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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?"
um... warcraft3 is not an FPS, yet barfs out on my iMac when the fighting goes up. The new Sims version looks like crap if you haven't got the VRAM for sufficient textures. More and more games, even not 3D, require a powerful 3D card, just as much as an OS wants a serious graphics card.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I have a Mac. I've had it for four years. I've added more RAM several times to 1GB of PC100, added some hard drives, upgraded the video card, and I'm considering upgrading the processors.
The reason I'm considering is I can't really upgrade the motherboard without needing new RAM, procs, etc. anyway, Unless this isn't the case on the PC-side, that's my definition of "a new computer".
Unless you're talking about a model that begins with a vowel, Apple's desktops are pretty upgradeable.
their is no directx on mac that I know Of unlike the Xbox so everything would have to be ported to opengl etc.
"With the things that x.org and friends are doing, is there some technical hurdle that opengl et al cannot compete on?"
Yes, very much so. Nvidia and ATI refuse to release full featured OpenGL drivers on the linux platform. DoomIII runs about 20% slower on linux because of nvididia drivers, ATI cards won't even PLAY doom3. UT2k4 is on linux, but it rusn slower because yet again, nvidia's poor quality drivers.
Ati BTW doesn't even have released versions of opengl drivers for linux, so they are even farther behind.
So far today, the only games coming out for linux are the ones who have authors who write cross platform games anyway. You won't start seeing ANY type of reasonable effort put into porting to linux from other game manufacturers until there is a reliable and fast driver for both ATI and nVidia cards.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
I guess "barely plays UT2004" is the new slang for "plays it at full graphics settings without a slowdown in framerate," because that is what mine has been doing since I bought it last month. I agree with the insufficient stock RAM statement, though.
ATI Radeon cards are the most popular with gamers.
Liar
I unfortunately have to wonder what type of crack this guy was smoking. First of all, the XBox 2, is a Windows based PPC970 system. The developers kit is actually a version of Windows XP running on Power PC. This is not a miracle or surprising. If you remember, Windows NT ran just fine on PPC, MIPS, Alpha, x86 and originally on i860. XP is portable and should be no problem for Microsoft to port to anything they want to. It was designed for that in the first place.
.NET more than likely needed to be modified to support JIT PPC970 support, no big deal.
.NET code will need to be ported to something local on the OS X platform or they'll have to use an open source .NET implementation such as Mono and port all the other .NET features to Mono that are missing.
.NET, etc...
The key issue for porting Windows XP to another platform is the availability of PPC970 compilers. This is still a bit of an issue, but Microsoft does in fact employ one of the best non-multiprocessing compiler development teams on the market and has managed to make excellent compilers for x86, StrongARM/XScale, MIPS, Hitachi, and others. 64-bit Power PC should be quite simple compared to some others. Also, since Apple has released source to their 64-bit GCC, the basic PPC970 optimizations should be readily available to borrow and Microsoft can focus on further optimizations.
So, let's think for a moment what it would take to port a Windows based XBox game to the Mac OS X PowerMac G5.
First, the game would have to use a Windows emulation layer, or reimplement all the DirectX code to OpenGL.
Second,
Third, all Windows API code will need to be ported to Carbon or Cocoa. Maybe they can use Qt or something else to make the job a little easier.
Audio code will have to be ported from DirectX to CoreSound or another tool kit.
Or... wait....
If they port from XBox 2 to Windows XP, they keep Direct X, Direct Sound, Direct Show, Windows API,
There's no difference between porting from XBox 1 to Mac OS X and XBox 2. In fact, it's probably the same.
Porting from XBox to Windows makes sense, but really, who would bother porting from XBox to OS X when the Mac market just doesn't pay for games anyway. (It costs a lot more to port to X unless you used OpenGL than you can possibly profit)
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.
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
Apple has had a pervasive color synchronization system in place for quite some time. This makes doing print stuff easier.
-mkb
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........
<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 $DIETY for John Carmack for keeping GL alive and kicking...
</rant>We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
Refreshing to see a post from someone that isn't a moron or zealot and actually remembers NT wasn't x86 technology.
I was going to post along the lines of what you said. Thank you...
Interesting to see that your post is already modded down. Either people don't get it, don't want to get it, or maybe just because you forgot the mandatory MS bashing requirement and didn't put a 'M$ Sux' at the bottom of your post. lol
Anyway, whether people like it or not, your post is on track, this guy must be on crack to think that games would any easier to port to a Mac just because the new XBox hardware is similar.
And the scary sub context of all this, the original post is nothing but a plea for Games for the Mac, without realizing that Apple doesn't have a great graphical performance architecture for gaming. Apple, the mother of consumer level graphical computing, and they still have nothing for providing high end gaming performance.
People used to make fun of Microsoft when they wanted OpenGL to be more hardware optimized, and ended up going their own road with DirectX because of the OpenGL group's reluctance to implement many of the DirectX abilities.
Now you have Windows that has a way for games to access not only video, but all multimedia aspects of the hardware in a way that is hardware independent, but yet has a very small performance hit if any, anymore. And so people are still using Windows to play games on because of its great gaming performance, to the level that a console even came out of the great performance DirectX and Windows coupled with hardware allows, the XBOX.
And now you see other OS developers and companies still trying to emulate or recreate a set of technologies comparable to DirectX.
And Apple hasn't even as been so bold to create a DirectX technology for OSX, instead they are leaving it to OpenGL, which is only a video solution, that still lacks many of the hardware optimization concepts that are in DirectX.
I wish I had mod points this week...