The Evolution of Mac Gaming

Next Generation has a piece up exploring where gaming is going on Max OS X. From the article: "Almost since the introduction of the Mac, Apple users have lamented the lack of game support provided to the platform as compared to its Wintel brethren. Sometimes that lack of support was due to hardware and input devices that weren't competitive with the PC, but the adoption of PC standards like AGP for graphics cards and USB support for 'proper' multi-button mice did away with those obstacles. But the largest reason usually has had to do with the size of the Mac market."

Comments

excuse me?

[moosesocks]

AGP and USB are hardly PC standards.

Apple adopted AGP around the same time as Intel did (which was a moot point nonetheless, as A) Most 3D cards at the time were geared for D3D and not OpenGL, and B) The cards weren't compatible between platforms anyway)

USB on the other hand, was adopted AND EMBRACED lightyears earlier by apple.

And stop acting like there's always been this huge dispraity between PC and Mac games. Sure, the blockbuster games were mostly for the PC, but Apple's definitely had its share of awesome games (Escape Velocity immediately jumps to mind) -- the big distinction between the platforms was that 3d games took a long time to get off the ground for mac users.

Also remember that Mac users up until a year or two ago, typically ran MUCH OLDER hardware than their intel counterparts. Where PC users typically upgrade every 2-3 years, apple users typically don't see a need to upgrade for twice that period of time. A G4 running OS9 was laughable overkill.

OSX changed everything, making it infinitely easier for developers to support mac due to the unix core, friendly APIs, and (tada!) proper memory managment.

Even today, apple's getting some great open source games, and it would seem that the trend now is for the cool indie/OSS games to be written on OSX and then ported over to Unix/Win32. Lux comes to mind here...

Re:excuse me?

[el_womble]

Especially as DB-9 and DB-25 were so homebrew hardware friendly. USB cost a hell of a lot more to develope for than RS-232. OK it sucks for data transfer, but its great for sending control signals. Great projects like an automatic coffee machine etc would be very expensive if there was no RS-232. OK, they're not going to set the world alight, but its one more avenue of computer science that is made less accessible.

Re:It Wasn't Until Win3.1

[Golias]

As a C64 owner from the 80s, I can assue you that this was far from the truth, especially when Specter VR came out for the Mac.

Networked PvP combat long before Doom.

I deeply envied my Mac-owning friends back then.

Who uses Macs?

[dal20402]

"0mg 1337 g4M0rZ" aren't attracted to the Mac in the first place, because the games are on Windows. And, really, they drive the market for new games, so it's only sensible to market games (especially, as TFA notes, niche games) to them: in other words, Windows.

So Mac gamers are people who use their Macs for other reasons (all those reasons we endlessly hear about) and happen to want to play some games. This audience will never support more than derivative games and a few struggling indie publishers -- which is exactly the situation now.

Having said that, Apple desperately needs to fix its OpenGL problems to make game writing/porting easier.

ObligatoryNostalgiaAside: I remember playing endless games of NetTrek on my middle school's Mac Pluses. Networked gaming in 1987! And I still fire up mini vMac (yes, I have a Plus case in the basement) to play Dungeon of Doom once in a while.

Re:Who uses Macs?

[EggyToast]

I do also wonder if the highly modular nature of the x86 market helps the "get a new video card every year" mentality that subsequently helps drive games that, while not exactly pushing better gameplay or newer stories, at least pushes the graphics.

Most people are happy working on a mac without ever really getting into its guts. That's a far cry from the "rebuild a PC every year" crowd who pushes for hardware advancements, sometimes simply because they feel like upgrading. I should know; I was in the same boat until I bought a G5 last year. Sure, sometimes I get the itch to put more RAM in my computer, but I'm at a point where it's overkill. For me to seriously upgrade, I would need to buy a new machine. I can't continuously graft new parts to the thing (well, I can kind of get new video cards), and that's even more true for the majority of machines from Apple.

Since Apple controls the majority of the hardware, if they don't push for the latest and greatest games through their hardware support, then it doesn't surprise me that game developers don't pursue it either.

Intel switch maybe good for OpenGL?

