Slashdot Mirror

http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=9021

The support for this mouse for both my OSes (osx, vista) is pretty broken out of the box, but once you get online and update, the software is pretty amazing (well, it was to me, I dont' really have a lot of experience with mice!)

anyways, I got this mouse because it was bluetooth, and since I use an MBP, I'm kinda hurting for usb ports and have bluetooth I'm typically not using.

Well, it turns out that they have this ridiculous usb bluetooth dongle which MS claim is the only way you can use their mouse. Okay, whatever. Luckily there are some wonderful people who can help you remove your dependancy on this completely useless dongle.

However, compared to my other "mouse" (a mouse-shaped stylus that goes to my wacom intuos 3 :p) this thing, minus all the bluetooth details, is a dream. It comes with a rechargable double A (although the retailer I got mine from didn't include the power adapter, D'OH, but shipped one as soon as we told them), plenty of buttons (although the scroll wheel doesn't so much scroll as glide. Think one that you've had for so long it doesn't click anymore ;.; )

Anyways, I pretty much fell in love with it, and it allowed me to finish my CAD assignments without spending every moment at the computer labs (have you tried working in autoCAD with a touchpad? It's impossible. my god.)

so, just my experience ^^^

a bad reference, but the first one I found

Sometimes it's nice watching Apple "hold the line", saying "What?! These configurations REALLY aren't good enough for you? They're good enough for all the *real* applications we sell. They're good enough for Hollywood to edit movies on and create special f/x with. They're good enough for pro photographers and artists. They're even good enough for the people who DO bother to port the "best of breed" PC games over to our platform, here and there. If you'd rather play "musical video card swap" every few months, go get a regular Wintel PC instead!"

But those are 2D apps with only minimal usage of 3D hardware. I mean, you could run Photoshop on Windows 3.11, way before 3D graphics hardware became mainstream. Also, most special effect editing can be done with nothing else than a framebuffer, so there's little stress on the 3D hardware either.

Also, if you say that the hardware configurations are good enough for the people who bother to port games, then why are Mac ports almost universally panned for having poor performance, such as:

Even loaded, the current DOOM 3 Macintosh performance lags behind the PC world (IMG on Doom 3)

Requires fairly high-end system (IMG on ET:QW)

High system requirements that still don't satisfy gameplay (IMG on Guitar Hero 3)

Sometimes it's nice watching Apple "hold the line", saying "What?! These configurations REALLY aren't good enough for you? They're good enough for all the *real* applications we sell. They're good enough for Hollywood to edit movies on and create special f/x with. They're good enough for pro photographers and artists. They're even good enough for the people who DO bother to port the "best of breed" PC games over to our platform, here and there. If you'd rather play "musical video card swap" every few months, go get a regular Wintel PC instead!"

But those are 2D apps with only minimal usage of 3D hardware. I mean, you could run Photoshop on Windows 3.11, way before 3D graphics hardware became mainstream. Also, most special effect editing can be done with nothing else than a framebuffer, so there's little stress on the 3D hardware either.

Also, if you say that the hardware configurations are good enough for the people who bother to port games, then why are Mac ports almost universally panned for having poor performance, such as:

Even loaded, the current DOOM 3 Macintosh performance lags behind the PC world (IMG on Doom 3)

Requires fairly high-end system (IMG on ET:QW)

High system requirements that still don't satisfy gameplay (IMG on Guitar Hero 3)

Sometimes it's nice watching Apple "hold the line", saying "What?! These configurations REALLY aren't good enough for you? They're good enough for all the *real* applications we sell. They're good enough for Hollywood to edit movies on and create special f/x with. They're good enough for pro photographers and artists. They're even good enough for the people who DO bother to port the "best of breed" PC games over to our platform, here and there. If you'd rather play "musical video card swap" every few months, go get a regular Wintel PC instead!"

But those are 2D apps with only minimal usage of 3D hardware. I mean, you could run Photoshop on Windows 3.11, way before 3D graphics hardware became mainstream. Also, most special effect editing can be done with nothing else than a framebuffer, so there's little stress on the 3D hardware either.

