Slashdot Mirror
Why Apple Should Port Games
DanTheMan writes "For every great game there is for Mac OS X, there are at least two for Windows. It's sad, but it's a fact. This article proposes a solution, and it's for Apple to port games. By the way, since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac, both of which are 64-bit now. Would you buy a Mac if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2? What other games are missing from Mac OS X?"
Macs cost to damn much.
not about is it easy or hard or cheap.
such reasoning always exists with gaming systems though.. "why can't they do blablabalba".
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
When Jobs didn't want games on the Mac to counter the argument that the Macintosh was "just a toy?"
if you want a gaming machine get a ps2 or xbox. the mac is not a gaming machine and hopefully will never be. i've never played games on my mac and don't plan to.
/ http://suffocate.us
/ http://johngrayson.com
since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac
Just like it's a piece of cake porting Windows games to Linux on the x86?
What other games are missing from Mac OS X?"
... no wait, these were the overpowered monsters you couldn't do much about, sorry.
I heard especially Windows Me has some great entertainment value! Dodge the BSOD monsters with the
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2? What other games are missing from Mac OS X?"
as good as we have support for quake4/doom3 theres no need for nothing more
By the way, since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac, both of which are 64-bit now.
Why do people think that just because two platforms run on the same processor that porting things between them is "easy". I can guarantee that the OSs used to run the two platforms are nowhere near the same, not to mention the graphics/sound/networking/etc subsystems.
"In case of emergency, break glass. Scream. Bleed to death."
Just because a platform uses the same CPU doesn't mean it'll be easy to port between them. The CPU is often the least complex part of a computer as far as interfacing with it. I mean, compare the complexity of maintaining the page tables and memory segments of an intel CPU with the complexity of dealing with something like a PCI bus controller or a GPU or a DSP. Even the software layer will be completely different on the XBox2 than what Apple uses in OSX. Moroon.
This doesn't sadden me to the amount of ported games for linux. I despise emulation, and until (if) the game industry ever picks up for linux I'll probably be half and half forever. (I have a windows and a linux box, for seperate purposes)
apple hardware is just not fit for gaming. They ship the imac with an underpowered 3D card (GeFX 5200, only 64MB Vram, which barely plays UT2004, let alone Doom3) and insufficient RAM.
I always tell friends : buy a mac, and with the money saved by not paying the MS tax, buy yourself a 199$ PS2 for gaming
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
What does this have to do with anything? How much game code does this person think is CPU specific? Most of the problem with porting games to the Mac is that APIs used (e.g. DirectX) don't exist on the Mac. The only assembly code a modern game is likely to contain is targeting the GPU, not the GPU (and even this is more likely to be written in a higher level language now). Everything else will be written in a language that can target any CPU, as long as the required libraries exit on the target platform.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If I could play games on it? No! As I already own one. But, it would be nice to have some games ported for us, but I won't lose any sleep over it.
Yes, sad but true.
Meh.
I think you can forget about games for PCs or Macs, as that whole market will soon be irrelevant. Gaming is all about consoles and mobile platforms nowadays.
but I still use a Windows box to play games instead of waiting 6 months to forever for games I like. Unfortunately, it takes time to port games from Windows to OS X; just ask the guys at MacSoft.
I'd personally love to see the MechWarrior series of games ported to the Mac.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
I have had Macs since 1987. I didn't buy them to play games. I have been using Linux since 1997 too for work.
I did have a Windows 95 machine for games, it broke so we bought a PS2?
Do you see a pattern here?
My Mac mostly serves as a development server running Tomcat and PostgreSQL - it makes too much noise to be on all the time. I do some Adobe Illustrator work on it from time to time, and learn about OS X not much else.
realkiwi
Incidently, what are the graphics and sound card options for a Mac? Are they the same? That may be another point why OSX isn't viable for high-framerate games, but then again I don't use OSX much right now so I'm not familiar with the hardware options for PowerMacs.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Would you buy a Mac if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2?
No, I already bought a mac for its existing great games. I've nearly completed Photoshop CS. The end guy is hard.
Tribes2. Loki ported it to Linux. It was the best game I ever played. Sad to see it gone.
"By the way, since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac, both of which are 64-bit now."
My Cisco PIX firewall runs an Intel Pentium, I think porting PC games to it would be still be fairly tricky. Anyone want to lend a hand showing me how to overclock a serial port?
as a troll... I'd like to say that this poster is absolutely correct. No matter how much Mac zealots love to claim it's just a myth! A person can buy a computer that can play the *most recent* games (although not very well, unless you turn off graphical extras like shadows, lighting, etc..) at around $500. No matter what you say, you just can't do that with a Mac.
Meh.
Considering how closely the Source engine is tied to DirectX, it's unlikely that it would be easy to port it to another OS.
While the HL2 leak had support for OpenGL rendering, the current version of CS: Source does not even allow you to choose that. You're probably looking at a near-total rewrite if you want to run HL2 on another OS that doesn't support MS' APIs.
except, most windows games these days are writen with DirectX not OpenGL. Blizzard uses OpenGL and they do some great stuff with parallel development. Which is why we see mac and win binaries of WoW, WC3, SC and Diablo 2 (heck they even made OS X native installers for Diablo2! what nice people).
:D
More acceptance of OpenGL would most definately help. It would be nice to see a lot more games for the Mac, but i've got the ones i need
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
Rather than software, I think the real problem is hardware. I can afford a Mac that's recent enough to do everything I want except game, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Sure, the G5s are nice machines, but when it comes down to it they're really overkill (and more than I can afford) for what I want.
Ideal Mac gaming machine:
-Processor and video card upgradable
-Single processor (yeah, some games take advantage of the dual processors... most don't, and it's too expensive to include on a cheap gaming machine)
-Fastest processor available; not like the 1.8 single processor G5
-headless, of course
It could do without a lot of the frills on normal PowerMacs, as it would keep the price down. Currently the only option is to game on a cheap, fast PC or buy an extremely expensive PowerMac. I'm not saying the PowerMacs are overpriced, but they're the only real option for Mac gaming, and are much more expensive than comparative "gaming" PCs.
In my opinion, a gaming Mac like this at an affordable price would do much more for the Mac gaming market. Most Mac users are stuck with either a terrible video card (everything but the Powerbooks and latest Powermacs) or a G4 with a very limited system bus (everything but the iMacs and Powermacs).
Considering most of the games I have played seriously in the past or intend to play in the near future are from Blizzard, I'm not too concerned.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Its the price. The machines are lovely, but for the price I can get just as powerful PC for cheaper.
The monitors now is another story.. *drool*
I have a novel ideal, buy a gaming console for gaming. Oh, no wait, maybe it is better to build your own PC with a $400 video card to play a game that will run on a PS2.
I'm so goddamn tempted to get an iMac, and I probably will. I like the selction of games available now (and I guess I could use VirtualPC to run some of the others (the older ones at least) if apple started to port games (which would cost alot of money) I would definantly be pushed over the edge, buy an apple hat and swear by everything apple ever makes from then and on forever (even if it does bad like the cube)
Of course, it would be a risky thing to do. Would gamers actually switch? Everyone loves OS X, and everyone wants it for x86, but there are stigmas with being a mac user (and most aren't true, like the all-macs-are-way-too-expensive one) So who knows. This question sounds alot like the "Apple should port OS X to x86!!!OMFGBBQ!!!111" comments that are a dime a dozen. Wishful thinking, but foolish thinking (although the porting-the-games idea isn't nearly as bad)
So the xbox 2 runs ppc, and supposedly runs on the darwin kernel. Sure, this would make porting games a snap. Also, the games would be easily portable to BSD and Linux, because of course OSX is based on BSD. Now the question is, would MS let this happen? Obviously the fact that Windows lords over game availabilty stops people from switching to other platforms, and its obvious microsoft wants to keep this monopoly (Hence DirectX, which makes porting games nigh impossible because it controls networking, graphics, audio etc etc) How would Microsoft stop third parties from porting the games they own? Easy. Evil Licenses. Wouldn't be a first for the big MS.
Here is a fine example of a Mac zealot not realizing that a person with low income cannot afford "equivalant quality parts"... hence the reason they go out and buy a $500 gaming PC, which can play more and newer games than a high-quality Mac anyway! So, let's see, $1499 for a Mac, $500 for a PC. That's $1000 difference!!!!
Meh.
I don't miss any games on the mac, I for one actually work on it
but more games on the mac might make some people consider switching
actually it would be nice if the gaming industry would start making cross platvorm games easily compileable on any platform, everyone would win
The submitter doesn't know what he's talking about.
When porting a game from one system to another, compiling to a different CPU is the easiest part. Just change a CPU setting in the compiler (or use a different compiler, if the one you have doesn't support the new target CPU).
The hard parts are stuff like talking to the graphics card (through DirectX or OpenGL), and the operating system.
Porting from Windows to X-box is easy. Change the CPU setting in the compiler, and rebuild. The X-box uses DirectX like Windows, with only minor differences, and some kind of Windows Embedded.
Going from X-box to OS-X then leaves only ALL THE HARD STUFF. Like rewriting everything that has to do with the OS and graphics (and sound and...) That's like... everything. Except pure calculation loops, that don't display anything.
Going from Linux to OS-X is way easier, but not going to get you any games. From OS-X to Linux can be easy, but as soon as the program starts using the nice Aqua/Cocoa/Carbon stuff, it gets hard too.
Not going to happen. I am a Mac user now, but even if I was not I still would not buy a Mac for Gaming, Even if the games where all released at the same time and did'nt have to be ported.
For the simple reason that every knew game requires a new generation of computers now adays, The upgrade spectrum for the Mac just isn't there to support this kind of thing. Once my PC starts running slow, I can just buy new parts for it.
Yes I can do the same thing for my Mac, If I want to pay a premium, but if I am just using my computer for games it would be far cheaper and wiser of me to get a PC.
Even still Apple may be catching up in the performance game but video card options are lame for the Mac right now. Macs just are not the right machine for hardcore gamers. Period. I could list tons of other reasons but I think I have made my point.
I think porting games to OS X will do little to convince gamers to move to that platform. I think one of the biggest reasons that gamers prefer the PC platform (other than the vastly superior game library) is the open nature of the hardware platform. Upgrades and additions are easily made, if a gamer wants to go out and buy the newest ATI or NVIDIA card they can just do it, no need to buy a completely new iMac or expensive upgrade through the Apple store.
More importantly, if a gamer wants to get a new motherboard or processor it is just as easy, this simply is not possible with the Apple platform. And there is choice in the PC market, Intel v. AMD, NVidia v. ATI, and the gamer makes the choice not Apple.
Despite the superiority of OS X, and I would say that most Windows users would not deny this, Apple simple is not a good platform for gaming. If gamers want a closed system that they have to buy a new one to upgrade (i.e. iMac) they will be way better of with an XBOX or PS2 or other console system, it certainly will be an order of magnitude cheaper. The open hardware of the PC platform just appeals to gamers and their custom-loving, fastest-craving attitude.
The one reason I've never been able to go for a Mac is the total lack for support of the games I want to play. It's nice that they have a few token games supported, but when there's no support for certain MMORPG games (or you are playing on a separate undersupported server) it's not enough. World of Warcraft should be a good step, but it's probably not enough on its own.
Aww, come on. (Score:-1, Offtopic) /. stereotypes.
This port, er, post was wholly on topic!
Now you've deprived the world of my
awful pun that also lampoons certain
OK, there's a lot of hardcore gamers who may choose their system based on the games, but a lot of people I know (age 30+) buy a computer for home, internet and business and then maybe will put the odd game on.
If a game isn't available, or they need extra hardware to run it, it won't be a big deal to them.
I know we'll get into this religious war about TCO and all that crap, but the fact remains that you can buy a new nicely equiped PC for a lot less than the cheapest Mac costs... and then you're getting the cheapest Mac.
The Mac MAY last longer, work better, and be easier to use, but if we all had the cash to follow that logic we'd all be driving Lexus and Infinities.
There's also momentum... I might be able to play the games I want to on Mac, but I definately can a PC... moreover, I have dozens of PC only games that I still have and will want to play long into the future. I could go out and buy a Mac, but why should I have two computers where one will suffice?
If I was starting out NEW, like if my house burned down and I lost everything in it, I might be inclined to buy a Mac. But otherwise, even I do think they are superior in many ways, it's simply not worth it.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I love Apple hardware, and agree that games should be ported for it...but what about Linux? I know it's open source, etc, etc. but honestly...
28:06:42:12 - That is when the world will end...
There's no need for Apple to get into this. There are several dedicated porting shops already, including Aspyr and MacSoft (mentioned in the article) and Westlake Interactive.
Apple may do well to provide assistance to these shops, but frankly its own resources are stretched too thin already. Why do people have this blind and absurd obsession with everything being made by Apple, anyway?
The "A", "W", "D" and mouse-look-and-fire model rules!
Meh.
Will Mac games cost more than PC games? Everything else Mac related does. Why would I switch to a more expensive platform just to play games?
Simply put, I just bought a 4230$ PC to play game, I got it a month ago. Very powerfull but not as much as I thought, some games I can't even play at the highest settings, considering the specs it's rather disapointing (X800XT, P4 3.4GHz, 1GBDDRII, 800MHz bus...). I optimized it the most I can but still. I played Doom3, Warcraft3, Ghost Recon, a load of demos. One game that just got released, Men of Valor (demo), has problem playing at 1024x768 (I get 24-30 FPS)!!!
The video card fan is already defective, I had to reformat and loose a bit of stuff just to move my OS to another drive, and the bottom case fan makes some weird noise. The FIRST week I caught 3 virii.
I should have gone with a Mac, sincerly, I thought I would have an orgy of games on the PC side and yes, I played them early and there are more but its more of the same so...
I'm quite disapointed, Windows isn't on par with osX at all (like some say), it is a very frustrating OS, I feel I have control over nothing.
But I know I will get use to it, as soon as the defective parts are changed and I spend 1hour per day on maintenance (adware cleaning, virus scan...) it might get fun...