[Dr. Spork]

So I was thinking that once the Intel transition is finished, a game written with OpenGL will be very easy to port for the Mac. This looks to me like a very good reason to develop new games with OpenGL: a near-automatic 3% increase in customer base, probably more than a 3% increase in game sales (less competition in the Mac market).

Either that, or the automatic porting tools for translating DirectX calls to OpenGL will get so good that even porting DirectX games to the Mac will be easy and sacrifice little in performance. Either way, this means more games for Mac, and this will be good for Linux on x86, because a game for OSX86 will probably not be too hard to run on Linux with Transgaming translation or some Mac/Linux equivalent.

Highlight Windows poor OpenGL performance

[Logger]

With Mac's running on Intel we may see the poor performance of Windows' OpenGL performance highlighted. Earlier on slashdot was a report on the poor performance of OpenGL on Windows due to the fact that Windows translates OpenGL to DirectX on the fly.

Could motivate M$ to improve their OpenGL support, which would be good for Apple.

great... but

[chrisxkelley]

i love gaming, it's fun, and its a great thing to do with friends, however- are mac gamers really that crippled? I mean, every fps shooter is basically multiplayer deathmatch, then single player shoot-em-up with a similar storyline to the rest of them. I play starcraft, unreal tournament 2004, call of duty, and doom 3. all on a mac. they run great and its alll you need. starcraft, well is just starcraft, the legendary strategy game from the late 90's, call of duty, ut2k4, and d3 are all great fps shooters. its all you really need. i mean, sure, it cant play half life 2, but do you really need it? is it really that great? what is so different about it than call of duty or doom 3? just my two cents.

Former Mac Game Developer

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to do Mac game development - I did the ports of a couple of the larger commercial titles on the Mac in 2001-2002.

It generally paid very poorly, and support from Apple was iffy.

If I was to do a financial break down of units sold vs what the average Mac development company got paid for a port, it was probably along the lines of about $1 per unit sold. 50,000 units sold was a big hit (not often achieved; 20,000 was more realistic), and it was not unusual for a game to take an engineer 6 to 12 months to complete.

One of the more prominent commercial Mac game publishers tried to drive down the cost of development by using the bids of wanna-be developers with no experience to drive down the bids of the experienced companies.

I've since moved on to console work at a major publisher/developer, and for once enjoy job security, great working conditions, and good pay (steady pay, at that).

Re:It Wasn't Until Win3.1

[NutscrapeSucks]

I'd say the peak was back farther than that. Probably the best period for Mac gaming was 1984-1988, when many Apple II devs ported their games. (Alas, most of these games were hardcoded to the 9" screen and broke when the MacII came out.)

In the late-80s/early-90s, the common knock against the Mac by PC users was that it was "cartoony". Apple wanted to promote a professional image, and actually discouraged Mac Game Development and made sure that the default Mac desktop was gray and boring.

By the peak era of DOS gaming in 93-94, the Mac platform was already totally secondary, despite the fact it's marketshare was higher than ever. Windows gaming didn't really take off until 1996 or 97.

Wine For Mac x86

[nukem996]

With Mac x86 on the horizon I definitly see someone porting wine or Transgaming selling cedega for Mac x86. I wouldnt be surprised if it was included in the Mac x86 release, its Applest best way to best way to gain market share from M$.

99% of games I play are flash

[tod_miller]

Check out 'N' a great flash game. The proble with flash is reusability of the modules, and the hackability of it.

Looking at teagames.com and http://www.rit.edu/~jhb4598/jblog Java quake 3 map renderer (with rail gun) that runs at ~89fps on my stock dell POShit.

Despite diverging proprietary systems, the dominance of flash and java in web and mobile gaming will ultimately (as technology grows) give us cross platform gaming. If Java can do cross platform quake 3 now, in 3 years will Java do cross platform Doom3 or Offset engine?

Cross platform - its what you want!

Play N today, it is supeerrrr333t, and they are putting out tutorials as their prime objective.

Teagames hasn't tutorials yet, if you want, nag them to put some tutorials out!

Thats all!

Tod the guy playing slashdot and reading flash games... switch that... while getting paid!