Slashdot Mirror
Claims of Apple Games Just PR Fluff?
GameSetWatch is running an editorial written by Alex Handy, the former editor of Game Developer magazine and a well respected figure in the games journalism business. Today he's discussing the recent show of support from EA and id Software for the Apple platform, essentially saying that he doesn't think much of it because it's all been said before. "We've been here before. I've been here before. Waaaaaaaay back in 1999, id was right there at MacWorld, with Carmack talking about how rad the OS was, and demanding that a multi-button mouse arrive. And this was Mac OS 9! People applauded. Those, like myself, who covered the Macintosh gaming world for a living saw a bright future ahead. EA wasn't there, but Activision was, and Aspyr was bringing Madden to the Mac anyway. MacSoft was bringing Unreal Tournament over, and StarCraft was still on the Mac, and still kicking ass. And then, nothing happened. There was a little while there when Mac game companies were expanding, and the best PC to Mac game porting house, Westlake Interactive, was barely able to keep up with all the demand for its services ... By 2001, the brief flash that was the Mac game boom was gone."
There's a reason they're called Gaming PCs and not Gaming "Computers."
I think the main reason this is only a show of support rather than real support for the Mac platform, is that the Macs simply are not built for gaming.
Consider: The mac mini has integrated Intel graphics which don't handle any modern games. The best video card available on the iMac is the ATI X1600, which is still not powerful enough to handle newer games and the high resolutions they are played at. Not until you get to the Mac Pros which start at $2500 do you get a system where you can even think about a realistic gaming platform, and even those machines don't come preconfigured with anything more than the X1600.
Well, Macs run World of Warcraft... considering with that alone we've just covered about 90% of the gaming time spent online, are Macs really behind?
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
They demoed it at a MacWorld and everyone oooo'ed and aaaaaahhh'ed about it. The Microsoft just stepped in and ended that whole thing.
It'd be nice to get more native games, but with Parallels getting 3D, I don't think its really needed anymore. Why stretch the resources on already stretched game-teams to throw out yet another platform they have to test and bug-fix...making the game even later. Or do just like everyone else does, call the alpha of the game the beta-test, then release the beta as a final product. Only you have more platforms to do that with now.
I used to run PC games in Linux through WINE without much problems, I don't see why it can't be done for OS X either. Again, it'd be nice to have native games, but I won't hold my breath.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
No one cares, because Mac users don't suffer the kind of desperate, crushing loneliness that drives you PC users to video games in the first place.
/. Way to get out of the basement and LIVE!
And yet the same copy-pasta from SA/4Chan still somehow manages to make it onto
Carmack is a pathetic relic of the late 90s, though he still does have a bit of a cult following. You know the guys who love to say stuff like "Carmack could, like, write a game engine with just one hand on a laptop while rescuing puppies from a burning building"
Microsoft has better and more talented developers supporting their system and really don't give a shit that Carmack hates directx. Carmack isn't bright enough to compete on modern consoles. So, that leaves...Apple.
It is really sad to see Carmack trying to hype the silly 'megatextures' stuff. But, hey, people buy expensive bottled water everyday. Suckers exist in every market.
A vague generalization, a tired old joke about gamers having no social lives?
To quote one of the best
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
Have we come full circle yet? Back in the late 80s/early 90s many folks regarded the Macs as a "toy" and PCs as a "workstation", neither of which were very accurate, yet this was the accepted generalization. Nowadays, I really consider the Windows PC to be nothing more than another gaming platform, and the Mac is where I get real work done (video/audio/photo editing, main browsing machine, file serving, other Unixy things, etc.). Don't tell my employer though, they still believe that a Windows box is what everyone needs on their desk to get work done. Bullshit, I say. I get way more done on my Sun Ultra 25 than my silly Windows Craptop.
;)
I guess we have come full circle now that Apple has decided to finally embrace the video game industry and lure developers to the platform.