While I don't disagree that the magnitude is higher, counting games at a store is not a proper form of comparison since the amount of games is dependant on shelve space, and shelve space is dependant on store goals, promotions, business plans, etc. Even if you look at the PCs huge shelve space (which has greatly decreased in stores like Best Buy) you will see huge sections of it taken up by the same game. It's better to just look at an online catalog.
Apple doesn't need to port games. Aside from MacSoft and Aspyr, which the article mentioned, there are several other software houses that could do it. A personal favorite is OmniGroup, who did an excellent job with Giants: Citizen Kabuto. (Talk about taking advantage of the hardware...)
In addition, not every "great game" released for Windows should come out for the Mac. Many games actually aren't that great. They just suck. Mass porting games won't help. The Windows world is big enough that somebody will buy whatever crappy game you throw out there, but the Mac world isn't.
That said, if a game is good, and the developer knows it will be good, they have two options: port it themselves or have someone else port it. That this doesn't happen more often, to me, means that the PC developer just doesn't care and isn't interested. Porting houses, depending on how they get paid, would be all too happy for more work. If they get paid by commission from the original developer, take it on. If they get paid through game sales, it's in their own best interest to only port the games they think will sell.
In order for a game to be most successful on the Mac, however, it should come out the same time the PC version does. This more than anything else is what will make the great games on the Mac work, for both the game and the Mac.
Considering I could build at least two extremely high-end PC systems for the cost of one moderatly high-end Mac, the answer would have to be "no."
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The Xbox2 runs on darwin?!? Where did you hear that? The odds of that occuring are close to zero, I think.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The first HL was mere days away from shiping when Valve yanked the plug on it. Why? Because they knew that they were going to issue frequent updates to the game, and that the Mac port would almost always be a version or two behind. Thus, the Mac online experience would suffer greatly. Because Valve put a heavy emphasis on the online game, they decided at the last minute not to create a situation where the Windows players adored the game but the Mac players were always complaining.
Does it make sense that the Dreamcast version of HL made it to shelves but not the Mac version? Not to me, either. Let's face it, Mac users are used to being second-class citizens when it comes to gaming, and they would have loved HL, even if it meant they could only play against other Mac users. But, I'm sure that Valve was considering the cost of all those free updates that they were going to be issuing, and ultimately decided that the Mac was too much work for too little reward.
HL for Mac was virtually done but they ate the cost of it (and pissed off Sierra in the process), rather than just ship it out. I would say that the atmosphere at Valve is very anti-Mac at this point.
Has anything changed at Valve? Last I checked, Gabe Newell was still running the show, so I guess the answer is still "No". Valve will never publish a HL game for the Mac.
It isn't the responsibility of Apple to port games to their systems. It is the responsibility of the gaming creating companies to make games for Mac's. However, is it profitable?
You are asking the game companies in question to do extra work to pick up a few extra thousand gamers. Is the profit margin that great in the Mac side of the gaming demographic?
One of the best things you can do to get gaming companies to make more Mac games is to register every game available to an Apple machine. By registering every single game you will drive companies to make more games for Mac users. My brother, an avid Apple follower, has used this practice for years with every product available for his machines that he has bought.
It is a matter of money in the end and if the demographic among Mac users isn't great enough to equal a large enough profit margin, then why bother?
And nobody else will port the games for them. I guess market share DOES mean something.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
PC games are largely written in DirectX. Which Microsoft controls. Which means they're very difficult to port to non-DirectX platforms. How'd this guy get to post crap like this?
Ignoring system prices for the moment, Macs simply do not have the power for gaming with most of the games coming out. Sure, G5s are nice CPU's and all, but that's only half of the equation. Until Apple sets up their architecture to allow standard video cards to work, Macs will always be lacking when it comes to games. I understand that Apple wants control over video card sales, but it is simply hurting their platform.
Why bother to couple GeForce GPUs with the Macs, if you aren't going to bother to utilize that power for games? It makes no sense. That's like buying a Ferrari just to drive to church every sunday.
I see a lot of comments already about how the Macs cost a lot..
Let me pose this question to those people then - with the recent changes in the industry, who is really paying more? The Mac users or the Windows users? Any high end card nowadays comes in PCI Express, which almost certainly requires you to buy a new motherboard, and possibly a new processor, on top of that $200-$400 card. Gaming definitely knows how to suck that money out of your wallet quicker than any Mac will.
Windows users are allowed to play more , but we pay the price for it. I suppose it's a necessary evil in order to enjoy gaming at its finest..
Today's FoxTrot seems particularly apropos.
That is an objective statement that is more opinion then anything else.
Is a Mac 'superior' at surfing the Internet? No.
Is a Mac 'superior' at sending/recieving email? No.
Is a Mac 'superior' at performing standard office taks? (Make a spreadsheet, text document and so on.) Again, no.
Those tasks can be perfectly performed on a Windows based PC for much less. Even non-professional and professional photo editing can be performed very adequetely on a Windows Based PC. Sure, you might see some speed increase for some photo editing tasks on a Mac, but from what I have seen, shaving 10 seconds here and there, upwards of a minute here or there, means nothing to *home* users.
All of that, for less then what it costs to do those same tasks on a Mac. Seems to me that the Mac is only truly superior at costing more money.
If I stop playing games on my PC, then I stop using Windows on my PC. When that happens, I am moving to Linux, not MacOSX. Because the Mac hardware still costs more and likely always will cost more then commodity PC Hardware.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I refuse to buy a mac because, unlike most of my peers, I have a pretty good idea of what would happen if Apple was on 90% of the desktops in the world. Based on their past record (and the records of similiar premonopolies that are now monopolies (MS, Cisco, Intel, et.al):
#1. they would strong arm their competition into oblivion.
#2. They would use their own proprietary hardware to ensure they keep their market share.
#3. Their new product development would mimic Microsofts. Now they are forced to develop, to keep their niche. When they have 90%, they wouldn't be forced to keep their niche.
There are tens more I can't think of off the bat, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
I may look stupid, but I'm not.
I personally like the games from Spiderweb Software and Ill Winter Games. Pretty much everything each of these companies makes is available for Mac OS X. Most of the games Ill Winter makes are also available for Linux and Solaris if you so desire...
FPS games get boring after awhile, but these games stay playable longer.
All the next generation consoles are going to use the cell processor.
"For every great game there is for Mac OS X, there are at least two for Windows" There's a hell of a lot more. I would say there is at least 10 great games on Windows for every good Mac game. Compare the Mac and Windows game displays in computer stores. For example, in J&R Computer world, there is one shelf dedicated to Mac games, where for PC there is almost an entire floor filled with them. You can even go to the Apple's own store and see their pathetic display of games. Yeah I know quantity isnt important but there are still a whole lot more GOOD games on Windows than on Mac. Any good game on the Mac has most likely been available on the PC over a year before its Mac release. As a matter of fact, I dont even know of any Mac exlusive games. Granted I dont keep up with the Mac gaming scene, but I'm friends with several hardcore Mac users and all the games they have on thier Macs are already on the PC.
#####Free and Open Source Game Directory#####
What other games are missing from Mac OS X?
:/ Ah well.
;P).
--
Anything by Capcom. Games from series like the (vast) Mega Man saga, Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, Street Fighter, Resident Evil, Viewtiful Joe, and so on and so forth would be great things to have on OS X.
It'd also be nice to see OS X versions of the recent Mega Man and Street Fighter "Anniversary Collection" packs (which were essentially digests of the primary installments in those series, along with some extras), purely for the fact that those would be great timewasters to play with on, say, a portable, when you really ought to be working or something.
Same goes for Konami. Some Mac-based Castlevania or Metal Gear action wouldn't go amiss.
I had also been hoping at one point to see Argonaut bring some of their franchises (old and new) to the platform - such as Croc, I-Ninja, and Starglider, for example. Given the recent events surrounding the company, though, that seems pretty unlikely at this point.
Those guys aside, I think a good solution to the situation with Mac games, would be for more encouragment and better support to be made available to developers, to encourage them to create games on the platform. There's a lot they could do, if they had the right incentives. This might also open the door for more new-and-original content than is already available, which may well be a better thing than getting bogged down with ports (not to say those are always a bad thing, of course, although I'd rather see more developers take the approach that Blizzard does as opposed to getting ports done later, but that's another kettle of fish entirely.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
The first computer I purchased was a MAC. I was big into MUD's and a nice simple strait forward durable computer was what I was looking for. Also MAC's seemed to have a slightly faster connection with modems (Dunno why). Once games like Warcraft II came out and year's later mac ported it I was still okay with it. Then games really started to hit the market. Interesting ones I really wanted to play. However they were not for MAC. My next computer was a PC. I probally will never go MAC again due to the lack of games.
Only crazy people say "all" and "none".
Consoles suck for FPS games. Try sniping a guy a virtual mile away on a screen that is TV resolution, or using an analog joystick to strafe/dodge while firing and changing weapons.
Consoles suck for realtime strategy games. Try using your analog joystick to box a bunch of troops to send to a target. Try using it to select different groups of troops.
For all these, a mouse/keyboard combo is way better. And although consoles may work with those items, the games really aren't designed to use them.
Why would porting xbox game to the Mac convince users to eschew their PCs. First, Xbox games are often water down versions of their PC cousins. These games lack features of PC games because the Xbox hardware is static and can't evolve with newer game engines like the PC can. But, Xbox games are going to make the Mac better at gaming. Is a user going to pay 2000+ for xbox quality games. Why not just buy an xbox and pay 300 at the most. Apple has it strengths and gaming is not one of them. Video are not updated on Macs as they are on PCs. Even if we had the latest games, we won't have the latest hardware. Besides, Apple is doing just fine. Look at thier stock price (50+), they are not reeling from the lack of games on the platform
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
If you buy the argument that it will be easier to port from Xbox2 if it's PowerPC based,
Then you can say the same about PS3 games, and Gamecube as well.
PowerPC dominates the next-gen game console field.
As for games I'd like to see ported to OSX, that's easy.
GTA III.
if I used my computer for computing and my game console for gaming. My computer is used for writing emails, reading slashdot, programming and file sharing. I use Linux and with the money I don't spend on an OS I can actually buy a PS2 that doesn't require I stay up to date as often with my hardware.
Mac doesn't need games, Mac needs lower prices and a more compelling reason to switch...
their is no directx on mac that I know Of unlike the Xbox so everything would have to be ported to opengl etc.
How on earth is this offtopic? Is this game available for Macs?
An advantage of the Macintosh for a lot of managers is the lack of games. It's not perceived as likely to be used as a toy.
Photoshop of course :)
Incidentally there is a company that writes DirectX API for the Mac. called MacDX or something like that.
Instead of porting games, Apple should take a page from the early days of 3D cards. IIRC, 3DFX paid developers to include GLIDE support in games. The fact that GLIDE was better than the existing version of DirectX (2 or 3?) made a good deal that much better.
If Apple made some tools to help keep games cross-platform, and paid a "promotional" fee, it would work out much better than trying to port already-completed games.
Hell, if Apple wanted to make Macs a serious player, they would arrange for the Macintosh version of games to be released first, if not simultaneously.
Yes, every now and then there is something compelling enough to bring me to the computer to play it (The Sims, WarCraft, StarCraft, Civilization), but it is rare that it happens. Frankly, at this point, being able to buy more games for the Mac might make many Mac users very happy, but I'm not one of them. The last full game I bought for the Mac was WarCraft III. I still have yet to buy the expansion pack, but I have bought expansion packs for my wife and her Sims addiction. However, if I spend $200 on games in a year for my computers, I would be shocked.
So, yes, I would buy a Mac, but not for the games.
it is a piece of cake porting windows games to linux. just because it doesn't happen often doesn't mean it 's not easy.
I was a Mac User for ages, and this sure is a sour topic. Here is the answer to a majority of the Macintosh problems:
Not enough people own Macs. When you are only 2% of the global computer userbase, nothing gets ported to your platform, and when it does, it is buggy and you are ALWAYS the last to get updates/patches.
Don't take my word for it, the high and mighty Adobe even launched a "PC Preferred" campaign, and refused to port Photoshop to OSX at a time when EVERY mac was shipping with OSX. Apple users had to wait for the next whole release.
These aren't games I am talking, I am talking about Graphic software. Mac zealots love to talk about how the Mac is for artists.. pfft!
Alias Maya (industry standard 3D software) was FINALLY ported to OSX, and it was a joke! It was so buggy and lacked so many options, it wasn't even SMP capable!! heh..
are great games that are Mac-first or Mac-only. I know, good luck trying to convince developers to do that, when the Mac only has >5% marketshare.
Halo was originally going to be a Mac-first game. Bungie was originally a Mac-only developer, and they cranked out some great stuff. Marathon was the best FPS for the longest time, and it was Mac-only. So it was with much weeping and gnashing of teeth as Mac gamers watched Bungie get assimilated by the MS Borg Cube, and then watched as Halo came out for the Mac platform, dead last. Sigh...
Having Apple get involved with porting games is not a bad idea. Apple definitely needs to start throwing some money at game development. The only problem is that they would be taking money away from other Mac development houses that specialize in porting Windows games. It would be better if Apple would emulate MS and snatch up a few up-and-coming game developers, and start cranking out their own line of games.
At this point, that's the only way that Apple is going to get Mac-first and Mac-only A-list titles.
I play mostly console games now, I would buy a mac if I could afford one, but I can buy 2 or 3 PC's for what a mac costs......
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
The game core runs on OpenGL as well so actually it's one of the simpler games to port.
Not to say the Mac porting community is just lazy or anything.
I'm sure someone has mentioned Aspyr, Blizzard, MacPlay, MacSoft, and other companies who port Mac versions of popular games.
But all this talk presumes that, in order for gaming to be successful on a Mac, that (1) the Mac itself has to be less expensive, and (2) that the game must arrive on the Mac at the same time as the PC version, if there is a PC version.
First off, people don't buy Apple products because they are cheaper, but because they want a certain quality of machine.
