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Transgaming Technologies and Mac Developers
ZerocarboN writes "With such current Mac publishers as Aspyr and MacSoft typically spending months to bring games to the Mac, Mr. State said: "We imagine that they are re-evaluating their business models. Our technology does revolutionize how games are brought to the Mac, which we believe will result in a paradigm shift in the Mac game publishing landscape." He added that TransGaming has no plans to license Cider to other companies, but "we are always open to discussion.""
All we need is DNF!!!
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Duke Nukem Forever is coming to the Mac!
There's also Crossover Mac coming, from Codeweavers. Not only is this better because the user can buy it instead of waiting on game makers to port stuff, but it's also better because unlike Transgaming, Codeweavers contributes back to WINE.
Of course, there's also vanilla DarWINE, but I haven't had any success with it on my Intel iMac yet.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
i think boot camp revolutionized the way games are brought to the mac.
Honestly I take the opposite perspective on Cider - I think it's going to be horrible for the Mac gaming community. Now, as Apple's market share grows, instead of publishers beginning to consider making native versions (not crappy ports) of their games we're going to see everyone using technologies like Cider that reduce performance instead. I guess it's fine for older games but its advantage in terms of development time is offset by the fact that the latest games won't have "good enough" performance.
Haiku for you!
Since the summary didn't explain what Cider is:
Okay, I understand that this guy's trying to sell the solution that his company produces. But it's pretty weird to say that these sorts of API translation technologies will be "the way" to bring games to the Mac when Intel-based Macs are a tiny minority of the total Macintosh user base.
I understand it's a lot less effort for the game developer to utilize something like this technology rather than porting the game to native MacOS X. But to the extent that game publishers claim that the Mac market is "too small" to justify porting games, I can't see how a small fraction of that too-small market is going to look any better.
I'm sure they'll claim that this is a zero-effort solution to supporting th Mac, and it's therefore 100% upside to add this in and get a few hundred sales to Intel-based Mac users. I'm sceptical that's really going to work out.
-Mark
I use to port games to the Mac. It was a lonely, miserable life. Thankfully those days are behind me.
Apple is to the games market as Microsoft is to security - it is something each company just doesn't have a culture to ever have any competence in.
Just look at Apple's pathetic game development page:
http://developer.apple.com/games/
Some of the games I ported to the Mac only happened because I was a Mac user and wanted the game on my system. Companies greenlighted ports with the hope that Apple was getting their act together on the games front and my promises that Apple was changing their ways. But there were always big promises with each new cycle of Apple game evangelists followed by decline.
I have a hard time imagining that outside of the usual token Blizzard games and a few others that native Mac gaming is probably dead - for good this time.
Solutions like Transgaming will be bad enough to keep people playing games under Windows, and just good enough that the execs with the power to greenlight Mac ports will claim there is no point risking the expense.
It is really sad to think back after all these years. Apple could have been a fantastic gaming platform. But their outright incompetence in shipping up to date and decently performing OpenGL drivers gave the absolutely fantastic PowerPC systems a bad reputation in the gaming world. And I will skip ragging on the Apple game employees I've worked with over the years.
MMORPGs and piracy are really killing the PC game market - I think it has been in a steady decline for at least five years now. Most pc development houses I know are looking to consoles to save them. If there is any interest in other platforms it is Linux and not Apple that I see companies moving towards.
when they reach into the box and find a compact disc instead!
Take a look at their support forum. And you will see the problem.
It looks like transgaming needs to tweak its engine for every video games. When the game receives a patch, some of them stop to work and gamers have to wait another tweak from transgaming. It looks like a lot of users are frustrated.
Transgaming may dramatically reduce the time you need to port a Windows based video game to Linux and MacOSX but it isn't such a clean way yet. They do not provide a 100% compatible DirectX 9.0 framework.