Furthermore, Apple went out of their way in the late 80s/early 90s to distance themselves from the gaming industry and try to slough off the "toy computer" image. That was a big mistake as many of the future performance boosts to computers in general were and are driven by cutting-edge game development. Welcome back to gaming Apple. Seriously.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
I used to do Mac game development/ports for several years from 1999 to 2003, including a couple high profile games. I've since moved on to 'real' work - non-port console and PC games. Since leaving Mac development I've managed to find a job in the games industry that has kept me employed longer than 12 months at a time without the company going bust (going on almost 4 years at the same company now).
The real problems with developing Mac games during that time frame:
The work didn't pay well (on the other hand, telecommuting was often a viable option)
The projects were few, and it was a highly competetive market
Support from Apple was effectively nonexistant
Quality assurance procedures were often mediocre - what you'd expect from a shareware company
The market wasn't large enough to make it financially viable to develop an original high quality Mac-only game
The market wasn't large enough to make most ports worthwhile unless the game was a proven hit seller already.
I doubt any of the above issues have changed.
I believe all of the Mac game developers I knew 5-6 years ago have moved on to other work. The 3 most well known Mac game port houses of that time shut down or ceased Mac development years ago.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
Perhaps the reason is even though the percentage of macs being purchased is increasing it is still a very small percentage of the overall PC market. Of those mac owners how many play games...probably a very small fraction. So a developer simply says given the small mac market, given the smaller percentage of that who will play games, and then given the even small percentage of those who play games buying my particular game, is the cost worth the potential profit. My guess is right now it is not.
I don't know if it will change anytime soon. No one says I want to play games now so I will buy a mac and hope in 5 years I have a huge selection. The market that does play games wants to now, not in a few years.
Even Adobe complains that Apple doesn't help them with speed issues when developing their software. So I can see why gaming on the Mac never really takes off. And Adobe helped Apple stay afloat in the 90's.
:/
However, there's one exception; Macs are now on Intel processors, and OpenGL is still relevant. BUT, most affordable Macs have weak video cards.
...Like the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and moon phases.
The Mac got a popularity boost in 1998 when the iMac was introduced and started selling like hotcakes. Games were made. Fun was had. A community formed. Then people kept using the same outdated iMac long after its gaming ability was rendered obsolete by modern games. Sure, some people upgraded to newer, better Macs and kept up with the games.
But over the last 8 or 9 years, the community has slowly faded, game ports have tapered off, porting houses have been dissolved and bought out, and the Mac once again sucks for gaming. But Macs are becoming popular again. Which means...
Games will be made. Fun will be had. New communities will form, and old ones will rise like the phoenix. Porting houses will be incorporated. Games will once again come to the Mac. And in 3-5 years, most Macs will once again be "behind the times" and "outdated" and "not capable of running modern games" and "unshaven and lounging about in their underwear all day waiting for that new version of solitaire with simians set alight". The market will once again ignore Macs as gaming machines. Analysts will call Apple "beleaguered" once again, just for old times' sake. And the cycle will begin again another 2-3 years after that.
Maybe this cycle won't dip as low as they once did, since the x86 allows for using Winelib (and it's bastard child "Cider"). We can only hope.
you know EA said they were bringing games to the mac.... but I dont remember them saying HOW they were going to do that.
now I might just be off base but...
Cedega said that they were working with developers to build Cider into the discs directly.. could this simply be that?
Huh? I have the Mac version of Halo installed on my iMac. Universal binary and everything. So if "Microsoft just stepped in and ended that whole thing" then they did it in a weird way...
It's certainly possible that this is going to be 1999 all over again, but I doubt it. There's no OS or processor transition to render old games unusable on new machines (as has been the case, almost continuously, since 1999). Mac usage seems to be growing more than it has at any time in that period. On the other hand, Apple is settling for integrated graphics, which they never did during the PowerPC era. Mac users have to upgrade either to MacBook Pro or iMac (from MacBook and Mac mini, respectively) if they want to game, and unless significant numbers of them do, there's even less of a market for Mac games.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Yeah, you're all so cool...like that dork in the Apple commercials. At least PC users don't rely on their gear to make them "cool". But I have to ask, why don't the introverted gamers AND the drunken, partying waste case extroverts do something useful for once? Set up a (favorite flavor here) Linux system and read the Linux Programmers Toolbox; then you might actually do something productive instead of getting wasted, taking drugs and getting STDs.