Second, the Macintosh installed base of computer is around 15-25% (don't confuse this with marketshare, which is the total percentage of Macs sold in comarison to the rest of the computer market). That means it's impractical to make a game that is Mac only or works immediately on a Mac unless you have a great gaming team that knows how to make things port well. Some companies, like the team that put together Neverwinter Nights, made the game data so portable that Mac users had installed the 2 game expansions using the PC/Linux versions before the Mac versions of the expansions arrived 2 or so months ago.
Third, I'd rather let the PC users be my beta testers. There are hundreds of new games in the PC market, and most of them are crap. The games that rise to the top typically do get ported to the Mac, if they weren't on a later deploy list already. And take heart, the time that a PC game is ported to a Mac is much, much less than, say, 9 years ago. I might have to wait about 3 to 6 months for a popular PC to make its Mac debut, Usually, the wait is worth it as any game-stopping bug is squashed before I see it, and the game plays wonderfully on my computer.
Some games are slow to port, like Halo, Splinter Cell, and Battlefield 1942, and some great games were never ported, like Half-Life. But overall the Mac gaming world has profit and gives those who do play a world of pleasure. However, don't buy a Mac to play the latest games--the market just won't accommodate.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
I don't play very many games, but I DO use a lot of well known PC applications that don't run on MacOS. If I want to play games, I can run out and get an Xbox or some other cheap game console.
Every platform can do word processing, spreadsheets, databases, presentations, e-mail, web, yadda yadda.
But there are a lot of media/audio/video and research abilities that the Mac platform has that are seriously waning on Windows.
People keep comparing clock speeds as if that is the only thing in question. Or keep making claims about cost of hardware being more on the Mac side. Ridiculous. If you spec out things equally (which is possible if you study it a little) you'll find quickly that Macs are in many cases cheaper than Windows machines for what hardware/software you get in the deal.
BUT...perhaps that isn't why you bought a computer...right? Perhaps you just wanted a very familiar interface with a modem, and a web-browse (for web and web-mail)? At that point the super-cheap-and-nasty Windows machine from Wal-mart is going to meet your needs. But you aren't going to be playing games like HL2 or Doom3 on that machine without severe frustration.
But Windows excels at playing games as a platform. It is one of the only things that it is really pretty good at. And benchmark for benchmark in gaming specifically...though games run pretty well on the Mac...you just can't match the relatively inexpensive value of Windows (vs. Mac) with gaming.
On a Windows machine you have access to all the latest-greatest hardware choices in processor/mainboard and latest-greatest video-card choices also. For around $1500 you can have a latest-greatest machine (no-monitor) with nearly the best of everything for gaming. Macs can't currently touch that price.
But gaming isn't the benchmark for being able to accomplish every task. And people shouldn't try to make it so.
Today's FoxTrot cartoon is especially appropriate for this topic... http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/uc/20041101 /lft041101.gif
Personnally, I'm missing Pong. oh, wait...
"Thankfully with keyboards and mouses coming becoming more common then before for consoles, this may no longer be an issue." ...do you draw the line between console and computer? If you need to play on a mouse and keyboard, you might as well play on a computer with superior hardware compared to a gaming console.
"Would you buy a Mac if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2?"
Rather, would you buy a Mac if you COULDN'T play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2?
Or would you use a Linux if you COULDN'T play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2?
The likely answers here are NO for the vast majority of home users.
For good, bad or indifferent, people play games. And if their games of choice don't run on their OS of choice, they will stick with Windows. All the office productivity apps in the world mean nothing on the vast majority of home machines.
I'm one of those people. I have SuSE set up and ready to rock and roll. It works with all my hardware, I have all the apps I need there. But it won't run World of Warcraft natively. I never boot to it. It's too much extra work when I can do all the same things under Windows AND play my games of choice.
People used to say, "Since an XBox is basically just a PC running windows, it will be very easy to port them over to PC."
But as we saw, it wasn't exactly the case. Only a handful of games have actually been ported over from XBox and as I recall Halo ran like crap until they patched it a couple times.
Below are a few reasons why people won't switch or even add a Mac to their household.
- Economics: Buying a computer is not like buying a console system. It's not economically feasible for someone to purchase more than one computer, as it is to buy more than one gaming console. A gaming console is at a fraction of the cost for a Computer (10-25%). Also the cost of a PC is a fraction of the cost of buying a MAC (33-75% with the rare 90%)
- Game Selection: PC has tons of games I can pick from, MAC has only the best of games from the PC selection. It's a natural subset of top producing games.
- Space: Space for a computer usually consists of a desk and chair, or possibly a computer armoire. That's another piece of furniture for many people to have it setup another machine. (This is excluding the option of a KVM. I use one for my multiple machine setup, but how many people besides techs even know they exist. Plus the added cost to get one)
- Why another machine?: That's akin to asking someone why have another toaster, car, mp3player, etc... If my first company is good at what it does, why do I need another?
Overall, for the average user, there isn't enough there to switch. Even when it comes time to replace a machine, will my software, that I use, be available on the Mac? Can I easily tranfer my data to the Mac (There is an option, don't know if it costs money)? Why get a Mac when I can get PC and remove any learning curves?If Apple is ever going to get to a level where they want to compete in the computer consumer market, they need to make ALOT of changes.
One thing to note, they do have very good sales in niche markets such as web and print design, and video and audio editing. Maybe they are content with the niche markets. They have too much to compete with in the consumer market that staying in the niche groups is far better for the.
With the OS X/ Linux community, it's more difficult. It's not considered to be an established (from the perception of a publisher, looking to make $) market. There are unknowns and it's a potential money losing situation. It's a vicious loop. No one will make the "big" games for OS X, because there isn't a good history to indicate sales, but that is what prevents that histopry from being made. Someone needs to break the cycle.
Again, this is my 2cents, having seen it from the publishing side of the fence. It's ultimately always about how much money can be made, and how many units will sell through. If the Mac community can show enough demand (which I think is starting to happen more and more) I think the future will be very bright for Mac Gaming.
I would say that the ratio for Mac vs PC games is higher than 2:1. Mac is a great platform for certain things, but ask any dev that has tried to make games for the Mac and they'll tell you about Apple's bipolar attitude towards gaming. That is part of the problem as well as cost vs return for such a small market.
Seems like you'd have to reimplement DirectX, which would not be easy, regardless of processor.
How about make release deals with game design companies and build in easy-to-use tools to help ensure cross-compatibility?
If Apple wanted to be a heavy hitter, they could easily do it. But they'd need to do the following:
Lower initial purchase price of desktops.
Ensure cross-compatible games with a couple firms (Red Storm, EA Games etc).
Spread out the burden of lowering cost over non-Apple manufacturers (OEM).
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
It is partly Apple's fault that there is so few games for its computers: if they had backed OpenGL instead of their own 3D API back when their marketshare was still significant, then games producers would have used OpenGL instead of Direct3D..
They suffered from NIH and are paying the price: too bad!
[ yes I know that now they are using OpenGL but their marketshare is not very significant nowadays..]
Ok, I'm repeating Ballmer. But where are the droves of developers needed to port the games?
If all games were made with a single graphics engine - say OpenGL - Macs already have fast video cards to run the games. But whereas on a console you know that everyone who's bought a console will buy a game, on the PC and the Mac those numbers are hard to tell. Past sales of games might give some indication.
Given there's a small market share, but if Apple is a software house in disguise... why not open up their own cross-platform game house? Afterall, they've ported iTunes which has been highly successful.
ATI Radeon cards are the most popular with gamers.
Liar
"Mac" being the division of Apple Computer Inc. that makes Mac computers rather than iPod players, no?
People will not be porting a lot of games for one simple reason. Numbers. Apple has about 2.5% of the market share. That is saying that for every 5 mac users there are 195 users of other systems, the lions share of these being Microsoft based. Not all users will buy the game either. If I develop some software and I have to decide if I want to spend millions of dollars to make it avialable to 2.5% of computer user, or if I should concentrate on the much larger percentage of people who use MS products, it is an easy choice. Even if EVERY mac users buys it, it can't compare to only getting 1 out of 10 PC users to buy it.
I realize this might seem weird to most slashdotters - but I moved my family to Macs precisely because there weren't many games available for it.
they wanna play games, they have a PS2 and game boys. I really don't need my 8 year old getting a language lesson from the intellects who inhabit Quake and Halo.
Clear, Dark Skies
At least two? Try, at least twenty.
The ratio is far more tilted than the article makes it sound.
To summarize all that apt description of image and wearing stuff which screams "I have disposable income", the words you're looking for are: "conspicuous consumption".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If the games sell, the store owner will find space.
I don't understand why my first post was rated at "0", moderated as "overrated".
How can the truth be overrated?
Now, if we could actually see what's going on inside those DLLs, theoretically Wine(x) could achieve 1:1 results with Windows. Unfortunately that'll probably never happen.
That's Microsoft's entire lynchpin with the DX enterprise: create a proprietary API that makes writing Windows games much easier, but blocks porting entirely, starving their competitors.
Of course, if Linux reaches some kind of a tipping point with Windows and companies cash in on us geeks, developers might start putting pressure on MS to open the standards to make development easier.
I'm such a dreamer
If you go through the motions of doing a Linux port, and you've done it right, you end up with a MacOS X port anyway- just recompile against it and that's pretty much it.
Now, having said this, it's not so much the differences between OSes that's the problem with porting games. Many of the houses are using cross-platform libraries or off-the-shelf engines which support Linux/MacOS X out of the box. It's more of a problem of all the "enhancements" that the studios do the engines and the short-cuts they take in the code that make it a pain. There's quite a few nasty, far from best practices things that VC++ lets you do that causes no end to pain trying to port games over to another platform.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I think the real question is if or when some hacker will manage to boot OS X natively on an Xbox2. If that were to be done, one could have the best of both worlds just by buying a "cheap" (hardware subsidized by Microsoft!) Xbox2.
I actually think that would be easier than trying to write some compatibility layer ("emulation software") to make games written for the Xbox2 play on a Mac running OS X, but I might be wrong.
How many people do you know who have actually switched from Mac to PC or PC to Mac? I know VERY few. For most people, their library of software dwarfs the cost of the actual hardware they use for a computer. Switching platforms involves a substantial penalty in software licenses. Sure, you can run an emulator, but that opens up a whole new set of compatibility issues. At the end of the day, I use my computer to do work. Time spent farting around to generate geek points indoctrinating someone else into my way of operating doesn't seem like a very productive use of my (or anyone else's) time.
Cheers,
Is it that hard for a massive community effort to come up with a cross-platform reimplementation of DirectX? E.g., an SDL/DirectX layer would encapsulate DirectX's objects and put wrappers around the SDL calls.
.NET is available, why not DirectX? There can't be anything in DirectX that specifically requires arcane, non-rewrite-able Microsoft routines, or anything that would be much easier on x86.
It is a major failing that DirectX is not available cross-platform (even if it may be less capable than OpenGL or SDL). If
There are 30 that suck.
Quantity does not necessarily denote quality.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
If something like MacDX (by Coderus) would become more popular and have more features.
hey!
First, let's take some facts:
1) PC's are cheaper
2) Hardware vendors target PC for performance upgrades
3) PC's are much cheaper to upgrade
4) Nearly all games target Windows
By having Apple port games, you face an uphill battle on point 4, and do nothing about 1-3. Sorry, but what's my incentive to switch?
Why on earth would someone switch to Mac for gaming, when it will take longer to get their games, they'll have to dump more into the system, then dump more into the upgrades (which will also come after they do on PC, and many won't come at all). All so they get to say "Hey look at me! I'm a sucker!"
I work in the gaming business (albiet in a fringe corner of it). We have access to over 2 million "hardcore" gamers - those that like to play competitively. I have a hard time believing you'll convert any with this idea - it's simply not practical.
If you want to convert people, get some great Mac-only games. There's a long way to go before anyone serious will do that. If Valve launched CS:S and HL2 on Mac exclusively, they've already got 1 foot in the grave.
PC makers are pushing hardware limits. How will Mac play games? Let's see a port of HL2 to Mac, and have the hardware guys go nuts. If a Mac can consistently beat a top-end PC in the typical game benchmarks, then it will get some buyers.
While I hope Apple becomes a gaming system some day... I'm quite skeptical that it will ever happen.
The cerators of Red Vs. Blue had a funny Mac Gamer skit. The guy talks about how good it is to play games on a Mac "You know the games are good 'cause you played them on the PC two years ago".
/. posts saying how the iMac is underpowered for games blah blah. THese are the same people who will drop $3000 on an Alienware system but expect the entry level Mac desktop to be sufficient. How about the single processor PowerMac. add whatever Ram or video card you want.
I don't use my computer for games that much, but it would be nice to have the option of more titles and being able to play them at the same time they come out for a PC.
I do take exception with some of the
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Think about this. Maybe there are more PC games than Mac games, but there are also a heck of a lot more console games than there are games for the PC. I'd say maybe, 1 out of every 16 games released has a PC version or is exclusive to PC. I'm getting sick of it! More PC games, NOW!
First off, games written for an X=Box or an X=Box2 will NOT be written to bare metal, it'll be written to a variant of XP embedded. That takes your current assumptions of the complexity of dealing with a PCI bus controller, GPU, or DSP and throws it out the window from the top of the Empire State Building.
Unless the game is written an X-Box only game, this means that they're most likely going to be using some abstraction code (and even then...) to make life easier and allow them to target PS2/3 and whatever Nintendo's planning to field. This means you can do the same sorts of things to target Linux/MacOSX- and since it's going to be Endian neutral (it'd have to be, unless MS is going to do something stupid and make the PPC run in little-endian mode (which works, but it's not it's native world...)) it's going to have one of the biggest issues for porting between MacOS X and other OS targets already killed off.
I might suggest some contemplation of your understanding of things and improving upon it considerably before posting on the subject again.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Yes, a video in port and audio in, which can easily be displayed in a window or fullscreen. And then you can plug your PS2 or Xbox or TV Tuner or other analogue source straight into your Mac. No messy porting of software, multitasking whilst gaming and a useful feature.