Also, if you say that the hardware configurations are good enough for the people who bother to port games, then why are Mac ports almost universally panned for having poor performance, such as:

Even loaded, the current DOOM 3 Macintosh performance lags behind the PC world (IMG on Doom 3)

Requires fairly high-end system (IMG on ET:QW)

High system requirements that still don't satisfy gameplay (IMG on Guitar Hero 3)

Years ago game developers asked for, and got, OpenGL for the mac. Many developers have being developing for the Mac for years and show no sign of letting up. They have a happy and prosperous relationship with Apple.

http://www.ea.com/platform_mac.jsp

http://www.feralinteractive.com/

http://www.insidemacgames.com/

iD software has announced that their next game "Rage" will be available for OSX. I'm waiting to see how that runs before I'm willing to buy the Transgaming story/excuse. If it really just can't be done, then Carmack and Co will be in the same boat.

Additionally, there have been rumors that UT3 and Gears of War are going Mac native as well.

Maybe John Carmack and "Icculus" know something that the Transgaming people don't??? I dunno.

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/07/17/gears-of-war-ut3-coming-to-macs/
http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ID=15468

It seems to me that Gabe must have decided some time ago that PC gaming on anything but the Microsoft platform is an inherent failure. If he actually had any interest in making his games multi-(PC)-platform, then maybe demanding Apple pay Valve $1 000 000 000 USD for just the rights to port HL2 probably wasn't the best start. And frankly, it's just sad when you see announcements like these, showing just how more proactive other people are about making Valve products available to new markets than Valve is itself.

I'm starting to think that internally at Valve, their real stance on this is, "Why bother to support them, when they'll gladly hack compatibility for themselves?"

Even if it's only a small portion of the overall user base, there are still lots of people with the latest and greatest, high-end, pro Macs that are capable of running games well; unfortunately, it appears lots of them just aren't interested in games. A game whose system requirements put it easily within reach of hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of Macs out there in the installed base is still likely to sell only a few thousand copies; there are very very few games in Mac game history that have ever moved more than 10-20k units or so on the platform. IMG's Tuncer Deniz just talked about the realities of the Mac market a few days ago ("I remember one Activision executive yelling at me at E3 a few years back, "We sold 3000 copies of Quake III: Arena and you expect us to continue to make games for the Mac"?").

I think that for games to really flourish on the Mac will require Apple's involvement - not just in schmoozing with developers and providing them with various kinds of support, and of course putting out games-capable hardware, but perhaps actually evangelizing games to its own customers. Perhaps it should bundle more games on new Macs (and not limit bundled games to the "consumer" Macs), give games slightly more prominence in the Apple Stores, etc. Maybe they should set up a program to match ad dollars for publishers willing to put "For PC and Mac" at the end of their TV spots, or put profiles of new Mac games in the main column in the "Hot News" section of their site (or occasionally even link to them from the main page). It'd be cool if Steve Jobs featured games in his Stevenotes more often. Whatever it does, I think Apple should do something to help push games to its user base.

well I can speak for Fallout 3, and Bethesda has never written or had a game ported to mac, at least none that I'm aware of.

according to this,they are open to it (and Linux), but will not do it themselves unless they get a porting house to make an offer. This makes sense to me because Bethesda uses DirectX and a true port to Mac and/or Linux would require a conversion to OpenGL. I don't know if it's DX9 or DX10, but if its the latter, it may also need the new OpenGL profile due toward the end of this year, as well (and certainly don't expect the game before mid-2009).

Blizzard does concurrent development and testing on Mac and PC, which often is the most cost-effective and profitable, but also has the most expensive up-front costs.

You seem like someone who doesn't really know and is just repeating someone else's uninformed opinion.

There are plenty of choices. More than enough that it would impossible to play them all.

http://www.insidemacgames.com/

...to an Intel Mac near you.

http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ID=14 797

There were rumors going around that Apple would be announcing that the Beatles catalog would be available on iTunes during a Super Bowl commercial. Clearly that did not come to pass. I wonder if this was the root of that rumor, or just a coincidence. Supposedly, Apple WILL be having a special announcement coming up on Feb. 20th.

Inside Mac Games had an interview recently with a PR guy from Parallels where he says "The goal is to have OpenGL and DirectX support in our next version, which should be in beta around the turn of the year."

You know, I'd really be curious to see how some of the CAD programs behave on a PowerMac with Parallels. Those are really fast machines. It would be an expensive experiment, but you're not the first CAD user I've heard mention this. A friend of mine works at an architecture firm, and he also mentioned the lack of CAD software available on the Mac as being the main reason he couldn't get one.