I'll have to remind myself of that fact next time I play my copy of Halo for the Mac.
Bungie was a Mac-first game development house, and Halo was going to be released on the Mac first and Windows second. Then the next year at MacWorld, it still hadn't been released. When it still wasn't released the year after that, Microsoft stepped in, bought Bungie, and put the Mac port on indefinite hold. They released it on XBox, then Windows, then over a year later, for the Mac. What could have been a premiere game for the Mac instead helped establish the XBox as a viable competitor against the Playstation.
E pluribus unum
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/01/13
Living With a Nerd
Proving once again that PC users are conservative, straitlaced troglodytes.
Generally, any sudden show of support at MacWorld meant that nothing would come of the whole deal in the end.
Remember Microsoft's MacTopia? It was their new, awesome website to showcase all of the new Mac offerings that were in the works and the new commitment by Microsoft to port over their top games and other apps.
There was this big hoopla and then...nothing. Microsoft began dropping support for the platform almost at once. IE was simply ignored for several years, and when they came back to work on it, Apple had thrown up their hands and written Safari in frustration. The Mac game ports never really materialized beyond the initial set, I believe it was obvious to everyone in less than a year that the deal was a big nothing.
I seem to recall we got a new version of MSN Messenger out of the whole thing. Still no cross-platform video chatting, but I guess it was something.
Hey pal, I play video games because I enjoy shooting my friends. If I were to do that IRL I would have many less friends and probably a jail sentence.
That just doesn't work well in my schedule.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Yes, what Samkass said above...I meant that it was coming out for the Mac first, but it never did until after it was old news on the PC and Xbox.
Just ironic that they were at Macword to debut it and to show it off and show how great it would look....then it not showing up on the Mac until a few years later.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
A show of support (or confidence) is what you give a coach right before you fire him.
I like the Linux version of this Troll better. I think it's because the Linux Troll is saying, "My broken OS is better because it is broken and therefore I'm more grown up than PC users" rather than, the Mac Troll's "My broken OS is better because it is broken and I have time to be a druggie and have sex in public restrooms."
Halo is a Mac game. I play it on my iBook G4.
Sometimes when I'm working on projects things disappear, I suspect gremlins.
Moderated as flamebait for responding to an admitted drug addicted party freak of a troll? ok....whatever.....
"I enjoy shooting my friends. If I were to do that IRL I would have many less friends and probably a jail sentence."
Given the average level of "skill" I see from most online game players, I'd guess that your friends would be in no real danger. Without an aimbot and unlimited ammo, most gamers couldn't hit the side of a barn, from inside.
Actually, target shooting is another hobby of mine. ;)
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Nice try, but alas, NO.
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2832
PC video cards will actually work in the Mac Pro under Windows XP, they will not however work under OS X or during any of the pre-boot period of starting the machine...we got a lot of display corruption as you can see from the screenshot below...On the OS X side, if you try to boot with a PC video card you'll simply get a black screen from start to finish.
I'm a huge mac fan and this is my number one hardware complaint.
You know, I've seen this exact post before. Word for word from the second paragraph on.
Either we've got a new plagiarist copy-and-paste troll to go alongside the "my record store is dying due to P2P" rant that keeps getting reposted by different people, or else all the mac troll posts of late are the work of a single person.
I'll go for the latter. Which is funny, when you think about it, because it means that A) mac trolls, much like mac users, are a tiny minority and B) this particular rabid fanboi can't be doing any of the things he's talking about (sex, drugs, friends). He's too busy trolling Slashdot.
Nobody is both having casual sex and socializing on the one hand, and spamming troll posts on the other. If you're doing the one, than the other isn't part of your life - happy people don't devote large chunks of their time to trying to piss people off over the net, and trolls don't get laid.
Premiere game, yes. Would it have brought the masses to the Macintosh? I don't know. Wind the clock back to 1994. Marathon.
