Improves support for the 64-bit version of World of Warcraft

Sep 10, 2017 14:23 GMT  ·  By

The Wine Staging team is pleased to announce the release of Wine Staging 2.16, which is based on the recently announced Wine 2.16 development version and improves support for various Windows games under GNU/Linux and Mac OS systems.

Based on Wine 2.16, the Wine Staging 2.16 release inherits all of its new features, among which we can mention support for pasting metafiles in RichEdit, rendering improvements in DirectWrite, support for safety features in library loading, better handling of transforms in GdiPlus, and better support for grayscale PNG images.

On top of that, Wine Staging 2.16 extends the deferred rendering context support in D3D11, adds support for indexed vertex blending in both D3D8 and D3D9 for simulating bones in older games, and implements 64-bit syscall thunks in the fake ntdll.dll to improve the 64-bit version of the World of Warcraft video game.

Improvements were also brought to support more popular video games under GNU/Linux and Mac OS systems. Among these, we can mention that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Prey 2017, and Crysis 3 will run much better with Wine Staging 2.16 as multiple rendering bugs have been squashed.

"Wine Staging 2.16 adds more deferred rendering context functions and fixes rendering bugs in games like Crysis 3, Witcher 3 or Prey (2017)," said the devs. "The ntdll syscall thunk emulation was extended to 64 bit in this release, which is required by the 64 bit version of World of Warcraft."

Steam, uPlay and apps using the libcef library should look better

Another important issue resolved in the Wine Staging 2.16 release is a font rendering bug that finally got patched, allowing Steam, Uplay and other apps that use the libcef library to look better when running in Windows 7 mode. Of course, the new Wine Staging release also fixes various other smaller bugs.

You can download Wine Staging 2.16 source tarball right now from our website if you want to compile it on your favorite GNU/Linux distro, but you should find binary packages in your distribution's repositories. We recommend updating to this release if you want to play the Windows games and apps mentioned in the article.