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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.
Another cross platform gaming engine, but where is the Linux support?
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
Game on, baby... :)
I've got 3 macintosh computers sitting in front of me. They represent more than 4 thousand dollars total of hardware that I use for income. When I put Doom 3 into them - the game is wholly unplayable.
Anyone see any concrete mention in the TFA (I checked) that they're going to run higher than 5fps without a Dual-Core Xenon and a top of the line graphics card? At this point only the Quake 3 engine gets any play on the Mac because it doesn't bog down (too badly - Aspyr? You suck!).
Until I here more FPS and everyday gameplay configs on the current Mac line - mmmmmmmmmMMMMMMeh!
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.
I think you meant to post this in the prior article http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/11/ 1853250.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Crappp. Yes, that's right. Sorry everybody...
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
I'll be interested to see if the Mac version is released at the same time, and without the 130% price markup that has traditionally accompanied Mac versions.
Shouldn't this go away, now that the chips are the same? Or have I missed some x-factor that will perpetuate the status-quo?
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
I will buy a Mac for sure if more people throw their support behind it, I am wondering where the EA Sports line is though, that should be ported over, it may move some Macs for Apple.
Maybe they should just buy a ton of crappy Compaqs, peel off the Compaq sticker, and slap on an Apple sticker.
I really hope that game developers start seeing how easy it is to code games that work across every major platform (GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows, BSD, Solaris, etc). All they need to do is code with the correct libraries(OpenGL and SDL mainly) instead of DirectX. Hopefully once they start porting more and more to OS X they will realize that if they code this way all it is is a simple recompile for a GNU/Linux port. While I know id software does this they seem to be the only ones that do, hopefully EA and other game producers will take up soon.
It's called "writing to your target audience." It's actually something that a good journalist is supposed to do. That way every news story isn't filled with three paragraphs defining what "murder" is when the target audience already knows.
- Command & Conquer 3 - March 28, 2007
- Battlefield 2142 - October 18, 2006
- Need for Speed: Carbon - October 31,2006 (November 16, 2006 for PS3; November 19, 2006 for Wii)
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - June 26, 2007
They also announced that the Mac will be one of the plethora of platforms that the next Madden and Tiger Woods PGA Tour games are released on. Not a single game mentioned is "more than a year old," and one of them (three if you count Madden and Tiger Woods, although they weren't listed in the"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." -- Groucho Marx
I like my mac-centric computing environment at home and at the office, but I'm not going to blindly accept the wisdom of this (from the developers point of view)... simply because the mac market share is so low still. However, two points could prove this move to be wise. 1) If the cost of porting games to the newer intel-based mac hardware is relatively low, then even limited sales could still be profitable. 2) Apple is constantly gaining market share with its hardware, and lately (last 10 years) they have been fairly prescient as to the future of hardware.
That's pretty funny actually. I was wondering why you didn't also complain about the color change to the 'MacBook Black' look.
I remember Steve Jobs demoing Halo at a keynote. It was impresive. So impresive MS bought one of the largest mac game shops...Bungie.
I'm aware of this. I picked a bad sample story to bitch about this, but /. is littered with submissions which are littered with unexplained and unlinked terms and acronyms that are gibberish to even those of us who read /. daily, like me.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
MWNY 1999, I remember watching the stream live and getting hyped over this MMO shooter. Its such a shame it never became the game it was intended to be.-=[shake fist]=-
The video of the demo is still up on the web, ah the nostalgia. http://nikon.bungie.org/movie1.html
now apple needs to have better gaming hardware a $2000+ sever / workstation hardware with FB-DIMMS and only a 7300gt is not the way to do it.
The low end hardware in the mini sucks for gaming as well and it should have 1gb base ram.
The I-macs are not that good as well, laptop cps and video cards, as well no high end video cards, and you are forced to buy other upgrades to just be able to pay more for a better video card and gamers don't like AIO's.
The mac book black at $1500 should have better video then gma 950.
The mac books pros are better for gaming. But at there price you can get a desktop with 1-2 high end video cards and a high speed desktop cpu with 2-4 gb of ram with as well a fast desktop HD.
Thing is, how upgradable is that Mac Pro? Can you just pop in a new top-of-the-line graphics card and expect it to work properly?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Well, if Electronic Arts start releasing Mac games, there's goes the much vaunted Mac stability. I jest... somewhat at least. We all know that EA games are notoriously unstable on PCs. My impression is that most Mac software to this day has remained well coded. What will happen when EA starts coding for the Mac? Is there a possibility of crashes, etc. not seen before?
Maybe they should just buy a ton of crappy Compaqs, peel off the Compaq sticker, and slap on an Apple sticker.
