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I read it on Slashdot that no one makes games for Macs, so it must be true. I better let Aspyr, MacPlay, MacSoft, Westlake Interactive, Ambrosia, Freeverse, The Omni Group, Blizzard, GraphSim, and Feral Interactive among many other commercial operations and hundreds of shareware developers that no one at all makes games for the Macintosh and that they should all shut down immediately. Additionally, Inside Mac Games should shut down their operation immediately as they are a waste of server space because they will never have any news to report ever.

I heard it on Slashdot so it must be true.

Age of Mythology is being ported to the Mac by Westlake Interactive. MacSoft already released AOEII way back when and is publishing Age of Mythology, too.

Of course, now that it'll be an M$ product, I won't be able to buy it in good conscience anyway...

You can also read about the game's status from the programmer in this Inside Mac Games article

Keep in mind, that the main game developer for the mac (that I know of) Westlake Interactive is IMHO not very good at coding for OS X, at least not yet. UT, which ran fine in OS 9, under OS X has terrible input support, runs slower because it is not using any OS level graphics acceleration, and has buggy sound support also.

In other words, using games as a benchmark is not a good idea.

Unfortunately, the very issue (corporate involvement) that seems to allow games to either become more complex or develop a better story/technology often end up screwing the whole system up. One only has to look at the history of Bungie. The had some great technology, fantastic story lines and overall killer applications. They had two programs in the works, Oni and Halo when Microsoft came calling. Once Microsoft bought them out and assimilated Bungie, Oni became a shadow of what it once was to focus all efforts on getting Halo out of the box. Halo also became more diluted in concept to fit in with the console paradigm Microsoft purchased them for (The X-Box). Additionally, Microsoft cancelled all development for the Macintosh and Linux at the time and only recently has Westlake Interactive Westlake Interactivestarted porting Halo, originally intended for the Macintosh to the Mac platform. Westlake by the way is an impressive little operation that has been bringing the best games to the Macintosh market for years now.

I personally prefer to find the smaller game development guys who write quality stuff and provide them with my $$'s. Guys like Jesse Spears who is providing the world of naval simulation with Harpoon Harpoon3 Westlake also deserves many kudos for their dedication and quality of work.

Nope, Westlake is.

And their track record suggests they'll do a fantastic job.

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Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.

This is bad news by any reasonable definition. Note that the official FAQ still says "we are planning a simultaneous PC/Macintosh/Linux release for Neverwinter Nights, with all three versions to be included in a single box."

Also note that Macsoft expects it will take them two months to finish the Mac version, not including the toolset. No clue how long the toolset would take if they decide to port it at all. Third, note that Bioware has never released a single Mac (or Linux) demo appliction, or even a screenshot of a partial prototype.

For comparison, other porting houses like OmniGroup and Westlake can plow through an entire port, starting from raw Windows-only DirectX-based source code, and turn out a complete Mac game in the same amount of time.

The obvious conclusion is that Bioware has spent the past three years working solely on the Windows version, and their claims about parallel simultaneous development were a crock.

There have been many new game ports for Mac in the last while. Sure, nowhere near as many as for the PC, but that's not entirely surprising given the relative sizes of the markets.

Also, remember that C code, while portable, will not magically always run on the Mac with SDL even if will run on PCs with SDL. Endian bugs abound, and while they are not difficult to fix, recompiling code on the Mac is (almost) never just a matter of running the compilation.

That being said, you probably could make more money off the mac users. Mac users probably aren't as heavy into gaming, true, but mac users are a captive audience. Unlike (((the majority of!))) linux users, mac users do'nt have the option of booting into windows. Now that bungie is dead, they have only what can be ported or emulated, and because there have been almost no new mac ports to speak of in nearly forever they are mostly starved for decent games and will probably run anything even mediocre that runs on their computers.

For example, looks at any genre, and many of the 'leaders' in that genre have made their way to the Mac. I wont list all games, as I dont even know all games, but for example:
Unreal Tourney, Quake3, Deus Ex, Baldurs Gate (1, 2, and expansion), all of Blizzards' games, the entire Tomb Raider series, the Sims, all the Sim City games, Sim Theme Park, Rune, Oni, the Myth series, Majesty, the Might and Magic series, and Alice.

In addition to these, you have several upcoming ports, as well as a bunch that I didnt list that already exist. Most big game houses like Blizzard are realizing that the Mac market is big enough that with the relatively small overhead of porting that comes due to good OO design, their Mac products are very profitable, because they've already done the most expensive work with the PC version. The Mac ports are getting closer and closer to the release date of their PC counter parts so that they are able to ride the hype wave a little better.

The additional problem here is that while I'm sure Loki is a good company, the Mac porting world isnt just there for the taking. You have experienced Mac publishers and porting houses such as Westlake Interactive, Aspyr, Mac Play, etc, who all have advantages in this area: they have experience, are established, and have earned some measure of Mac user loyalty because they have stayed with the Mac gamers throughout the ups and downs, and, as important or more so to a potential partner, they arent under chapter 11.

That said, there is definitely still a demand for some Mac games, and certainly not every company supports the platform yet. But I just dont think people understand how far the platform's gaming status has come in the past 3-4 years. And I dont know how much luck Loki would have breaking into the scene. The Mac gaming scene is much healthier than you might expect.

-swc

Westlake Interactive has announced that all their titles currently under development will have carbon versions (and they will do some carbon versions of older games as well depending on the publisher). Check here for the projects they are working on and here's the announcement from Westlake Interactive about OS X support.

Westlake Interactive has announced that all their titles currently under development will have carbon versions (and they will do some carbon versions of older games as well depending on the publisher). Check here for the projects they are working on and here's the announcement from Westlake Interactive about OS X support.

half-life for mac os was ported (to 99% completion) by andrew meggs, an excellent coder, i might add. sierra killed the project because of support cost issues. see westlake for example of the burden of patches to the windows version to the person(s) responsible for a mac port.

and unlike half-life, which used a chomping stack of mfc for its menus (arguably the most annoying aspect of the port), halo is, and has been, running under mac os for a long time.

besides, to steal an oft-used carmackism, game coders should do "The Right Thing" and have the discipline to code portably from day one. i believe jason jones et al share that sentiment...

You left out "What networking protocol does it use for multiplay?" I don't suppose it's compatible with either DirectPlay (Win) or NetSprockets (Mac)?

This conversion has already been done, by Brad Oliver at Westlake Interactive. I realize there would still be technical hassles converting from Mac APIs, not to mention licensing and payment issues. But don't say that it's just too hard to do.

I doubt it'll happen though. The MacOS has its own standards for graphics and hardware interface, plus the added benifit of the MacOS GUI. I suppose it might be possible, but you'd get better results with a MacOS X specific port to take advantage of InputSprockets and such. OpenGL support might make it easier though, and if Apple would drop SoundSprocket in favor of OpenAL, it might make things even easier for companies like Loki and Westlake Interactive to build ports.

Now if we can just convince more developers to use OpenPlay networking instead of that horrid DirectPlay of MicroSoft's, we could have more games simultaneously released for Windows/MacOS X/ Linux, and the world would be a better place. :)
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That should be www.westlakeinteractive.com. Sorry about the mixup.