id, EA Show Support For Apple

The iPhone may have been the star at today's Apple event, but Joystiq points out that id software's debut of 'id Tech 5' is just as beautiful. There are no current details on the first title slated to use the engine. Just the same John Carmack had a few things to say, pointing out the technology's strong graphical and cross-platform performance: "What we've got here is the entire world with unique textures, 20GB of textures covering this track. They can go in and look at the world and, say, change the color of the mountaintop, or carve their name into the rock. They can change as much as they want on surfaces with no impact on the game ... We're going to be showing on a Mac, PC, PS3, and Xbox at E3, we'll have another Mac announcement at E3." Game|Life also points out that EA will be throwing support behind OS X, with releases of major titles like Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need For Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Comments

Thoughts From A Former Mac Game Developer

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we go again with Apple and games...

It's the same old cycle over and over again for the past couple of decades:

1) Someone at Apple, once again, stands up at some meeting and says we need to have better game support to grow marketshare.
2) Apple hires some new game guys. Meet the new Apple game guys, same as the old Apple game guys.
3) Apple woos/pays for some big game/company to make Mac versions of their game or games
4) Apple trumpets gaming on the Mac at one of the big Mac conferences
5) Sales of the Mac versions of the games do poorly
6) Performance of the Mac versions of the games are worse than the pc versions due to crappy, for games, Apple GL drives or various other issues with Apple's OS due to the fact that game support has never been any significant concern
7) Bean counters at the new Apple friendly companies start asking why they are spending so much money developing games for the Mac with such relatively poor sales
8) Mac versions of the company's games start to get delayed or canceled
9) Life returns to normal and the pc gaming world continues right along oblivious to the last Apple gaming episode

Gaming for Apple is just something that isn't in the company's culture. This latest outbreak of Apple interest in gaming is in for an even tougher time now that they have been dumped into x86 land and every sane x86 game dev house is perfectly happy letting Mac users reboot into Windows to play their games.

Re:Thoughts From A Former Mac Game Developer

[cyborg_zx]

Um, it's the APIs that are the real problem, not the ISA.

Since most development code NOT going to be assembler changing the choice of ISA is in most cases going to be a (relatively) simple case of compiling your code to a different compiler architecture. It becomes significantly harder if you have to deal with API changes if you have to use different libraries for different architectures - it just screams 'fragile code' at you. I don't think most developers are going to be too bothered what hardware dongle the API eventually connects to.

Re:Woopee

[DeltaSigma]

When J.C. says he's never going to work with someone again, that doesn't mean id intellectual property will never hit that platform. They just happen to be a game studio that isn't at the complete whim of their publisher, and thus are not forced to entertain business dealings they find unsavory.

I never heard anyone from id software saying they would never work with apple... actually, I don't remember anyone from id software actually working with apple. Nevertheless, if such statements were made, why is it surprising that they changed their mind? I mean, if they were stubbornly refusing to release on the mac platform for personal reasons, would that benefit their fans?

Did John Carmack say this somewhere in his .plan, or was it elsewhere? Where did you hear this? I think some context would really help.