Are you seriously suggesting that the only difference between a crappy Compaq and an Apple is a sticker? That's fucking outrageous.
You'd blatantly need a new case as well.
Anyone notice how about 40-50% of the Wii games scheduled to be released in the next 6-8 months are Ports of PS2 and PSP games? Well it is the same deal with Macs. Publishers are learning that more platforms the title is released on = more sales - Look at one of the best selling games last year - Cars (on just about all platforms).
Anyways the Deal with EA's games going MAC is that they are having a third party doing it. So EA gives them the code and assets, and takes care of marketing. A third party ports the game and takes a sizable sum of the profit.
Its almost a no brainer for EA. It is a Win/Don't Win situation - they aren't really in a position to lose. They don't have any real investment into it, they established the IP and the product and it is up to the porting company to make the game run on a MAC.
HULK SMASH
After all, I am strangely colored.
... is if Apple didn't put junk graphics cards in them, or even better let them be user replacable... And no retarded special Mac version either.
... thought some mac fanatics thinks a shitty graphic card is good: macrumor comment.
Also you shouldn't but macs who haven't been updated for long since their prices are almost always fixed until the next update. You can see when a modell where last updated here: http://www.macrumors.com/
Anyway, here goes the current situation:
Mac Mini, not updated for long, integrated Intel graphics, rumor says it will be discontinued.
Macbook, recently updated, integrated Intel graphics, sucks for gaming.
iMac, not updated for long, intel/ATI X1600 or nv7300/7600 GT graphics in 24"-model, price/performance ratio suck, wait for next update, buy close to it and you will probably get a decent value.
Macbook Pro, recently updated, Nvidia 8600M GT graphics, mid-range card in a laptop, one of the better ones in a laptop you can get atm. Decent price, good buy currently.
Mac Pro, no major updates for a while, stock card is quite crappy thought you can replace it (you can actually have four graphics cards in the mac pro, I doubt it will help gaming thought), expensive so don't buy it unless you want quad/octo xeon cores and need all the upgrading options.
What you can expect in the future:
iMac update real-soon-now(tm).
Mac Mini scrapped and eventually replaced by something else.
Eventually a Mac Pro update, some people think it won't happen until the next chipset version thought, which is quite long into the future by computer time measures.
You can't do an apples-to-apples comparison while this is the case. Why even have a tower when you can barely add anything to it?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
They may not be a year old yet but the article does not give any release dates for the mac versions of the games they mention.
While EA Sports titles will certainly increase the range of games available on Mac I and will have mass market appeal, they certainly wouldn't have been my first choice to relaunch gaming on the Mac. EA Games are renowned for buggy releases which isn't going to sit well with the Mac user's "It just works" mentality.
Ever since Doom days I always looked forward to new ID tech, and was always amazed not by ID games but by their groundbreaking game engines and prospects of other game developers using those engines to make awesome games. Looking at the first screenshots of ID next tech is a letdown for me. I understand these are very first shots, but to me it looks like it was built around Doom3 engine and I cant help but notice the plastic feel of the demonstration. For the first time I can remember there is a better looking engine in development (Crytek 2.0, [Crysis]) at the time of the announcement of new ID tech. Granted it might still be too early to tell but so far the engine does not look revolutionary to me. It looks more like an evolutionary step from Doom 3 engine. I am assuming that the limitations stem from the fact that the engine is designed to run on everything under the sun and 360, mac and ps3 is what limits its potential. Ensuring the engine would run smooth on consoles like PS3 and 360 limits the engine from using far more powerful hardware PC has to offer over consoles. This tech demo makes me glad there are developers like Crytek out there.
It is, but not to figure out WTF is going on.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
You will notice that the Dell option will have better support (3 yr next day onsite is standard for Dell servers in AU) as well as more reliable hardware (I.E. more expensive, like ECC RAM, RAID on motherboard), you may also note that there is a generic video card (Intel integrated graphics module) which is all you need when you use this machine as a Linux or Windows server. As far as servers go, this is rather cheap.
I however think you put it best,
See above.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
What I was saying that the API would be the same between all platforms this way. I realize that there still will be minor differences especially when using different compilers ...
... They offer official support for Win and OSX but your on your own for GNU/Linux support. The GNU/Linux community would be very happy with that.
Mac games use platform specific APIs such Carbon and Cocoa. Whoever told you that everything is done with standard UNIX APIs didn't have a clue.
(1) That is a sleezy way to treat a paying customer. (2) The GNU/Linux community is not happy with being treated as second class citizens, they merely accept it due to a lack of options.