:)
Heck, who wants to sink resources into porting games when the consoles are peanuts in cost?
"You know you want me baby!" - Crow T Robot
Apple knows there users groups they fall into one of three groups: Professional , Loyalist , or Educator.
Apple simply can not compete with the Windows market for porting games. It will also not help strengthen any of the other user groups. It is not Apple's responsibility to port games it is up to the developers to do that. Microsoft doesn't port games. So the articale should have said: If developers ported their games to the mac would you buy a mac to play them?
Apple has spent the last few years buying up programs to make Apple Pro software which help to fill in holes in their software coverage. Examples would be DVD Studio Pro , Motion , Finial Cut Pro and Shake.
Would John Q public buy a mac to play the newest games. The answer would be no, because a PC that can play the same game would be cheaper. Those that say yes either have to much money or would have bought a mac anyway, the fact it would play the newest games just sweets the deal.
Life is marked by pain.
I'm helping to develop a driving simulator/game and the 3rd party graphics, physics and input systems (OGRE, ODE, SDL) we're using all work on the Mac, Linux and Windows. We're mainly developing the code on Linux machines but it works on Windows without having to go through a massive re-engineering.
As middleware matures I think this is going to become much more common. The OS is going to become commoditized only when cross platform software becomes the norm.
Oh by the way, our project only works with Windows and Linux right now, if you're a Mac compile guru stop by, shouldn't be a ton of work to get it running on the Mac.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Instead of spending resources porting existing games, why not spend resources on developing/supporting Open Source game development ?
- You will always be playing catch-up to Microsoft - you will never be caught up or ahead
- Microsoft might take legal action
Plus there's other things - like how installers for DirectX video card drivers are Windows specific, or the fact that the consensus is to come up with or enhance native cross platform alternatives instead of helping Microsoft.Schnapple
Ahem, perhaps you didn't check very hard:
http://www.coderus.com/
This has been out for a while, for porters only granted; but that is a big step.
Would you buy a Mac if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2?
No. It would be too little too late. I stopped buying new Apple Equipment in 1997. I became a PC gamer that year and I haven't looked back.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I know /. just eats up this kind of cynical jealousy of the upper middle class, but your post takes generalization to a whole new level.
Do you really think people go to starbucks to look cool? Do you think people use the headphones that came with their iPod because it's more prestigious than upgrading? Grow up. Most decisions people make follow the path of least resistance. What you fail to realize, is that people with disposable income have a different path of least resistance than you do.
If you made six figures, didn't have any children, and didn't know or care much about coffee, why would you make your own just to save $1 a day? If you buy an MP3 player to play over compressed hip-hop mp3s and you don't know/care about what audiophiles think, why would you do research to save $20 on headphones? Why would someone spend $3000 on a mac and hook it up to a Sony monitor just to save $100?
Yes, style makes the sale, but convenience, and indifference keeps them coming back. I can only guess the moderators chose Insightful because there was no moderation for Cynical.
Nobody wants to own a computer that gets to scrape the remains off the 'main table'. Ports suck.
If Mac OS X wants to be a gaming platform, it requires *native* titles that sell computers. Something no other platform can offer (unless it comes as a port 6-12 months later).
As long as all the titles are late ports from games seen on other platforms, nobody is interested really. Heck, as long as 99% of games are late ports instead of simultaneous release ports, it's clear nobody takes the platform seriously as a gaming platform, so why should gamers do it?
I used to own two 'port platforms' back in the dark ages. First one was MSX (well, MSX2 actually) that got cubic assload of crappy ports from games - from Sinclair Spectrum 48, a MUCH worse computer that looked like a toy compared to what MSX2 could do.
Later I got to curse crappy Atari ST->Amiga ports on my Amiga - most of the games were done to the lowest common denominator (Atari ST), and took zero advantage of Amiga's abilities. Only later in Amiga's life, when ST was dead and buried, some real Amiga games were made.
So now I only buy platforms that are *native* to the games. So PC and PS2 at the moment. Yes, I'm missing some 'XBox exclusives', but not enough of them to make me too sad. I did consider GameCube for a moment due to some great firstparty Nintendo titles, but sadly game pricing policies in Finland nuked that idea. I'm not buying 149 euro (or even worse, now 99 euro) console and then pay *75 euros+* per game. Too rich for my blood.
PS2 has both nice exclusive titles, and being the base platform for most multiplatform titles (being the crappiest of the consoles right now) means that games are usually developed on PS2 first, and then we get half-assed Cube/XBox ports from there...
So, get companies to fund native OS X game development. Might be Difficult(tm)
ok for those kids who have no idea what factors are involved in how portable an application is, here is a crash course.
OS X is based on unix and linux is based on unix. That DOES NOT mean that any application can be ported on way or the other. Please stop making the stupid argument that it is enough that apple could just recompile itunes for linux. That also includes saying that any game can be simply recompiled for OSX. Similarly, just becasue Xbox 2 will be based on a PPC970 that does not measn that a developer can easliy port any game to OSX. There are things that need to be considered like platform specific LIBRARIES.
Please please stop making such stupid statements.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Also playing games should be done on a sofa/couch and not at a desk :)
Ciao
You forgot to mention that for every mac out there, there are 9 PCs !
Stop and think for a long moment...
DirectX compatibility is only needed if you're simply recompiling for a new target. Most games abstract out the DirectX layer for their engine so they're not dealing with it directly (You'd be stupid to do anything else, really...) therefore it's only a small effort to provide a comparable OpenGL specific layer. Once you've done that, that's one less thing. Typically, most games are using FMOD, Miles, or SDL/OpenAL for their sound. That means the sound is taken care of. It's a minimal effort to make a version of user input code for SDL (your Linux and MacOS X choice...) to replace your DirectInput code. There's several cross-platform choices for network support and while it's an effort to make something work as a replacement for DirectPlay code, it's been done (I know, I've done it myself and helped produce a minimal wrapper layer to allow several pieces of code simply recompile for Linux.) What you speak of simply isn't really much of an impediment for anything except the smallest development studios producing valueware as they're coding strictly to DirectX because it costs them nothing at all.
The biggest impediment for most studios, typically, for going to PPC is that most games make assumptions about the order of bytes, etc. that are far, far removed from best practices. Assumptions that make for difficult migration of code. The same goes for going from 32 to 64 bits- many developers do things like assume pointers are the same size as ints and proceed to interchange them liberally.
If you're making a game for PPC64, those impediments go bye-bye for making a MacOSX game- and since MS is going to probably be suggesting that the games be made available for XP on x86, the code's probably going to be endian neutral as well.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This would make things easier for sure...
http://www.coderus.com/
I'd buy a Mac five seconds after I could afford it.
If there were games, that'd be a nice bonus. The _only_ thing keeping me from using Mac is that I am poah' and that Macs cost a pretty heft amount of money.
Games wouldn't be a big thing for me, and having tons of Mac games wouldn't do diddley-squat for my changeover to Mac.
Lowering the prices though would get me "switched" within the hour.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
This guy's as sharp as a marble. Unless you're coding your games in assembly (no doubt some of that still happens, though compilers are getting so good that the ROI of assembler for games must be pretty low by now), swapping out one compiler for another has got to be the least of the porting worries. I'd say that first and foremost is what to do about DirectX.
If Apple were serious about games, they'd write a DirectX shim layer of some sort. That would probably do more for the portability of games than anything. The problem is that in this case, "if you build it, they will come" is not necessarily true. Because the mac isn't regarded as a gaming platform, I am not so sure that even the immediate magical appearance of DirectX on OS X would change developer hearts and minds.
It is emulation that benefits when the original and target systems have the same processor, because then you don't have to emulate the CPU, and that is by far the slowest part of emulation. So, XBox2 using PPC opens up the possibility of a terrific XBox2 emulator for the Mac.
it is a piece of cake porting windows games to linux. just because it doesn't happen often doesn't mean it 's not easy.
Really, I didn't realize DirectX on Linux was that advanced... =)
OpenGL to OpenGL is the only way games port easily between the two, and porting from DirectX to OpenGL is not a simple port. DirectX has many features that OpenGL has yet to implement or adopt.
its still a closed OS (the interesting parts are anyway) that is way freaking over priced and the hardware is ridiculously expensive.
Like Aspyr?
What other games are missing from Mac OS X?
Wouldn't the shorter list be "What games aren't missing from Mac OS X?"
They've got Blizzard, id, and Bungie Studios (kind of) making cross-platform releases a priority... other than that........
If you want to play games, buy a PC. If you want to get some work done... serious work, get a Mac. It is not Apple's focus to offer games to the world. It's a saturated market full of everything you can think of. People can play games on their phones, PDAs, TVs... not to mention the huge handheld game device market. When a manufacture wants to sell a PC by showing off it's "muscle", they put a game on the screen and hand everything off to the GPU. Notice how Processor speed somehow gets pointed to a frame rate on Quake? Understand that Apple is not interested in competing for a larger gaming audience. To do that, they would have to make a $500 computer with a single purpose in holding a lot of fast ram and providing a slot for a ATI/nVidia card. Apple provides a work environment to those who want to use it. A Wintel machine is a $500 game console with a word processor and a web browser.
Get a Life: Real World Ed.
Great product, easy to learn, hard to master. You will be glad you played. It never gets outdated and the updates are free. The only bad thing is there is no save and reload option.
There is a whole hot-rod modding community for PC users out there. I can customise my machine in almost any way imaginable. Macs are not particularily casemod friendly.
In this day and age, the main problem with mac game ports is the lack of interoperability. Many PC games use DirectX for graphics and networking. Usually the companies doing the ports manage to bring the graphics to the mac but they stop and don't bring us the networking. Result : games like Age of King and I suppose Age of mythology now, which you could play on a LAN or on the Internet with Macs, or with PCs but not with both !
Porting games is good, but having them work well with their PC siblings is essential if the mac gaming market is to take off in any significant way. Online gaming, LANs are integral part of the gaming experience and Mac ports usually are severely lacking in this department.
As for the power of Mac graphic cards... You should take a look at the mainstream PCs being sold for the non-enthusiast crowd ( it means something like 99.99 % of the market ). These PCs are sold with the same graphic cards sold with Macs....
Eric ESCUDIER
By the way, since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac, both of which are 64-bit now.
Truly written by someone who has no concept of how computers work.
I doubt they will unless you have a Power Mac G5 you get the most basic graphics chipsets available take a look at the iMac. 5200 Ultra is already 1.5 years old and while not terrible you are very much in the realms of "value" graphics.
You expect me to play CS with the stock "mac" mouse?! I do like my alt-fire, drop wpn, and reload to be on there as well as my primary fire and wpn switching (The scroll).
But then again, gaming isn't apple's primary market. It's the photo and video guys they have always been after. But it may not be a bad idea to port the OS to x86 and x86-64. Do what Sega did; go software.
<rant>
...all you have to do is click the "Magically Change DirectX Applications To Run Under Mac OSX" button in "FairlyLand Dev Tools", and the magical porting pixies will do all the hard work...
Give me a break. This guy obviously has no concept of how to port applications.
See, the one thing (that I can immediately think of and that supports my argument :P) stopping a flood of games appearing on Linux, Mac, et al is DirectX. You get DirectX running on Mac, and Bob's your third uncle twice removed.
Of course, this would be nigh on impossible... DirectX is pretty damn huge, and you can't simply wrap a DirectX interface around OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, etc. (for example, OpenGL uses right-hand aligned polygons, DX uses left-handed... or the other way around).
No, the real trick is to get developers to stop using DirectX in the first place. If they started using OpenGL, OpenAL, and other cross platform libraries, this problem wouldn't exist (at least to a large degree). Then, it would simply be a matter of compiling the game for each platform you wanted to support.
Pretty much the only developers that still use OpenGL seem to be small independents, and id. Oh well, thank $DIETY for John Carmack for keeping GL alive and kicking...
</rant>We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
If you want to play games buy a PS2.
If you want a computer, buy a Mac.
If you want a doorstop, buy a Windows machine.
Why bother to couple GeForce GPUs with the Macs, if you aren't going to bother to utilize that power for games?
Because Apple's built an OS and GUI that take good advantage of it. Besides, the GeForce 5200 and Radeon 9200... the standard Apple GPUs... are pretty cheap and anemic.
who is really paying more? The Mac users or the Windows users?
The Mac users.
I'm a Mac user.
Yeh yeh, mumble PCI Express mumble mumble... but for maybe $700 I could put together a PC using off the shelf parts that might not be anywhere near a top of the line PC game machine (and I could build a G5 Powermac that'll knock its socks off) but it'll be at least as good a game machine as a G5 iMac or G4 eMac.
That's with something like an Athlon 64 3400+ (which seems to have a price-performance sweet spot), an ATI Radeon 9800, half a gig of RAM, good solid name-brand parts. Not exactly an enthusiast machine, but it'll play current games at a reasonable resolution with frame rates that won't make you choke.
Your eMac G4 has a built-in monitor, but it's not worth anything: it's a crummy 17" shadow mask with dots I can see from six feet away... without my glasses! It's got a Radeon 9200 with 32M, not a 9800 with 128M. It's got 1/4 the RAM. And the G4 might be a bit more efficient than the 3400+, but with almost an extra GHz on the AMD side I'm not sweating it. Price: about par. Winner: AMD, no question.
The iMac G5 has a 1.6 GHz G5... but it needs as long a pipeline as a P4 to get that speed, so I suspect the 3400+ is still faster. And the video is a *censored* nVidia 5200. I just upgraded my wife's game box from that to an ATI 9600 and it's like night and day. Price: almost twice as much. Winner: AMD.
Neither of these Macs are comparable to what's really a bottom of the line entry-level machine for a novice gamer.
For the price of an iMac, I can upgrade to a 9800 Pro, double the RAM to a full gig, and go with a 3700+.