The best the PC had going was still Doom. Marathon did everything Doom did and more, actual story, 3D environment (you actually had to aim up at that guy on the high platform,) overlapping map areas, etc. Yet most outside of the Mac world never heard of it until now (perhaps even still,) even with the port of M2 to Windows.
The PC side didn't one-up them until Quake in 1996; characters modeled in 3D, angled platforms...Marathon couldn't do true ramps, but instead stair-stepped such areas. (I only checked the dates for Doom(93), Quake(96), Duke(96), Unreal(98), any I missed?)
Anyway, you can go out and buy a god-damned high end video-card, and it will fit in the PCI-E slot of a newer Apple system.
Similarly, game discs for the XBox 360 fit perfectly well inside your car's CD player.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
See; the purpose of the troll is to antagonise and get attention. That's likely all there is to it.
This one succeeded.
It's questionable that the Mac trolls are even (originally) the work of a Mac user, and probably irrelevant. Ditto the cut-and-pasters. The stereotypical stuck-up Mac attitude was just chosen to get up people's noses. I suspect that either the same person wrote them all, or that the later ones were "inspired by" the first.
umm, *cough* Parallels adding 3D isn't going to make a damn bit of difference. At least, not for a long, long while. Firstly the 3D support is very primitive currently, Second, Gaming in Parallels would have a substantial performance hit, since they don't allow guest SMP, and they're having to virtualize the 3D API. To say nothing of the lack of support for shaders at this stage.
15-30 years ago, I used to play lots of computer games. Adventure, Zork, Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, Seventh Guest. But now it's all real-time stuff needing fancy graphics hardware, and I'm not interested. If what gets ported to the Mac is the sort of thing I see people playing now, I certainly won't be buying it.
thats because the new intel macs use the EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) as opposed to BIOS (Basic Input Output System) that most if not all "PCs" use.
Mac video cards have EFI friendly firmware loaded on them and "PC" video cards have BIOS friendly code loaded on them. The hardware is the same, you'd just need to hack the video card's "BIOS" or firmware whatever you want to call it to work with EFI.
Also I think the switch to intel from powerpc will be a boon for game porting in the future, so I could see the mac becoming a viable gaming platform.
Targets in target shooting don't tend to run for their lives and a moving target is many times harder to hit than one that is stationary. Then again I haven't seen any running barns recently.
I ate your fish.
Dude you trolled big time - but damn was it funny. LOL!
Welcome to /. where false information can sadly get you a +5 informative moderation.
WoW has always been multithreaded on both Mac and PC. It was only with the 2.0.1 patch that Multithreaded OpenGL support was added, and then only to the Intel Mac client. There is no Direct3D equivalent, and from this technote, likely no equivalent from DirectX 9.
It is true that the PC version is faster than the Mac version on similar hardware in certain situations. Most of these involve video driver issues; think Vista driver problems but with the video card companies in less of a rush to get better drivers out.
Go here for some more video information by both blues and greens.
From what I gathered from the EA stuff, they are only going to support the intel Macs in this movement. The problem though, is how exactly they plan to execute the deployment of these Macintosh versions. Are they still going to require six months to a year or longer to perform the conversions from DirectX to a Mac compatible format, like we had with the PowerPC macs? Will they delay the Windows versions of these games to allow for a simultaneous release of these titles?
If these issues still remain a constant problem for games ported to the Mac, then why both making the Mac versions at all when just about every intel mac user who cares about gaming probably already have Windows installed under Boot Camp?
Ever since the Mac went to intel processors, a number of previously major Mac-specific game sites, such as MacGamer, have been dead silent for several months now. Unless we start getting simultaneous releases on the Mac, most of us are just gonna continue to tolerate the annoyance of booting into Windows to avoid a lengthy wait for the next big thing in PC gaming.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Not focus on getting big game companies on board with their cutting edge technology. They need to take the Wii approach to games. Get devs to make casual play games. No way the hardcore crowd will let themselves be subject to vendor lock in on their hardware setups.
No sig for you!!
Samkass, your timeline is incorrect.