As a yardstick as to how much effort you need to maintain the code part of a port: Blizzard has four (4) Mac developers on staff, and they're split amongst World of Warcraft and Other Secret Blizzard Stuff. (Of course, they're probably the four greatest Mac developers out there. And it's not counting QA, support, etc.) Source

Actually that's what he HAS been doing. Multi-threaded OpenGL in Tiger. Rumored 2x speedup in WoW, more as we get more cores. NICE.

Care to educate a noob on OS X and linux apps?

It's not chicken and egg at all - Apple have stated that they are not and do not intend to be a serious platform for games. They don't help game development at all, and don't intend to.

I think you're working from some very old data. In the late eighties and early nineties, Apple somewhat misguidedly tried to bolster its reputation in the business market by discarding the "toy" image and not encouraging game development. However, once their market share began to seriously tank in the mid/late nineties, Apple "got religion" about games and realized how important they were to keeping their users happy.

After that, Apple hired a series of people as "Games Partnership Managers" to reach out to the game developer community. Apple has recently been rumored to be adding gaming functionality to the iPod. Apple famously reached out to John Carmack with OpenGL to bring iD games to the Mac. Apple devotes a whole section of their retail stores to games. And, of course, they have made gaming a featured section on their website.

So, I think your assertion about Apple discouraging games was once true but is very much outdated.

Just a couple of handy links with regard to Mac gaming:

    - http://www.apple.com/games/
    - http://www.insidemacgames.com/
    - http://www.aspyr.com/
    - http:///

This has to be a total friggin' joke.

Look, they can't even get Open GL to run at reasonable speeds on OS X. Actually, it's so bad that 1-year old laptops such as mine (12" powerbook) don't even reach minimum specs to play friggin' Civilization IV , for chrissake.

Actually, their latest move of not including a decent GPU on the Macbook is a pretty strong indicator that they don't give a fuck about games, gamers, the gaming market, or game publishers. What, do they really expect even casual gamers to shell out 2000 bucks for a system (iMac Core Duo or Macbook pro) with decent (not even top-of-the-line) graphics?

But oh, wait, of COURSE: the article is about shipping games to the goddamn iPod. What a bunch of total friggin' idiots. They should get out of their happy iPod bubble and take care of their computer division sometimes. Now that they have a decent processor, they'll still manage to ruin the show by using crappy integrated graphics like they're some cheapass Walmart assembler.

(note to Apple: this is not just my rant, everybody remotely interested in playing games on mac just went berserk on the Macbook graphics fiasco. Just put an X1300 or better on the black-expensive Macbook and all the complaints will go away).

As a well known Mac game porting expert points out, the C&C-Generals team did a really dumb thing. They based their simulation engine on floating point and insisted on bitwise matches of results.

http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/view.php?ID =294

      "In C&C Generals, the game relied on bit-level floating point calculations being identical between players. So we'd have to guarantee every single calculation in the game produced an identical result to the the most minor decimal place when calculated on the PowerPC and the Pentium. There are enough small differences in how the compilers optimize floating point code to make those numbers not match, and so the game goes out of sync."

      Playing PC against PC was probably always going to be ever so slightly flaky as a result; maybe less so if all your opponents had the same make and model processor as you...

http://www.softpedia.com/
http://www.macosxhints.com/ and
http://insidemacgames.com/
are all sites I've found to be helpful...

As far as must have OSX software, I would recommend:
Adium, Comic Life, Flip4Mac, Inquisitor (awesome extension of safaris search box), RockNES, SNES9x, and SCUMMVM.

Quake 3 has also been release as a universal binary.

There's a lot more to DirectX than Direct3D. Even companies who use OpenGL for their GFX engine use directX for interface (directInput) and sound (directSound). Additionally, threading libraries can be different and incompatible. For a real world example, Civilization 3 complete was released last week for Mac. Civ 4 was released a couple months ago for PC. Civ 3 uses OpenGL for graphics. So please, enlighten me as to why the port took so long if it's just a simple recompilation.

AlpineR

yes, a Mac version is coming, according to CivFanatics, via this source.

From Jaffe's blog:
I want game journalism- at least 50% of it- to be more like music or film journalism of old. I want it to challenge us and tear our s#!t [mactari's edit] apart and analyze it and- when we do a good job- champion it and bring the message to the masses. ...