To get a Powermac that's going to compare to that, well... let's see. Let's assume the 1.8 GHz G5 is comparable to the Athlon-64 3700+... I don't know if it is, but we'll give Apple the benefit of the doubt. After you bring the RAM up to 1GB, and upgrade to a 9800XT you're looking at a cool two grand.
From the article: PC gamers would might begin to believe that if they got a Mac--which wouldn't cost any more than their custom-built cold-cathoded LED-fanned gaming PC--they would be able to play games on their computer, ported from consoles like the Playstation 2 and the XBox, earlier than if they stuck with Windows.
You CAN build a PC that costs as much as a comparable Mac, but you'll have to work at it. For the extra $500-$700 I could get a PS2 and an XBox and a bunch of games. And there's a bunch of games that never come out on the consoles... those will still come out for the PC first.
Hi, I was the one that ported Unreal Tournament 2004 to the Mac...among other games. I'm probably qualified to speak to this.
There's an urban legend that Apple has a zero-tolerance policy for games. If you're an Apple employee writing a video game in your spare time, that's grounds for dismissal. Rumor is that this is not enforced, but still in the employee manual (or stone tablets outside 1 Infinite Loop or something).
This is probably not true, but it says a lot about the culture at Apple. Games are not in the business plan. At all. Since the Apple II was so wickedly ahead of everyone else in terms of game capabilities, a lot of people saw it as a "game system" or...well, a toy. Funny how that sort of thing blows up in your face, huh? So there's a historical bias against it at the upper levels. It's a flinch reaction. Several layers of upper management are going to have to retire or die (or both) before this attitude changes.
That being said, this article is pitching a silly (and unoriginal) idea. It's hard enough trying to evangelise the Mac to game publishers, but it gets even harder when Big Publisher starts asking the very legitimate question: "How come Apple put time, money, and manpower into porting Half-Life 2 and wants me to shoulder the port for my own title?"
A fair question, to be sure. Other results would be less concern at the original gamehouse for portability (we'll let Apple fix that) and the choking off of the few companies that are actually doing this today. Oh, and we haven't even gotten to the "could this even be profitable for Apple" question yet.
That being said, here're a few things Apple CAN be doing:
1) Get more developer relation people that do nothing but deal with games. These are the people game developers call when they need something done...OS bugs that need someone to fight for developer priority, hardware access, questions about marketing your product and general connecting of the right people. They also go to game developers/publishers to pitch the Mac and encourage them to see a profitable business model in Apple's platform. Apple used to have two of these people working this job. They now have one. I would bet that they'll have zero before 2005 is over. I suspect that the position is the red-haired stepchild of the company. I respect Rich for every day he gets up and continues to choose to go to work.
2) Backport OpenGL fixes. Apple's GL team is top-rate, but once they are working on a new release, you are out of luck. This is company policy, not the GL team's fault. Let me illustrate this for you. Right now you might be desperately trying to get a game running for Christmas, ported from a DirectX9-based game, and lo and behold, you find that a Pixel Shader you moved over to GL_ARB_vertex_program triggers a kernel panic in OSX. You get the team to look at it promptly, thanks to that one devrel soldier who's still standing, and it gets fixed, but the fix is rolled into Tiger.
Well, Tiger's not shipping for 6+ months, and you ain't shipping this Christmas. And when you do ship, you'll be telling a bunch of people that you need to buy a 150$ upgrade to the OS to play. This is more acceptable for Big Name Games, since somehow people will swallow this, albeit unhappily, when it's UT2004 or World of Warcraft. Will they swallow it for an indie game that's a 15 dollar, online-only purchase?
I'll be fair and say that, as far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of Mac users upgrade to the latest OS anyhow, because generally the MacOS upgrades have been significantly compelling. When I screw up a Linux build in the year 2004 and a game stops running on a Red Hat 6.0 install from 1999, I get angry email. When ut2003 required people to upgrade to Jaguar, I never got a single bug report or complaint. Figure that one out. Still, if there is no upgrade path at all, you're timetable gets screwed. Put that shit in Software Update, Apple!
3) Give out free hardware, and give it out gratuitously. The Games Department (t
Don't say, "don't quote me," because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying.
I'll buy a Macintosh when it costs relatively the same as a PC of equivalent power.
I don't like the idea of paying money for cool glowy apple logos. Substance wins over false style in my book and always has.
My current computer is a PC that looks like it has a family of hyenas living in it, and it runs BSD faster and more smoothly than the high-end macs at school. It's great that Macs finally got a shell (after what, 20 years?) but I don't really need to be babied by my OS or my hardware manufacturer.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
I spend most of my free time playing HL mods, I'm interested in buying a mac, but it's a very low priority for me because my favorite game library is not available on it.
No i already have a PC that can play these and wont have to wait for them to be ported. When it's time to replace my current PC i wont be buying an overpriced mac just because it has the same games as PC also if i wnated to play XBOX games i would buy an XBOX.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
I am holding off on buying a Mac because of games. I use my computer (currently Pentium M/debian) for development (mainly C++ and lua), surfing, writing, image management (digital pictures), watching DVDs on trips, and games (on winXP dual boot). So it is a general purpose computer that I share with my wife. I would like 64 bit next (for my code), so pragmatically I am looking at Mac and Opteron. My wife wants easy-to-use-learn-and-manage and prefers OsX over XP, gnome, KDE, fvwm2, etc (to her the 'OS' is the desktop/WM). I still want games, but I do NOT need latest and fastest premium priced HW. It is about gameplay, but there is not gameplay without game. Mac doesn't have the games. Linux doesnt either, but it can share HW (dual boot) with XP, which does have the games. So the right choice for us now is x86. It would not be if Mac had the games.
Sorry folks, but all of the technical merits aside, Apple isn't likely to port or widely fund the port of games to MacOS X. Why? Because the future gaming platforms are not the Mac or PC, the market has already spoken very loudly on that matter. Like them or not, the living room games consoles are where most people are going to do their gaming. This means that that is where the money is and is going to be.
Yes, games will continue to be made for desktop computers, but the sales of those games are dwarfed even by the sales of mediocre console games, to say nothing of the megahits like Mario, GTA, Halo, or the Final Fantasy series of RPGs. So the profitability of porting games to the Mac is highly questionable. They'd likely make more money by getting cozy with Microsoft on the Xbox development front, though I don't know exactly how Apple is involved with the G5 based Xbox 2 development kits, if at all.
I like Apple. I like MacOS X, and will probably buy an iBook someday. But porting games to the Mac is probably not something that would be good for their long term health. People aren't buying Macs because it is a great gaming platform. People are buying Macs because they are easier to use than Windows PCs in many cases, and are stylish and cool. Being a niche player is fine, as long as it's profitable!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
It's obvious - if he did, he would include a mouse that has more than one damn button.
I like to play games. But I switched anyway because the experience was so compelling.
I used to have a desktop PC, on which I played a lot of games. Then I got a Powerbook. After that, it was Game Over, so to speak - how could you go back to using Windows after using OS X for a while? I was tired of the video card upgrade treadmill anyway, and decided that for the majority of my gaming needs I'd just buy a console.
That has worked out very well. If you think about it, how many great titles have been released for the PC that are not also around on the console? Most game development energy focuses on the console world now, so if you are any kind of gamer you have a console anyway. And more than ever truly great games come to the console first and the PC second.
It's true that Doom 3 and Half Life 2 are the major exceptions to this point. But although I'll not be able to play HL2 come launch day, I probably will within a year when the console version is released. And in the meantime there are a slew of equally compelling games for the consoles - like Halo 2 of course which I feel has a storyline (or at least a backstory) to equal that of HL, or GTA (whcih will come to the PC eventually), or a number of other AAA titles coming out this Christmas season. Both Doom 3 and HL 2 are holdouts from an earlier time, how many more spectacular games will we really see come out for the PC first?
The author of the first post makes a great point. I have seen countless posts saying the only thing holding them back from getting a Mac is games. But to those people I would say, buy a few consoles, get keyboards and mice for them to make FPS's tolerable, and drop the monkey that is your PC.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
By the way, since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac, both of which are 64-bit now.
Eh? Since when does architecture have anything to do with how easy it is to port a game... OK, I'll tell you, not since games relied on large amounts of assembly. Hell, i386 Linux is 100% processor compatible with Windows and porting windows games is still a bitch. If the XBox 2 is anything like the XBox 1 it'll use some form of DirectX. Screw the architecture, port DirectX and you're golden. Unfortunately that's a constantly changing target with almost no window into its underpinnings... not to mention a patent minefield.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
eg. WarCraft III & Frozen Throne (ported at the same time to both windows and mac, UT2k3, UT2k4, RTCW to name a few.
We get some really good games on the mac ported over or developed concurrently with the windows versions.
Admittedly, Mac Halo sucked before several patches were applied and some other ports really suck but I don't really care too much about games on the mac. I have a Game Cube for games and only need a few games to play while I'm on the road with my laptop.
The funny thing is I've been able to start churning out a lot more graphics, music, movies and DVD's on the mac than I every did on the PC because I'm not playing some mindless mediocre windows game or trying to keep windows running smoothly.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
>For every great game there is for Mac OS X, there >are at least two for Windows. It's sad, but it's a >fact.
As the proud owner of 3 PC's and 2 Macs, I can tell you for a fact that it's more like "for every great game there is for Mac OS X, there are at least FIFTY for Windows".
Part of this reason is the Mac's poor OpenGL video support.
Sadly enough, I've heard more than a handful of people say "I'd never switch to a Mac. There aren't enough games for it." I always thought that was a poor excuse to avoid buying a computer (I have a slight Mac bias). Yet these are the same people that continue saying "The Mac is a toy...it isn't a serious computer." Baffling I tell ya.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
It does show 9800 in a close battle w/ GF4mx but, at the graph above that; nvidia has a 16% lead on ati.
As to guessing why so many ppl have gf4mx, I'd say you are right but, that can't be the sole reason 'cause I know two newbies who went out and bought the "gf4 for $50...omg." Lot of midrange gaming comps come w/ low end ati's and nvidia's like 9200 series and 5200 series, respectively.
How about producing great games that no-other platform has, á la Nintendo?
Yes, standard TV is somewhere around 480x240 (or something really low).
However consoles are already starting to make use of HDTV resolutions (720p which is almost 640x480, and 1080i which is something like 1280x1080). The next gen consoles will support HDTV resolutions for sure. Then you get PC comparible res (on a much larger screen).
Personally, I find most games very enjoyable even at TV resolutions. The only time I think a very high resolution is important is when you are trying to snipe in an FPS and need every pixel to resolve detail.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Tribes: Vengeance really bugs me. Tribes 2 had a native GNU/Linux port. Tribes: Vengeance uses the Unreal engine, which has already been ported to GNU/Linux in several incarnations. Why can't Sierra just go to Icculus and say, "Remember what you did with Postal 2? Do the same thing, but with T:V."
So why can Postal 2 and Tribes 2 get ported, while T:V and HL2 can't? Valve could take a tiny fraction of the millions they're going to make off of HL2 and make a Linux client, at least to throw the dedicated server admins a bone.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Just because they're available doesn't mean I need to waste my time on them. Heck, I'd still buy a Mac even if Visual Studio.Net were available for Macs. In fact, I recently bought a Mac even though M$ has been distributing them with NT for XBox2 development.
that Apple would need to start shipping some graphics boards that have some real horsepower before they even think about porting modern games like HL2. Even the boards that they ship in the G5s are a joke compared to the best available (which is what you should be getting at that price). Anyway, that arguement aside, I don't think that games are really the killer app that is going to drive people to Macs. They should focus on reducing costs, and keep with the whole digital media hub philosophy and applications thing.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
What I wonder with this question is if the effort would be worthwhile, because it seems to me the PC market is slowly drying up.
If you ask me we have reached a tipping point with the consoles. There are now SO many consoles, and so many people enjoy consoles, that if you want to make serious money that is where you go. As a result most game companies have shifted primary focus on console games.
Yes HL 2 and Doom 3 are out this year. But how many really new truly impressive PC titles have come out this year that are not console bound anyway? And more and more great games come out first for the consoles (like Halo 2 or GTA) and then get ported to the PC later.
I personally think HL 2 is a kind of swan song for the PC gaming industry. I really cannot imagine the next HL not coming out for the consoles first.
There will always be PC games of course, but more and more the console games will be where all the really interesting stuff is going on. If you think long-term, that puts the PC almost in the same boat as the Mac five years or so down the line.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When it was suppose to be a pure Mac title. That is, until someone swooped up and bought Bungie and ported it over to their console...
An exclusive hot title would've perked some interests in a Mac.
to play video games.
Atleast thats what I keep telling myself EVERY TIME I PLAY HALO.
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
I refuse to switch to Apple hardware/Mac OS until Dark Age of Camelot is ported. I just can't get enough of that game; and it's the last thing holding me to my Windows PC (daoc doesn't run well on Linux).
The Apple site doesn't list all of the games available for the platform, so it's not really a valid place to garner the information needed to draw the conclusions that the author attempts to make.
Aside from that, it would be stupid for Apple to take on the responsibility of porting games to their own platform. This is something that should be left to the third party companies like Aspyr and MacPlay. As if Apple doesn't have enough responsibility with their own software development and hardware design. If they took over the porting job too, many would complain that they were just closing their doors to the third party guys anyhow.
In the interest of fairness and disclosure, my first machine (used for school papers, etc.) was a CPM-based box, and the first machine on which I played games that I enjoyed was the Apple ][.
The reasons are:
When it comes down to it, to get past even a few of the items I've listed here, Apple would have to undergo a culture-shift. They'd have to be keen on not producing their own hardware. They'd also have to be keen on selling the OS seperately. Slashdotters love to gripe about how windows is so expensive and you end up having to buy the same OS many times over a decade. If Apple went to selll the OS seperately, they run the risk of becoming the same kind of company as MSoft -- with all the headaches and griping that comes with that territory. If you sell the OS seperately, you have to be ready to write drivers (or support that activity by others) for all of the devices that people want to have in their machines. This involves a lot more administrative and development overhead than most people (I mean game players) are aware of. Apple would also have to be prepared to run more Microsoft software on its platform than they want to. They appear to have been okay with the idea when it came to Microsoft's office suite, but there are a huge number of games that are developed under Microsoft-sponsored aegis. Assuming they're okay with the idea, will microsoft-sponsored game development firms be comfortable with having to wrestle with the overhead of the porting issues in the process of regular product development? I don't know the answer to this (the situation is, admittedly, hypothetical) but Microsoft may have the opinion that they don't want to spend money on development activity for platforms that don't benefit them directly.