In 1999, Bungie announced their next product, Halo, which featured a world-beating physics and AI system. Halo's public unveiling occurred at the Macworld Expo 1999 keynote address by Apple's then-interim-CEO Steve Jobs (after a closed-door screening at E3 in 1999). However, on June 19, 2000, (also known as Black Monday), Microsoft announced that they had acquired Bungie Software and that Bungie would become a part of the Microsoft Game Division (subsequently renamed Microsoft Game Studios) under the name Bungie Studios. As a result, the Mac and PC versions were delayed, and the game was re-purposed for Microsoft's Xbox, on which it became the console's killer app. Bungie's sale to Apple's long-time rival Microsoft was seen as a betrayal to the Mac community at the time. Mac and Windows versions of Halo were eventually released two years later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie_Game_Studios
Get it right fanboy: MS specifically targeted Bungie because they were a premiere Mac developer. It didn't take years; the acquisition took place roughly 6-8 months after the 1999 MacWorld. I had nothing to do with Bungie not delivering on schedule.
If you want to lie, do it about something people can't fact check you on, or wait for more folks who were actually alive at the time and paying attention to die.
With people being able to easily dual boot a Windows OS and Mac OS on their machine it would be even harder to sell a copy of a Mac game now. I think you'd need to put bonus content in the game to make it worth it, but that would just piss off Windows users.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
So, what is the incentive for companies to develop games for OS X anyway?
Money? Well... Not really much money in a niche market compared to the current Windows market. What else is there?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The error in reasoning here is an inductive fallacy: "Claims of Apple games support in the past turned out to be false. THEREFORE, this latest claim must be false too." ... the situation has changed and is different to (and independent of) the situation several years ago. The latest claims may or may not be false and have nothing to do with the prior claims.
I remember in 1993 playing Doom on a NeXT turboslab. Romero's blog confirms that id used NeXTStep as the dev environment (http://rome.ro/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday .html), so it isn't a real surprise that Carmack would want to do his next engine (no pun intended) under Mac OS X. If the heavy lifting under the covers is cross-platform, I would think it not a tremendous effort to release a game for all platforms at the same time. Non-trivial, certainly, but probably within reason even for potentially a smaller audience.
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
Great retort. I'd mod you up if I had the points.
M.P.I.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
The best the PC had going was still Doom. Marathon did everything Doom did and more, actual story, 3D environment (you actually had to aim up at that guy on the high platform,) overlapping map areas, etc...
...The PC side didn't one-up them until Quake in 1996; characters modeled in 3D, angled platforms...Marathon couldn't do true ramps, but instead stair-stepped such areas. (I only checked the dates for Doom(93), Quake(96), Duke(96), Unreal(98), any I missed?)
For a "true" 3D environment (including shooting), there was Descent , which was released in February 1995, two months after Marathon (December 1994). Descent is a first-person shooter viewed from a spaceship's cockpit, so it might not count. The Terminator: Future Shock (December 1995) was true 3D. (Yes, it's based on the movie.)Also, any list of "great" innovative first-person shooters should include GoldenEye 007 (August 1997, Nintendo 64). Since you mentioned Unreal (May 1998), I might as well mention Half-Life (November 1998), which I think set a new standard in FPS storytelling.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
I'm foe-ing you for your staggering lack of clue, though I don't care to waste my time countering your points. Just FYI.
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Interestingly, Marathon is coming to xbox live arcade.
"Stop playing games and do your homework! Billy, you have an iMovie to finish off for tomorrow morning!"
"Ah come on, Dad! One more World of Warcraft!"
Apex Apple TV Video Converter is designed to convert your favorite movies from AVI , DIVX, MOV, MPEG, QuickTime, VCD, DVD, WMV, ASF, RM, RMVB to Apple iTV. http://www.apple-tv-converter.net/
I've played Marathon and while it may be bigger and more complex, Doom plays infinitely better. And in the end, that's what counts.
Ultima Underworld had true 3D in 1992. Use a slingshot or other ranged weapons and you could even call it a shooter!
And this is not your Mothers Macintosh anymore...
That said,
Apples are for creative producers,
video combat simulators and sports simulators are time wasting money consuming drains for passive consumers.
