Following Friday’s release of Wine 11.6 with reviving the Android driver and improving game mod support as part of DLL loader updates, Wine-Staging 11.6 is out today with extra patches atop.
Wine-Staging 11.6 ships with some 285 patches atop the upstream Wine 11.6 codebase. Wine-Staging dropped a number of windows.web patches while updating VKD3D to the latest Git code and notably adding one new patch series.
A set of 65 patches from CodeWeavers’ Zhiyi Zhang was included as part of the Wine-Staging 11.6 for the first time. This code working on Microsoft’s DirectComposition support was started in part due to this prior merge request that only began to stub out the implementation of DirectComposition. The stubbed out implementation from a few months ago was enough to get the Dorico music notation / scorewriter software working on Wine. But simply stubbing out the implementation wasn’t enough to get upstreamed into Wine and Zhiyi Zhang has been working on a proper implementation.
The big set of patches now in Wine-Staging is said to help with the Corgi Warlock game on Steam. But a proper implementation of DirectComposition will still require a dwm.exe desktop window manager implementation and likely some graphics driver integrations too.
The Wine-Staging patch series beginning this DCompositionCreateDevice2 support can be found via this merge to the staging codebase.
Microsoft’s DirectComposition Windows component is used for high performance bitmap composition with transforms, effects, and animations as part of UI design. Details on that API for those interested via Microsoft’s documentation.
Wine 11.6 and Wine-Staging 11.6 can both be downloaded from WineHQ.org.