It's a very interesting idea, but I think there will have to be a sea-change at Apple before it even stands the chance at becoming a reality. I'll start saving up for a Mac right now, just in case it happens.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
I miss Loki
Polliana writes "For every great game there is for Linux, there are like what, at least 500 for Windows? It's sad, but it's a fact. This article proposes a solution, and it's for Linus Torvalds to port games. By the way, since the Windows uses the intel archetecure, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future Windows games to intel and amd based machines, both of which are 32-bit now. Would you buy Linux if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2? What other games are missing from Linux?"
That game should be ported
www.sporecubes.com
How the hell is this supposed to fly? Apple is going to need to contact the licensors for each game and pay for a license to play on OS-X.
The way this works is that the IP holder for a creative work licenses said work for a certain use, in this case for the Microsoft XBox. This license does not grant them rights to produce a PS2, Gamecube, etc. version or to make paper cups, napkins, mouse pads, baseball caps, etc. with the IP in question. I work in the toy and collectible industry and licensors come up with very specific requirements, they try to grant licenses to make one and only one thing (for example, there are typically different licenses granted to produce versions in wood, plastic and diecast metal) and oftentimes include restrictions on when, where, how and to whom you can sell the product.
Apple can't simply produce a conversion kit and have the consumer do the work since the consumers have only bought a license to play the XBox version.
What I've noticed about Macs is that even though there are less games total, there are a greater ratio of GOOD titles to sucky, buggy, amateurish games. Having less of a selection might not sound like an advantage to most people, but it is to casual gamers and impulse buyers.
o r-a-girlfriend crowd.
Also because the Mac hardware platform allows fewer permutations than a PC, when I spend my tiny gaming budget on a product, I'll have a greater assurance it'll work. I gave up PC gaming because I was sick of fiddling with drivers, patches, and so forth.
I'll give you that Mac gaming is not for the hardcore. But it's good for the three-games-a-year-because-i-have-a-job-or-a-kid-
Written by someone who doesn't understand how it all works and posted by a fool who agrees.
NO one in their right mind is going to 'give' apple source code to 'port' games to apple. It's all about money. And if there aren't enough people to support the staff to rewrite the code to a risc processor, then it isn't going to happen. Hence the situation today.
The second major blunder in this post is that they assume a 32 bit processor is a 32 bit processor. NOT! completely different instruction sets and pipelines. Code has to be nearly completely rewritten to get it to the other type. Graphics text and sound files are about the only exception. Core code is tossed.
The third assertation is that 'they are both 32 bit' machines. NOpe. Apple is 64 bit and CISC processors from AMD and Intel are moving that way now although the majority are still 32 bit. There again the way these chips (Apple RISC vs AMD CISC), work are so radically different from each other, that porting doesn't happen without a lot of cash and incentive. Neither of which are there at the moment.
I can still run 'Dark Castle' on OSX. Who needs more than that?!
Too lazy to look up the figures.
Really the resolution I think is fine, and it's more what goes into making the pixel than how many there are in the end!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Endianness and nasty, crufty 32-bit code that makes all kinds of assumptions is the impediment.
If you're using PPC or PPC-64 for the architecture for your console, it's not difficult to migrate the code over
As for API's, I do this sort of thing all the time- you really, really don't know what you're talking about, so you should keep quiet about it.
The code's typically written to an API with an abstraction layer in most well written games- come up with a different abstraction layer and you have the game running on a different API. How in the hell do you think the MacOS and Linux games that DO get ported happen? It's not as you say, no matter what you might think.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
A bigger problem I think is release timing. When games come out for the Mac, it is often weeks or months or even years behind the PC and console releases. This makes it hard for Mac gamers to find people to play online with as by the time we get the damn thing, PC gamers have gotten bored with it and have moved on to the next big thing.
Apple isn't a gaming company and it is a bad idea for them to port games. However they do have resources for gaming developers and they work with the likes of Aspyr and Westlake to port games.
However gaming isn't the cure for Apple's market share woes. Mac gamers can get a cheap PC or a console to play non Mac games on. That is what I do, though I do buy the Mac game ports so that I support the mac gaming community at the same time.
Apple's main push is in usability and productivity of the computer user, the area where they shine and that is where their main focus should be. They can continue to make porting games easier for developers, but they should do no more than that. The developers can take Apple's help or they can sell less games. It's their choice.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
By the way, since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac, both of which are 64-bit now.
Thanks for the tip, Einstein. However, in case you didn't notice, linux and windows both run on the same x86 processor. Porting windows software to and from linux is difficult. And those are both computer OSes, rather than a computer and a console that doesn't even exist yet.
Would you buy a Mac if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2? What other games are missing from Mac OS X?
I'm sure a lot of mac people are going to happily respond to these questions in a mature fashion.
It's true that Apple does not currently provide a cheap computer that is good for games. Configuring one from the Apple store online, I see that you need to spend at least $2200 without a display, which gets you a 1.8Ghz G5 (roughly equivalent to an Athlon64 3000+), 1024MB RAM, 160GB HD, GeForce 6800 GT and a 2-button mouse.
A similar Dell XPS runs $2014 at the Dell online store, only has a better CPU - 3.4Ghz Pentium4. And of course you do-it yourselfers could probably build something for cheaper than the Dell.
Please. The vast majority of game code is written in high level languages, and last time I checked, there were C and C++ compilers available for the Mac. The processor architecture has very little to do with how portable the game is. In modern games, only a tiny fraction of the code is going to be written in assembly. If it was any kind of barrier at all, you wouldn't see as many games ported to the Mac as you do.
Writing C code that's portable across types of processors is trivial. The hard part of writing portable software is making it portable across platform APIs. If you write your game with a platform abstraction layer built in, or use cross-platform APIs (like OpenGL), your game is much more likely to get ported than if you wrote directly to DirectX/Win32 and then have to figure out how to port your code to use the OS X equivalents.
Asssuming Microsoft is smart and makes the APIs for the new X-Box very similar to DirectX, it will be much, much easier to write a game that will run on X-Box 2 and Windows than it will be to write one that runs on X-Box 2 and OS X, processor architecture notwithstanding.
Both the PS2 and the XBox have keyboards and mice you can buy (the PS2 is easier since you can use any USB keyboard or mouse). A lot of console FPS games like Halo 2 support them.
That's why I say the PC market is kind of drying up, when you have little advantage to having a PC over a console.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've been writing software for two decades on and off, and I plan to port the games I'm writing now to Mac and Linux and maybe even a console.
I know people try to convince me not to -- that I need to invest that time into the game to enhance game play. It's also fiscally unsound when I would already have 95% of the market at my disposal writing them for the PC. However, for me as a developer, a well-designed engine is almost as important as game play; and one element of a well-designed engine is that, in all phases of development, it should have a measure of coupling and cohesion that makes it highly scalable. Furthermore, I get a high degree of personal satisfaction knowing my engine was good enough to allow for minimal porting effort to other platforms. As for the platform-specific hardware interaction (OpenGL, DirectX), I'm counting on the platform developers to provide me with the means to make porting practical through intuitive API's and SDK's. If several platforms provide the same intuitive interface (Like how Windows and Linux and Mac support OpenGL), good for me! Makes my life easier! Good for them! Draws more developers who want to port their software or change to their platform!
There is a point to my rant: At least momentarily changing ones thinking from "I should port my game to another system", to "why wouldn't my game work on another system?" is a healthy thing for a developer to do.
P.S. I have that luxury because I have no boss looking over my shoulder demanding a release in 2 months.
Would you buy a Mac if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2?
How about: Whould you by a PPC based XBOX if you could run OS X on it?
An ATI press release claiming that they are #1 in discrete graphics.
h tm l
http://www.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2004/4794.
Now what the hell does discrete graphics mean!!!
#####Free and Open Source Game Directory#####
there are at least two? I think you meant at least 10. We have had 17 lan parties the past two years. There have been exactly 0 macs out of about 2,500 computers that have come through the door. Why? Incredibly overpriced computers. Incredibly poor and several generations behind video cards for the price. Playing Battlefied two years late isn't exactly cutting edge. Apple has done nothing to court gamers, and the one nut at quakecon this year doesn't count.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
"By the way, since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac, both of which are 64-bit now."
While this is possibly true from a raw technical standpoint, There are many reasons for this not to happen.
1) X-Box Exclusive content is probalby published by Microsoft.
2) Console games usually do not port well to PC. There are exceptions, but a game designed around using a game pad adapts poorly to mouse + keyboard control.
3) I dont think that Microsoft will permit anyone to port Direct X to OS X.
END COMMUNICATION
Just like most x86 gamers switched from Windows to Linux because Loki started releasing ports of popular Windows gaming titles?
The endian issues will probably not go away. If anything, MS will probably have the bootstrap code for the Xbox2 switch the CPU into some sort of low endian mode if possible. If you look at Windows CE, all of the supported RISC processors are running in low endian mode. Enough said.
The point of my post was that CPU architecture isn't the largest impediment these days. It's about the API. If you could see past your ego, you'd see that I was motly in agreement with what you're saying.
An abstraction layer is itself an API. There's cost involved there. Will you be able to make enough money off those games actually make enough money to justify the expense of porting the abstraction layer? But I guess you can write these in your sleep since you're such a smarty man, so it's pure profit. I guess that's why Linux is such a great gaming platform. Oops.
You're not the only person on the planet that understands programming.
The cheapest of the new iMacs is $1300.
I built my current PC for roughly $1500, including the monitor. It's a 3Ghz P4, with 1GB of PC3200 DDRAM, two 80GB HD's, a Radeon 9800XT, Audigy 2, Lite-On burner, etc.
I got quite a bit more bang for my buck. Reading any Mac story here is painful due to the denial.
I dont see the justification when a new console costs just as much as the equivalent graphics card needed for new titles. I'm sure this will be the case for the X-Box 2 (or whatever they call it). Probably even more so if the gfx arch is kick-ass. I can see the desire for having a single appliance that does it all, but those days are rapidly coming to an end...
PC (Mac) games are slowly dying IMO -- There just isn't a compelling reason to buy a game for a home computer when a console can host the same titles with essentially plug and play ease of use and arguably better production values in some cases (which, admittedly, is wierd, since most of them use the same assets for the port.. but I guess it has to do with supporting all the various hw combinations... oh well). Plus the software house can make money on the console version much easier than the PC version for one big reason (that I list below).
I think people usually want home computer games for the following three reasons:
* They want bleeding edge gfx titles. Usually predictable boring FPSs with awesome gfx engines that dont matter for playability. What's most popular FPS of late? Halo on an xbox...now Halo2.. not even a cutting edge engine really... just a good game with great production values. I think Doom3 and the subsequent disappointment post release in indicative for the future of those titles and pretty much the death knell of the gfx card/fps race. I mean, it wasn't even that pretty compared to the last generation.
* Simulation. You need processor and RAM that the consoles dont have. Not many people are truly hardcore about their sims, most want a good game. It's hard to sell a completely hardcore sim. Arguably, Colin McRae and Grand Turismo are the best driving sim games you can get right now.. both are available on consoles -- one is exclusive to a console. But most of the good stuff is home computer only, making this reason really the only real justification IMO for wanting a home computer game.
* Cheap. The unspoken reason -- and I honestly believe the real motivating reason people whine about not having a home computer port of a particular game -- you dont need a modchip to dload the cracked version of the game. Obviously, this alone puts PC's *way* far back in relation to consoles as far as the market is concerned.
That was the case with Bungie's Marathon and Marathon 2. When Microsoft saw Halo, they bought Bungie to prevent it.
Apple *shouldn't* port games! We've long since been happy playing Blockout, and uh .. Super Blockout!
Who could possibly want anything more??!
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I've long been a supporter of portable games and I'm the guy who wrote or championed Unix-y ports of Doom, Quake, and Abuse back in 1993-1996 (http://davetaylor.name), but Mac is still a pain in the ass.
As I'm sure most of you suspect, porting to the Mac is not as easy as "make", even assuming a similar arch to the Xbox2.
The reason developers opt to make their games portable to multiple platforms now is that they want $8M to make their game instead of $6M, and the only way the publisher will approve it is if the developer commits to a multiplatform release, so that they can see more sales.
The Mac game market is still very small, unfortunately, so it doesn't qualify as a viable platform for the publishers. And although the similar endianness of the Mac does make porting easier, it's not a single platform, but a collection of similar platforms, which means you're signing up for a customer support headache, just like you are with the PC. The additional customer support costs, the differing marketing channels and strategies, the inventory mgmt, and sales effort of maintaining an extra SKU, are usually sufficient distraction to knock down a Mac port proposal.
But that's not the whole story. It turns out that Mac owners suffer from accute good taste, which has something to do with why they've historically paid a premium for a pretty, inferior computer.
Only since MacOS X emerged from an awkward puberty has the Mac become a pretty, superior computer to the PC, but it turns out that Mac owners are still the cause of some aesthetic grief. If you do a straight port to the Mac, instead of adding the features and looks that Mac users insist upon so that their Mac apps feel Mac-y, then you get panned in reviews.
I agree with another poster's comment that Apple should either do the ports or fund developers to do ports. I think this would be good for them not only because it would bring more games to the Mac but because it would viscerally illuminate to them the annoying demographic and business side-effects of porting to the Mac, and going through it enough times might inspire solutions.
Sadly, I've recently asked after this, and they are not interested.