The Fact that APPLE generally had educational software and not all those Trash PC games was always a plus.
Tools wanting to waste their valuable breathing time playing games can go buy an XBOX 360, or an AppleTV
They're just going to be running the Windows code calling Win32 and DirectX APIs under some collateral descendant of WINE.
As far as Mac developers are concerned, it's irrelevant. It won't be using or advancing any of the features of OSX in any way that anyone with a reason to attend WWDC could possibly care about. I don't know why they bothered bringing it up.
I would rather own a console than any mac games that my ibook, or maybe a macbook can't run. A console is designed for gaming. Any computers I use are for internet and work. We've got a 32" LCD TV, if I wanted to game, I'd rather do it on that than on even a 19" monitor.
Descent was an interesting game. The space ship concept had you moving and rotating in all three dimensions. More frequently than not, this made me disoriented and ill. Granted, I did get motion sickness a lot around the time of that game, but I'm not the only one the free motion made sick, am I?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Pssst ... the first link explains about "Multithreading Direct3D 9" ... basically No.
Yes I am a troll, since on this site EVERYONE that doesn't act like a pompous, elitist asshole is a troll. I get it now and will not assume otherwise. Honestly, I don't even know why I read this shit. I come for the news articles and get sucked into arguments with a bunch of hippies and kids.....fuck it....you guys guys are a joke.....
Of course it's fluff. Apple doesn't need games. Games aren't fun. All of the fun stuff anyone would EVER want to do comes preloaded on a Mac - you know like looking at pictures and creating a shitty website.
Yeah, I forgot that if you try to get real work done on anything other than a Mac, you're pooched.
It is true that the PC version is faster than the Mac version on similar hardware in certain situations.
That's just wrong too.. It's faster in ALL situations. I have a new santa rosa based macbook pro and WoW runs at about 50fps (and dips to the 20s) with terrain distance 1/2 way. That's just about exactly the same as it ran on my powermac g5 with radeon x800.
On windows, it runs between 80 and 200 (yes 200) with all the same settings on OSX except I can move the terrain distance to full, still getting that framerate, and enable FSAA at 2x.
Whether or not directx has multithreaded anything, which I thought it did, my estimate is that I get double the framerate on windows XP as compared to OSX on the same hardware.
LOL...If I had moderator points right now I would give them to you...
The fact remains that from the time it was first publicly demoed in 1999 until its release was over 4 years (not two, as your quoted text suggests... 1999 to 2004). Even after Microsoft announced they were buying Bungie, they were promising a Mac port for years. I guess it's not true that Microsoft's buyout was a result of Halo delays, but your timeline seems further off than mine, despite it being a "wikipedia" quote.
E pluribus unum
To each, their own. I've played & enjoyed DOOM across multiple platforms (from my old 486 to the Jaguar, to an OpenGL OS X port that made you aim vertically.) Straightforward, guns-a-blaze, demon blasting fun. But in the end Marathon still wins in my book. It may be a bit more cerebral with the story and puzzle solving (plus I'm the sort who's more methodical, save often, use fists whenever possible,) but Marathon has plenty of kill-everything-that-blinks moments too.
Good one, I forgot about Descent, (Half-Life too, but that and Unreal come further down the timeline, so we can cut those out.) I wouldn't hesitate to include it among FPS games, but there is that tiny nagging in the back of my head ... is it quite in the same class? In that you're floating in zero-g. Are you subject to gravity at any point in the game? Are projectiles under the influence of external forces (or do they pretty much follow a straight line path?)
:)
I'd exclude GoldenEye only for the reason that the overall thread is in the area of the "PCs are for gaming; Macs don't have games" debate. Never heard of the Terminator one until now, will have to check it out, (can never have too many FPS games!
DirectX has multithreading, and has for a very long time. Generally people don't use multithreading to render because it's much simpler (and likely faster) to render all graphics in a single thread.