Now sure, some of that has to do with what the public will actually pay for (it's not like NEXT GEN magazine- one of my faves of all time- was a chart topper). But doesn't some of it also have to do with the mentality of the folks who write for these magazines IF indeed they are not respecting their OWN industry enough to claim JOURNALISM as their industry?

Has Jaffe gone completely mad? Does he really think video game journalists are any different from the talking heads (and mouths on radio) of ESPN?

The issue is that both "journalism" outlets are really just thinly veiled, sometimes unofficially sanctioned extensions of the respective entertainment industries. Each is, unfortunately, intertwined commercially with the product they're "reporting" on. Just as ESPN Radio's SportsCenter updates are often 20-30% (by time) commercials for games that are being shown on, you guessed it, ESPN or ABC (both owned by Disney), video gaming sites pimp games that they themselves are selling. Heck, at least one arguably large site pimps their store's (that should have you worried enough as is, that a 'news' site sells games) sales as news alongside their 'true' news stories.

Let the buyer beware -- good reviews mean better relations with major gaming houses means easier copy, more codes, more exclusives, and better sales for both players. It's a fact of life, I'm afraid. Jaffe wonders why there are so many previews; that's easy. They're "reviews" without any conventional requirement for objective judgement. You can play up South Park for the N64 as a game with lots of potential even when it stinks to high heaven -- it's still in development, after all. Previews are excuses for incestuous gaming industry lovefests, and everyone's a winner, developers (Out, out, Ballmer!), gaming rag editors, authors, & owners, and even readers.

Readers, that is, except for those like Jaffe that might truly want to see someone with both the personal and commercial cahones to call out the proverbial spade. Where are the old oldmanmurray.com folk when you need em?

IIRC, he abandoned the idea because he had a hard time trying to make it "fun". I couldn't find the exact article i read but a similar one can be found here.

Or, to say in another way: If you shoplift and/or cheat at exams, odds are you download music.

This story really reminds me of this: http://www.insidemacgames.com/images/machall_4_l.j pg

As for the Mac dates, I relied on these IMG stories:

• Neverwinter Nights PC Gold, Mac News
• MacSoft to Publish Neverwinter Nights (official announcement of Mac version June 12, 2002)
• Friday, August 1, 2003 : MacSoft Ships Neverwinter Nights

As for the Mac dates, I relied on these IMG stories:

• Neverwinter Nights PC Gold, Mac News
• MacSoft to Publish Neverwinter Nights (official announcement of Mac version June 12, 2002)
• Friday, August 1, 2003 : MacSoft Ships Neverwinter Nights

As for the Mac dates, I relied on these IMG stories:

• Neverwinter Nights PC Gold, Mac News
• MacSoft to Publish Neverwinter Nights (official announcement of Mac version June 12, 2002)
• Friday, August 1, 2003 : MacSoft Ships Neverwinter Nights

A note on the HL2 part:

Not really anyone's fault for trying... but, Valve's asking for both arms, legs, and a few organs for the rights for it, pretty much takes up the entire development budget.

And, then, on top of that, Havok's asking for several *MORE* organs for the rights to *use* the OS X version of Havok. (According to a article over at IMG, they want six figures.) It exists... but, no one wants to pay it. See above about development budget.

Article: http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/view.php?ID =351

True. Interesting quote from this article:

After the keynote, Apple's Phil Schiller stated that there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."

I am willing to bet that Apple plans on using a TCPA strategy to lock down Leopard.

Are Mac users really the type of people to download and install an illegal, cracked OS

According to the author of the game, it's also available for the Mac.

It's a pretty fun game, especially for online play. (I rented the Playstation version and played for a few days.) From what I understand, it's pretty much just Battlefield 1942, except set in the Star Wars universe. A basic FPS, with land and air vehicles to pilot.

Not flamebait? What fantasy world are you living in? It's actually flamebait AND a troll all in one -- which unfortunately, I've wasted my time responding too.

There are tons of current mainstream games for the Mac and many others on the way. And it's not even hard to find them.

Brad Oliver of Aspyr Media that (among others) does mac ports of popular titles has commented on the issue in the Inside Mac Games forums, right here: http://www.insidemacgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php? p=192796&highlight=#192796

Are you sure P2P doesn't work on the mac? Or what about games?