On the bright side, they are aggressively going after the top-20 PC games and making sure they get ports. This is smart but not brilliant. Brilliant would be creating incentives for developers to maintain Mac portability from the start.
For instance, I've often thought that iTunes, had they not signed multiple deals with multiple devils to launch it, could be the solution to the distribution dilemna for unsigned composers. If Apple made a similar online distribution store for Mac games, where the developer/publisher could enjoy massive margins that put the retailers to shame, this could be the cookie developers need to pull the trigger.
Pulling that particular iTunes-y solution out of my bum probably too early in the morning w/o sufficient coffee, but my point is that Jobs certainly has the scratch, balls, and brains to make it an attractive platform, but it isn't quite there yet.
I love it when people just make claims without any sort of justification.
You mention e-mail, web browsing and office somehow come to the conclusion that Macs are not better without mentioning why or why not.
Does IE have tabbed browsing, popup blocking, spell checking, real CSS compliance, etc?
Have you ever used Office on a Mac? You mention Excel, but have you ever tried producing charts in both Windows and Macs? My guess would be no.
If you like Outlook on the PC, you should have a problem with Entourage on the Mac. If you like a slimmed down, nice mail application, Apple's Mail is just fine. Specifically, what's wrong with it?
As for professional photo editing, is the best you can say for the PC is "adequate", then still ask what is superior on the Mac? How about video, or content creation in general?
How about not having to deal with viruses, spyware, etc? How about every day simple things like file navigation via column view or unheard of features like Expose' for the PC? These are everyday features where Macs are better. Sure, there are areas where PCs are better supported via third party products, etc. If you're going to make a point where the PC is better, this is where you should go. Your arguement was weak at best.
What an idiotic post! "It shouldn't be that difficult to port future xbox games". *bangs head on table*
Lots of things CAN be done, but think for just half a second WHY the hell would MS want to?
There's also a major hardware hurdle. ONE FRIKKIN MOUSE BUTTON.
the cheapest emac I see on apples site is $800. If this is a sale, it's not a very frequent one (I've been toying with the idea of buying a Mac, so I check prices from time to time). Also, this isn't a very well equipped computer (no DVD burning, only a 40 gig drive, only 256 megs of RAM, and yes I realize Macs may be more memory effecient, like that matters when you're editing seveal 1600x1200 jpegs).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
But then the point that somehow its easier to port from xbox 2 to mac is bogus. If you have an abstracted API then it is easier to port to PC, PS2/3, gamecube, GBA and also Apples. So what. It is an obvious point. It has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying processor. Plus you still have to have someone worry about doing the underlying work to make the API work on top of DirectWhatever, GameSockets or whatever Apple wants to use, SCE's lib and PS2/3 hardware crap. Screw that. Go where the money is, PS2 and Xbox.
As other posters have already pointed out; why would you spend a boatload of money for a Mac? I know that died-in-the-wool Mac users really like their boxes, but I've used and supported Mac G3-G5s and I cannot honestly say that I see any evidence that, especially for the gamer, there would be any advantage to going Mac (unless of course there is some status symbol associated with owning things that are merely more expensive than the next guy's).
JoloK
as I said: mod parent up, it deserves more modpoints than these measily three. some of the big porting to mac studios have an inhouse DirectX -> Mac library.
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
Apple needs to take gamers and their hardware requirements seriously.
Gamers frequently laugh at the mac, not because of the lack of games, but because of the the apparent apple stigmata AGAINST games. Gamers need a proper gaming machine, or they are not going to be happy. Look at the facts:
1) To get a mac with a decent graphics card built in, you need to pay $2500+ for a top-of-the-line G5. Apple computers typically ship with GPUs that are two to three generations behind the currently shipping top grade GPU. This is embarrassing for a company that seems to what to hold on to an unrealistic idea that their computers are cutting edge. Real gamers know better.
2) Apple computers typically ship with a less then average amount of RAM installed. Another embarrassment, this time even worse, because RAM is so cheap. These kinds of things make apple look bad to gamers, because they show apple is only interested in the bottom-feeder who has no clue how much RAM he/she realistically needs.
3) Apple's mouse and keyboard are of poor design. The average gamer needs lots of keys and lots of buttons. Once again, apple targets the bottom-feeder who has no clue. Gamers notice these types of details.
4) Apple does nothing to give gamers the little details they need which convince them they have a gaming machine. Like ALL ports in the front of the computer. Like pre-installed sound cards. Like included speakers that don't suck. Like good games which come with the computer. Etc.
So, for a hardcore gamer to buy a mac, they would typically have to do at least three things before they even install a single game: upgrade the graphics card, upgrade the RAM, and change the keyboard/mouse. All of this jacks up the price to unacceptable levels, especially since a gaming PC with all of the above typically runs about $1500.
Once gamers have exactly what they need (hardware-wise) from the moment they buy a mac, without spending a crapload on upgrading where apple has skimped on them, then maybe they'll consider the mac a serious gaming machine. But it's going to take apple changing their apparent viewpoint that all mac users are basically grandma who uses a word processor and email, and who doesn't care about how fast her computer goes.
The cheapest computer on apple's site right now is $799 and that is with the lowest options available, like 256M RAM.
Yes, that's for an eMac, the iMacs start at $1299. >;
One simple fact that you are all forgetting anyway is that a lot more effort is put into the optimization of the PC version of most games (I'd like to facts on this, but it's easy enough to google it yourself) and the Mac ports usually suffer because they just don't have the funding to do so. The reason for this is obvious, anybody that'll actually buy that game on a Mac, that doesn't already have a Wintendo to play it on, is so hungry for games they'll buy it even if it's sub-par and inferior to it's Windows parent.
You should really take that into consideration when talking about how you can buy a system that will play the games equivalent to some cheap, low-end Windows PC.
The original argument still stands though, the quality games are usually not released for the Mac at all. So I don't really see how the price of an effective machine is relevant. The problem is the number of people that have the machines already, not the number of people that would buy one if there were games for it. The reasoning for that statement is that the high end games will never be available in the same quantity for Mac as for Windows unless there were an existing market for it and the market will never be there unless the games were available already...
Who's going to jump first?
Even if one publisher invested a ton of capital into making their top quality games available on the Mac, 1 or 2 big companies games are not reason enough to start switching to Macs (assuming that most Windows users even find Mac OSX desirable). Those companies will still make their games for the Windows market and you'll still have a lot of other companies making top quality games for Windows and no ports to the Mac, or crappy, bug ridden, low performance ports if they do (since there just isn't enough money to spend on the ports).
You could bring Blizzard into the mix and present things like D2, WC3, WoW. Yes, Blizzard is taking the proper approach and making the Mac verisons simultaneously, but Blizzard is unique in a lot of ways when it comes to development. They take as long as they want to complete a game and they make games that they know from experience will appeal to Mac users as well as Windows users.
Anyway, point being, people aren't going to buy Macs for games without games to buy and publishers aren't going to fund games on the Mac without people to buy them.
MAME already runs on Mac/Linux/UNIX/BSD/Win32 anyway. Who needs crappy 3D remakes of old classic games when the originals are 100 times better, and can run emulated on 1/10 the hardware requirements? :)
http://www.mame.net/
http://www.mameworld.net/
the reason Microsoft chose to use G5 CPUs in their XBox2 is so they can taunt all those Mac owners with all their XBox games that will NEVER be available for OSX, no matter how similar the hardware gets.
By the logic above, all games made for Windows should be available on x86 Linux because it's easy to port. You know, the Processor has everything to do with what toolkit, libraries, and so on that you use. Hell man, just import some magic glibc-linux.h and voila:
./configure --platform=linux && make && make install
Far Cry seriously kicks ass. It deserves more attention.
I had to roll back nVidia drivers for a GeForce 2 MX because I found that I could no longer play DVDs because the card has a TV-Out.
No, you can NOT disable the TV-Out port *anywhere* in the software. The only choice was to roll back the drivers.
PowerDVD & Windows Media Player were rendered DVD-worthless... but at least VLC works.
Pissed me off, and reminded me that shitty drivers occur with both ATI and nVidia.
I own a Mac and a Linux box. Just because there are more PC games does not mean that they are good, just that game players buy more. Anything good and has a future usually comes out for Mac and or Linux, examples, UT2004, Quakex, etc.
Hard core gamers don't care about the OS, what matters is the hardware needed to run the game, and being able to customise that hardware, x86 wins, and it will for years to come, thanks to the rule of numbers, not because of Windows or Mac.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I am leading a group of developers to develop a fully multiplatform game. The two main libs we use are OpenGL(graphics API) and OpenAL(audio API). This has been done successfully many times, look at idsoftware they infact say it makes them code better for more stable games. If its done right all you'll need is a few lines of code changed and a recompile. If people just got off DX and went open stands it would be easy.
Complaining that there aren't enough games for Macs is like purchasing a fuel cell car and complaining that there aren't enough hydrogen stations around.
umm....hello?!?! vivendi universal was purchased my microsoft not but LAST YEAR. why not simply ask: "if you could live on the moon, assuming it was exactly like earh, would you"?
always with the imposssible hypothetical's
crazy kids
I love the line "it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5" ... some people have no concept at all in what is involved in moving an application from one system to another, just because the CPU is the same doesn't mean it'll magically convert itself :-)
They should simply add video in ports on the back of the iMac and offer Nintendo Game Cubes as an option (I'm sure Steve will consider the PS3 if it comes in a cube shaped form factor)
This would also solve another major drawback of the Mac, TV on the desktop options!
If the same games were available on both Windows and Mac OS, I would have a full gaming environment and a full development/productivity environment on the one computer.
This would avoid the current stupidity with dual booting.
In all honesty, you might as well say "if the same games were available on both Windows and Linux", though.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I agree with your statement that MS is trying to specifically sell X-Boxes. It would compromise their market if all the third-party developed games made for XboX could easily be ported to PS3. But there is an opportunity here....
The console makers (Sony, MS, Nintendo) go to extreme lengths to woo developers to create games on their platforms. And they work even harder to secure exclusive titles for their platforms. These exclusive deals, however, historically only pertain to the console market and usually haven't meant games aren't ported to PCs and Macs.
A publisher can agree to the exclusive xbOx release of a game, use the hype and success of that release to boost sales of the title when it's released on the Mac and PC. The publisher will make more money off the Mac and PC sales because they don't have to pay the kind of licensing fees for those unit sales that they have to pay on the XbOx. So, having an easy port path to Mac (and PC) could help publishers swallow the medicine of exclusive xboX contracts. seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
This despite the fact that every other Star Wars computer game has been ported to the Mac and despite the fact that the creator (Sony) ported their other MMORPG (Everquest) to the Mac. *sigh*
Come play Moral Decay!
I got about halfway through the Warcraft 3 Undead missions, and stopped playing. I have no inclination to return to it, either. Why? Because I played Dune 2. Command and Conquer. Red Alert. Warcraft. Warcraft 2. Starcraft. Warcraft 3 is basically the same game as Dune 2, when you get right down to it; all that differs is the units' relative strengths and weaknesses, heroes, and ... uh ... help me out here, guys.
There is nothing recently released on the PC that excites me. I'll repeat that: nothing. I walk into EBGames, look at the boxes on the wall, and walk back out without spending a penny.
For work, I have my Mac. For games, I have my GameCube. The pairing works very nicely for me, thank you very much (Pikmin 2 is released in two days here -- and yes, I am very much excited about it.) You may choose to disagree with my feelings; that's fine.
It boils down to how I spend my hard-earned (and this becomes doubly important once you have a mortgage.) I get more value for money out of games on the GameCube than I would on the Xbox, Mac, PC, etc. Just remember, though: everybody is different. What works for me may not work for you, and I'd not quibble that point.
Babar*an (C64-action like Conan in the movie) iMaze (cocoa instead of X11) Astro-Panic dogfight (the one where sprite-planes hide in the clouds) Winter-Games The Eidolon Shufflepuck-cafe in color and with network mode Grand Monster Slam Uridium Defender of the Crown (multiplayer) Hardware: Competition Pro support in every game (with adapter)
Uhh, I am terribly sorry. I should have used the preview button before submiting my posts.
shame on me!
Just as an FYI, there's a company called "coderus ltd" that produces a product called MacDX. It acts as a bridge between DirectX and the Mac OS: ...
http://www.coderus.com/
So things might not be as hard as they were in the past
I'm no addict to FPS. The only game that matters to me is X-Plane, and it exists on Mac. Hell, it was developed on a mac. The author seems to claim easier, faster development on Mac.
Crippling:
I have an ibook and a powerbook, and a big flat-screen TV. I cannot play it at an adequate resolution on the big screen using the ibook because apple decided to disabled screen spanning. The display is limited to mirroring, where I don't use the LCD's available resolution, a crying shame. I don't think any PC maker would deliberately cripple their hardware... Also, PCI graphic cards for powermac are notoriously more expensive than their x386 equivalent. Why is that? Is there a technical reason I cannot move my graphic card from a PC to a Mac and vice versa?
These limitations hamper the development of an ecosystem where PCs and Macs can compete head to head.
This ecosystem existed on the apple2 and the PC and made their success.
..you can play "new media designer"
it's like monopoly except you lose all of your cash every third turn, and the 'top hat' is replaced with a turtleneck.
Considering this foxtrot strip ran in thousands of newspapers on the day that this story was slashdotted.
Laziness is a virtue, anyone who bothers to tell you otherwise, is clearly lacking it.
There are people working on exactly this. They work at a nice company called Transgaming, though most slashdotters don't really seem to like them.
You could always use dslinux to install linux into your Nintendo DS and play any game you want.
I'm in the same boat as the parent poster. I like playing computer games, but I purchased a PowerMac (and soon afterwards a Powerbook laptop too) because the overall experience was just better. OS X is teriffic, and so are some of the bundled apps. There are some incredibly good shareware and freeware packages out there too, and of course, most of the "general business/small office/home" applications you might need (MS Office, Print Shop, Quicken, etc.). Most of the "cream of the crop" games make it to the Mac eventually, so there's a good number of things to play on mine.
