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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."
But the largest reason usually has had to do with the size of the Mac market.
What about the fact that most of the computers Apple ships come with a GeForce 5200 (iMac), Radeon 9200 (Mac Mini), or have crappy ATi laptop cards (iBook/PB) and are NOT UPGRADABLE? Not to mention the low RAM that comes standard.
Sure, they ship the G5s with good cards.. sometimes.. but I dropped $3 grand to get my DP 2.5 with a 6800 Ultra in it.
So blame the market all you want, I'm sure that's a good portion of it. However, if those MacIntels use stanard PC gaming cards, I'm willing to wager an upswing in Mac gaming.
Latewire
Umm, no. Mac gaming was alive and well throughout the 80's and in to the 90's. It wasn't until the utter PC/Wintel domination around the time that Win3.1(1993) came out that Mac gaming started to become noticably weaker. This is by no means a market that has always been weak.
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...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The issue isn't that the good games aren't available. They eventually make it over, and they must be making money (or they wouldn't keep porting them.) The major issue that I see is that Mac users don't get the good games until at least a year after the PC release (like Neverwinter Nights, to name just one.)
I can understand not wanting to gamble on the Macintosh version before it is known if a new game will be a hit, but give me a break! Games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic were hits looooong before they were ported to the Mac.
In my opinion, the best we Mac users can hope for with mainstream games in the near future is shorter porting time with the switch to Intel processors looming.
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.
wtf are they talking about?!?! I remember way back when... before win95. Before the pentiums. Mac gaming was where it was at. When I had my 486, I used to envy the macs and commodors and amigas.
Prince of persia is a prime example of the lack of sound and graphics support the PC world had at the time. The only decent games of taht time period were doom and wolfenstein3d.
Macs had digital sound built in. no need for that soundblaster add-in card for real sound and music over the bleeps and clicks of the PC speaker. Macs also, generally, had more VRAM, too, so they generally had much more complex graphics.
hmph.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
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).
Oh GOD NO! PLEASE NOOOO!!!!
I can't recall the number of hours that I wasted playing that. I could have stopped whenever, but I just had to keep playing to afford the Kestrel.
I had almost gotten over my addiction, and I had even completely forgotten about the game, UNTIL YOU JUST MENTIONED IT!
BASTARD!
However, Microsoft has definitely been discouraging use of OpenGL on Windows for quite a while, and while I don't believe Microsoft is actually artificially degrading OpenGL performance in any way on their current operating systems, this effort probably has led to the hardware vendors devoting less time and energy to developing OpenGL drivers.
John Carmack has always acted as a force keeping OpenGL alive on the PC by coding his games (and thus also the games that use his engine) for OpenGL instead of Direct3D; however, the current reports are that id is now doing dual Xbox360/PC development of their next-generation engine. Unless Microsoft is releasing an OpenGL library for Xbox360 (highly unlikely), this probably means that he is switching over to D3D.
Since Apple tends to ship their consumer machines with non-upgradeable, lower-end 3D cards, any 3D game on the Mac is likely to be GPU-limited anyways, so using an OpenGL-to-DirectX conversion library may not be that much of a performance hit.
Problem is that MicroSoft is doing everything it can to move developers off OpenGL and into DirectX. In Vista, OpenGL is actually impaired and emulated from DirectX.
So performance-inclined developers will be tempted to develop for DirectX wich isn't available (or wanted) on Mac OS X.
It's just another MS move in attempt to lock-out gaming from Mac OS X.
I bet they're nerver about mactel too.
To those interested in developing games for Mac, you should stop by the iDevGames forum sometime ;)
Another similar site (which many of the iDevGames members also visit) is CreateMacGames.org.
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...