This is hardly proof, but looking at IMG's web store, compare the links:

World Of Warcraft
World Of Warcraft Collector's Edition

The CE link is obviously broken. I'm not sure if the orders are cancelled because IMG's store is barfing, or because of shifty tactics on VU's part, though I'd definitely lean against VU based on past history.

This is hardly proof, but looking at IMG's web store, compare the links:

World Of Warcraft
World Of Warcraft Collector's Edition

The CE link is obviously broken. I'm not sure if the orders are cancelled because IMG's store is barfing, or because of shifty tactics on VU's part, though I'd definitely lean against VU based on past history.

The Mac game market isn't that bad. I used to be a serious PC gamer, but consoles have pretty much taken over that addiction. Still, there are a few PC gems every now and then, but a lot more of them than you might expect are ported to Mac.

If you are a PC game fanatic, the Mac is not for you. Games take longer to get here, and some games won't get there at all. But if you are a casual PC gamer, the Mac really isn't that bad these days. It's much better than it was a few years ago.

We get all of the Blizzard games simultaneous with the PC. Many of the most successful FPS games make it, but they may appear months later due to the porting process. The kind of games that casual gamers play alot are usually there -- Myst (ship hybrid CDs), the Sims and its variants, etc. The big names also arrive, titles like KotOR, Splinter Cell, Call of Duty, Halo, etc.

You can find out more at sites like Inside Mac Games. Switching to Mac is definitely not a blocker for casual gaming, and it seems to be getting better all the time.

I guess he doesn't play any computer games on his space heater..

But, the full version runs fine (except I can't demorec) on my iBook (1 Ghz G4, 640 MB RAM, Radeon 9200 w/32MB VRAM), provided I just keep the detail settings low. But, I can run it at 1024x768 with workable framerates (25-40 fps), or at 800x600 with better framerates. And the demo ran smooth on a dual 1.8 GHz G5 I played it on before as well.

I really want to try UT2004 on a dual 2.5 GHz G5 with 8 GB RAM and a GeForce 6800 Ultra, though...

Oh, if you want to read a review of UT2004 on Mac, there's a few to read:

GamesAreFun (yeah, I wrote it, so I get to plug myself)
Inside Mac Games
Applelinks

And others like GameSpy and such.

A Mac "gamer" asked about the port to OS X. Apparently there is no current time for the release of a port. The game runs, but there is a lot of optimization, and currently they feel the Mac platform can not yet offer the same experience as the PC. Activision will not publish the Mac version of Doom 3. There is no publisher set currently.

The answer: Tim Willits, lead designer. He's also the one handling the Linux port. He said the Mac port was playable, but was still in need of optimizations, especially for the lower-end systems. He said he was working directly with Apple to address the issue.

What was most intriguing of all was that they stated that the Mac version would NOT be published by Activision as previously assumed. Instead id would have to shop around for a new publisher. The bright side of this is that they MUST be putting out a retail version, otherwise they wouldn't be needing a publisher at all.

God knows how many hours we wasted in computer tech on nanosaur when my Jr. High got a shipment of orange iMacs. Until the teacher wised up and deleted the game on every computer.

Yeah, it's kind of old, but I loved that game in Jr. High, and I'm glad to see it's still around. It even has split screen multiplayer! Rocking good mac game, Nanosaur.

I sure hope this doesn't turn into a repeat of Halo on the Mac. From the reports, it was buggy, slow, and there was no demo available. Then Macsoft starts complaining about piracy. Gee, with no demo and reports of a crappy port, I wonder why people took to pirating it.

As for BF1942, the jury's still out. All I want to know is where I can download the demo and try it out myself.

This reminds me of the guy who put up an Adobe Golive PDF book for download. Wired article here. Since nobody reads links, the short story is that it was downloaded 10,000 times in 36 hours and faced a possible $15,000 bandwidth bill (which was later rescinded by Level 3, his hosting company).

Earthlink wasn't so charitable to a Halo fan who put up a movie previewing Halo and saw it downloaded 100,000 times. Earthlink charged him $30,000 for the 4500 gigabytes downloaded.

The moral here is that if you're going to put up anything which might be downloaded quite a lot (or if you're expecting a slashdotting), make sure your host doesn't charge through the nose for extra bandwidth. Or, if the file is over 5MB in size (and under 1GB), make a freecache.org link and let others mirror it for you automatically.