The fact that games come out for Windows first and Windows has "twice as many games" as Mac seems like a pretty flimsy reason to base a computer buying decision on. If you're THAT obsessed with games and gaming, I'd think you would just want a console or two. That's ALL they're designed for! I've seen so many POOR games on my PC, I almost prefer the fact that my Mac acts like a "filter". Nobody's going to waste the time and money/effort porting a game that wasn't any good in Windows so it can suck on the Mac too.
Yeah, all that said, there are a handful of game titles I'm really sorry to see never made it to the Mac (or looks like they won't in the future, like Half Life 2), but that's just market economics in action. When you opt for a system that has MUCH less marketshare than the dominant platform, you have to realize your software options may not be identical.....
If it takes apple a week longer to release the game for mac than PC, then it won't fly.
The gaming market (myself included) are fickle and impatient. If its new, and I can't get it the day it is released I probably won't play it.
The exception to this is going from a console to a PC, where I get the luxury of my preferred controller type and usually some added features (more content, level editor, patching, expansions whatever). And if then if the wait is long enough or I don't know how long it will be (think fable, or halo), then why wait when I already have the PC?
If apple is going to do something like this they'd have to jump in on all the big titles to get a mac port done, and for a while it would cost them oodles of money, but if they can market productivity and ease of use (even if that means MS office on a mac), to high school and university students then you could find people who switch.
Pci-X is for servers. And has little in common with pci-e
Newer consoles will have much stronger support for HDTV resolutions.
720p is 1280x720, 1080i is 1920x1080 (interlaced) (stole these from a response to an earlier post of mine).
1080i is substantially better than what you are using now!
Even some current games on consoles support 720p.
I'll not argue that at the moment PC RPG's are deeper than console RPG's. But with much better resolution and a far huger market, it's only a matter of time before PC RPG's head over to consoles as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They are too expensive. Period.
If Apple released cheaper hardware, or opened the door to clones, more people could afford an apple, and more support (games, apps, etc) to it would be devoted.
Will it happen? Probably not. Apple apparently likes their position of high end computers. And mac zealots use their macs as status.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All my PC friends used to tell me that they would never buy an Amiga because they were just games machines. Showing them that quality business software existed - from wordprocessors like, ahem, Kindwords, to video editing hardware and software, nothing could convince them. Meanwhile, they played Leisure Suit Larry, King's Quest, and Space Quest. But Amigas were just for games.
Now the argument is reversed. People will not change to the competition because they can't play games.
It strikes me as amusing, but I think that PC people enjoy two things:
upgradability
low prices
People will not, in general, move to a proprietary hardware system, because they can always find a whitebox cheaper. They then subconsciously convince themselves that they are part of the better camp.
If the general population does not change to the Mac platform, then the best interests of the game publishers and Apple are not met by porting every last little game released.
That's why only the best make it to the Mac. They are financially viable.
If an Xbox plays the games, buy an Xbox - you are guaranteed that the game will work with your hardware. And Apple won't get stuck in an endless support cycle for games which don't make them money.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
... I bought Star Trek Fleet Acadamy. Then I got Postal. Now when I was thinking about buying a computer, instead of building one, I decieded to go w/ XP crap because it was 1) cheap and 2) more games. If Mac had more games, I would have spent the $$ and gone with Mac. It's been a better OS for the past 20 years. Heck, my Mac+ is still running, in 2004. The applications aren't 2000 compliant, but what the heck, I have a greak koo-koo clock.
You don't buy a mac for games. Even if apple wasted all that energy getting the games over to mac, people would just realize what they realize when they play quake3 or doom3 or whatever.
Performance sucks on macs. And if you consider FPS vs. $$$, it really sucks.
Apple still follows the digital hub strategy, and I tend to agree with it. Here's where I'd *like* to see the digital hub/entertainment center go, although I don't think it will.
1) The Hub
A fanless computer that blends in with the home theatre system. Has 3 modes. Traditional computer mode (mac os x,in this case and functions with a mouse/kb etc), Component mode-functions like your typical VCR or A/V box, and On-screen-display mode (functions like a tivo but with an expanded Tablet-pc type system which you can control with a remote). Connects to the TV and wirelessly sync's with your laptop/clie/cell etc.
2) The input set
Contains all the crap inputs you need, optical, coaxial, ryw, RF, etc. Connects to the hub via a firewire connection. The only "smart" thing it needs to do is feed whichever input the hub asks for through the firewire. Could feed multiple inputs limited by bandwidth.
3) amp/converters
firewire to the hub. used as necessary. This means your upconverter to progressive scan stuff can be used for multiple inputs seamlessly, all configured via the hub.
4) game system
Simply because it's the best way for games to be distributed (no more updates, fewer buggy releases, more "seamless" than PC games) that has significantly lower piracy issues. Further, I don't mind paying $50 for a game if I actually get something that's not buggy and it allows me to get the system for a very low price. I think this is one reason the console market is so attractive to both developers and gamers, so it's here to stay. Plugs into the hub.
The problem with this is it not only requires a whole lot of software development (that I think only Apple could pull off the OS, hopefully getting some home-theatre interface tips jacked from Tivo), but it requires a whole mess of industry standards to be developed (over firewire) and a complete change of the component development process. Apple has the hub technology to do this, but not the component aspects. Sony has the component aspects, but not enough control of the windows operating system to make it seemless.
Apple/Sony, please make me happy.
Ah well, pipe dreams are nice.
DirectX is not behind OpenGL as you put it, as OpenGL has just partially caught up to DirectX. OpenGL 2.0 has not yet been written into the vast majority of driver sets, whereas any card can support the latest version of DirectX even if in software.
-]Phreak Out[-
I'm not very hardware savvy, so that's why I'm asking.
They just are gamers who typically bought their hardware a long time ago, back when Nvidia was king (Most people who play half-life have older hardware, in my experience). Most of them would probably buy ATI if they bought today. That's just a guess, of course, but I bet it's true. Why? Because I, and all my friends, bought ATI for our upgrades this year for the current host of games out there.
By the way, I loved HL/CS, and I played it for years on my Geforce3. But this time, a Radeon X800 XT made more sense for me. Single slot, fairly quiet, and very fast. Those were my criteria (and being ~$500 or less).
Most people on gaming forums are tilting ATI right now, I'd say, even those that have Nvidia. I personally will buy whatever seems the best at any given time, but I'd have to say that right now, I (and most people I know) "like" ATI better (we'd prefer the latest ATI cards over the latest Nvidia ones).
-Dan
" I'm with you, a Mac is a superior tool for all kinds of work, but I don't think anybody will hold back on buying a Mac just because there aren't enough games for it."
Thank you for your opinion.
And for every argument to this point, all you do is have to look world wid x86 hardware usage statistics to realize that either A) people do place a lot of stock in the PC's games, or B) something about the mac being the ultimate/superior computing experience just doesn't jive. Even if we were, for the moment, to take your word that the Mac is a superior tool for all kinds of work, one must then ask the question to which their are only painful answers for-- Why isn't the mac in the usage majority if it's so great?
I, IMHO conclude that if all of these statements justifying the Mac's superiority are correct, it must only be by the narrowist of margins, and only to the point where it must not counterbalance some major deficiency in all things Mac, save the iPod.
IMO, of course.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Well, the point is that the assumed processor can cause SERIOUS endian and memory offset issues which can kill performance, introduce bugs and make porting a nightmare.
To remove that difficulty does not make porting trivial (and thus you are right in a sense, as I think that's what you're trying to say), but it does remove a big stumbling block to porting.
Say companies who port already have an established workalike API for Direct-X (which seems to be what most games use nowadays for the Xbox/PC) because they've ported a large game before.
The fact this game was tested on the same processor makes their life a whole lot easier, as it removes the endian nastiness from their porting experience. Because many games deal with large textures etc etc and have their own engines for reading them in and manipulating the memory, stuff like that does crop up.
Yes it doesn't make porting suddenly trivial, but it may remove some of the more subtle and insidious problems.
To be honest, nothing tremendously interesting has happened in gaming for a long time. Some of the most interesting (and popular) games run adequately on mid-range hardware. Call me crazy, but I find my Gamecube more entertaining than most PC games, especially since I know I won't have to spend time tweaking it to get the highest FPS possible, or any other kind of nonsense. Who cares about technical details when the games aren't even fun? PC gamers are hardware manufactures' number one whores. The pressure shouldn't be on a video card maker to create the latest in greatest, but it should be on software developers to stretch technology to its limit; some of the cheapest, lamest, c64 games were still better than the $40+ crap that's released today -- and all it needed was 1mhz. Why is it that developers manage to push the limits of a PS2, but merely up the specifications without any hacking effort when it coms to PCs? It's a huge money making scheme, and I don't pay it much mind anymore.
For the money one blows on an insane gaming rig, and constantly upgrading that setup, he/she could just buy a top of the line Mac and possibly a couple consoles along the way. Keep in mind that Mac will probably last a minimum of 5 years without any major upgrades; longer if you upgrade the GPU, CPU, and other things. I don't see my Quicksilver going anywhere any time soon.
Yes it is.
No it isn't.
Yes it is, you douche.
No it isn't you, cock-smoker.
Yes it is, you retard.
No it isn't, you sphincter pimple.
Repeat endlessly.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Developers have trouble programming around the 1-button mouse =P
I was kind of thinking the same thing but didn't want to be too mean to them... one more ribbing wont hurt them any though! :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I did know them generally, just not specifically.
:-)
No, it doesn't hurt much (after you have lots of practice). I have to give planning estimates for software at work...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I use G5 1600 mac exclusively and I don't have x86 anymore.
By far, I never missed PC games. Especially that "counter strike" thing. While on PC, I wasn't interested in too.
Companies like Aspyr, Feral ports games to Mac already and they do them by demand.
If I know mac community by 1 year, I didn't see anyone "dieing" for a pc exclusive game.
Had to say another thing. Macs are quality machines but expensive. Top of line Mac users (not pros) can spend a lot. Seems they can/already buy a console or gaming PC for pc exclusive games.
If you check and look at game list or if you want to see a TOP selling game company like you will understand me.
... so, let me get this straight, you don't mind spending a fortune swapping hardware bits, and pulling your hair out chasing the 'right' BIOS, but you're too cheap to buy a third-party multi-button mouse???
Apple will be right with ya, start holdin' yer breath......now.
Not on the G5 it doesn't. That required Virtual PC to be rewritten.
If it was that simple to write a DirectX layer (not to mention a layer for all the other windows-sepecific API calls made by a typical windows game such as thread calls, file calls etc), the WINE guys would have done it by now and I would be playing C&C Renegade, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and all my other windows stuff with it :)
The G5 doesn't have that option- it's Big or not at all. Microsoft's going to have to deal with endian-ness and so are vendors who are targeting Windows and X-Box2.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac
Dude, that's like saying that since both AtheOS and Windows run on x86, it'd be easy to port between them.
Now, if the Xbox 2 were to run Mac OS X, you might have something, but it doesn't.
you think this would be obvious most of the people i know who are mac fanatics still have an x86 box that they turn on for games only... other people would never try a mac in the first place because it could never be their all-in-one solution
Get your torrents...
You're pointing out an ideosynchrasy, admittedly. I do spend somewhere around 1000/yr on computer equipment, but I also have five systems to maintain. (2 linux and 2 xp and one solaris x86). So maybe the mouse comment was a red herring. I'll accept that.
Oddly enough, I've never had BIOS issues -- ever. I know it's comparatively rare for those of us that like to build-our-own, but it's been my experience.
Apple is always the packaged system buy, though. When you buy a Mac you don't have that many choices. I like the choices I get with the PC platform.
I've come very close to buying Apple systems on a couple occasions, but when it comes to gaming, I just don't feel like they offer the flexibility I want in terms of configuration choices.
Like I said, I'll start saving now for another reconsideration of an Apple next year, but as a gaming system, it's just not what I want just yet -- in terms of gaming software available and system configuration.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
Can't you ping -f? That should be fun enough.
I would pay $100-200 for HL2 on my Mac. It is the only game that will force me to pull my PC out of the closet and upgrade it. This is the most exciting game to come along in a long time.
I worked in pre-press for over 6 years and I'm very familiar with the ColorSync architecture (we used it in our production workflow for almost 5 years before I left 2 years ago). The great thing about Apple's implimentation is that it's system-wide. Your third party software vendors like Gretag-MacBeth, X-Rite, Monaco, etc. build great software on top of a great foundation provided by Apple in the form of ColorSync.
You are indeed a troll.
"According to a poll by X-bit labs, around 56% of users had 'Powered by ATI' graphics cards inside their PCs." ...
"About a year ago ATI was regarded as the best graphics processors designer in 2003 by 81% of X-bit labs readers."
The number of people who have ATI cards was not 81% in 2003. That would be amazing, though! The number of people who prefer a brand and the number who have a card of that brand are not the same. For example, one year ago I considered ATI the best...and I had Nvidia in all my PCs until one month ago.
> and nVidia is dominating the performance market.
Yes, for now they are.
-Dan
Really, I got a kick and a half watching my old roomie, Troy, as he stayed 'on the tip' with the online PC gamer thing. He'd come out of his room, once in days, bug-eyed, bleary, mumbling BIOS this...new character-creationutility that... it was great fun actually. And his PC running Win98 was amazing for games (surround sound, of course, all the doodads).
But while all that was going on I was running an investment analysis biz, and publishing weekly and a monthly tabloid on a Powerbook (ext. monitor)... And it used to kill me, the old 'myth' regarding PCs being the 'business' machine. Most PCs are cash registers or glorified typewriters...and when you really nail somebody down about biz apps, speed, security, cross-platform integration, ease of networking, etc... the PC guy will throw up his hands and say, "What about Games?"
And they have a point there, no question about it. So, yeah, the old toy vs. Biz vs what(?) thing is silly, sure, and Apple got suckered into the 'art' thing 'for the rest of us' [by their own in--house guys]. I use PCs at work, no probs, but my Powerbok is an insanely great biz box, no question.