Bill Gates regrets that MS ignored Internet Explorer for so long that Apple wrote Safari in frustration. (See: Worst. Keynote. Ever. over at The Secret Diary of Bill Gates). He thinks that Apple is making a ploy to capture a large part of the web browser market now. It certainly is easy to imagine Microsoft buying Electronic Arts or ID Software or even two or three of the top dozen game software companies to inflict further damage on the Macintosh game market. I wonder how Apple could prevent that?
The fact remains that from the time it was first publicly demoed in 1999 until its release was over 4 years (not two, as your quoted text suggests... 1999 to 2004). Even after Microsoft announced they were buying Bungie, they were promising a Mac port for years. I guess it's not true that Microsoft's buyout was a result of Halo delays, but your timeline seems further off than mine, despite it being a "wikipedia" quote.
Samkiss, you tard, qualify your statements. It was released on XBox first, 1 year after aquisition and 2 years after it was demo'd first on a Mac. XBox first for a reason. That reason was to knock out a premiere Mac developer and steal the Halo thunder to use as a system selling release game. If you watn to argue my timeline, specify which release you are talking out of your ass about.
Again, from the 'pedia:
Halo: Combat Evolved is a first person shooter that takes place on a mysterious planet-like construct referred to as 'Halo'. It was the first Halo video game and was released as an exclusive Xbox title on November 15, 2001.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(series)
To review, the ORIGINAL XBOX RELEASE was in 2001, right when the XBox came out. The Mac/PC ports were indeed ~4years after the MacWorld demo, but those releases were mostly irrelevant, and not what the OP was pointing out anyways. The port delay was certainly NOT due to Bungie delays; it's much more reasonable that MS itself sandbagged those releases to milk the exclusive for as much as they could. It worked out pretty much as Microsoft intended, which was the OP's point and what you are apparently trying very hard to obscure.
That's camp as tits. roflmao.
It should be noted that the entire trilogy is available for free for Windows, Linux, and OS X from Bungie (Source code is available too, in case anybody was wondering)
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Now, we're not using underpowered G3s, which is when this was announced, previously. Then there was the dispute over QT 3D vs. OpenGL. Open GL was supposed to get us more customers. Didn't happen. MS controls the flow through DirectX and the ubiquitousness of the Intel chip. Now it's just software that's the exclusion. I took the EA announcements as solid, to show up in July. They don't do that for nothing, though of course, if they get little interest, they may stop. The id demo was at the same time more interesting and less specific.
It was interesting this far: Apple does, indeed, want a share of gaming because, well, gamers might then consider the Mac. (They can already use a Mac with Bootcamp as a pretty good windows machine.) There MAY be enough market share, and hardware compatibility, to make the difference now. There WILL be some big sellers now available in Mac versions, and that might even continue.
No, we're just not faggots.
I belive the Mac plattform to be very suitable for testing new concepts and ideas. Mac users generally are trendy, early adopters, often with access to good broadband and is used to e-ditribution. As such shareware companies would go well to test on the Mac and then deploy full scale with cross plattform. Instead of asking; "Why are there so few games on the Mac?", we should be asking; "Why don't games on the Mac ?". For example: All Macs comes with a web cam built in. 100% of Mac laptops and something % of the desktops is sold with this functionality. It has the potantial to be used in many innovative games. Like the kind of online-user-generated content concepts that is so hot right now. Sony's new game "Little Big Planet" on PS3 would do perfect on Macs.
AAA titels is of course fun, and here Cider can be sort of a savior. With it developers can (hopefully) bring their games to the Mac with low cost, little effort and with acceptable performance. Running games native is what most of user would like. Booting to windows everytime a friend pops up, asking for a match in Game X, sounds like a real pain in the ass. Unless of course "Fast OS Switching" that was previously a feature for Leopard, wtritten about on Apples pages but then removed, turns out to be just what Mac users need.
So if all turns out good Macs will have:
1. A well performing Cider technology
2. Fast OS switching between Leopard and Windows XP/Vista
3. Parallels and VMWares products with 3D support (today DX8 tomorrow DX9)
4. Big companies like ID, Blizzard and Epic developing native games
5. Users have the option to buy a gaming console and plug it in to their Macs to play
To me it seems as Mac users have all the options in the world to play infront of their dear and so well designed computers ^_^