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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."
As has been said ad nauseam on various forums, you don't need a $5000 computer to play games! I play UT, RtCW, and Flight Sim X on my MacBook Pro just fine. An ATI X1600 is perfectly sufficient to play games. Only the most hardcore of hardcore care about video cards higher end. Yes, the GeForce 8800 Ultra and Radeon HD 2900 are the models that make all the review sites (okay, really just the 8800 Ultra,) but in reality, those will sell less than 5% of each manufacturer's total sales. The mere fact that INTEL sells more graphics chips than ATI and nVidia combined should tell you that the vast majority of computers DON'T have the latest greatest chip. And game developers know this. Most games are written to be at least playable even on Intel integrated graphics. The few games that really 'need' high-end graphics have equivalently small target markets. Just like Toyota. They make a $100,000 car, but they don't expect it to be their highest-selling car by a longshot. They expect their second-cheapest car to be the biggest seller. And so, yes, there are accessories for the high end car, but there are far more for the low-middle end cars.
(A better car example would probably be the Honda Civic vs. the Honda S2000. Yes, you can buy 'tuner' kits for the S2K, but there are far more tuner kits for the Civic.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
ATI 1900 on mine. Except that it gets freaky hot and crashes the computer if you try to push 3D with it, unless you use a third party application to spin the front fan up. A lot of people on the forums have the same problem. Eventually I'll put a third party cooling rig on it but you'd think that dropping 5 grand on a computer that you wouldn't have to do that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think it might have been smart to distance themselves from the gaming industry in the late 80's. I owned an Amiga, which had the same CPU as the Mac, but it had color and sound (which the Mac did not have), and arguably a better GUI operating system for quite a bit less cost. Back then a lot of people were saying only game machines needed color and graphics, definately not machines that were serious for business. Color = game machine, even. I think this contributed to the failure of the Amiga, even though it was very popular with computer enthusiasists of the time.
The Atari ST also had color and sound as well as the same CPU as the Mac, and it failed as well. The Atari brand name probably doomed it to being a "home computer" at best.
There was still some of that distinction then between a "home computer" and a "work computer", and the home computers ended up failing. I think the price of the Mac also actually helped it avoid the "home computer" label.
It's funny that you use your Windows PC for fun and your Mac for work, because that is the exact opposite of how the Mac is marketed by Apple.
I would never call a Golden Delicious or a Cameo or a Granny Smith a MacIntosh, becuase while they're Apples they're not a MacIntosh, but a MacIntosh is so far beyond being called an Apple, so sweet and crunchy. My favorite Apple is a Mac. The other Apples, they're just Apples, but a Mac is a Mac.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
You appear to be just the sort of person I've been wanting to ask this question to for some time:
If the game was initially written for Windows and written with OpenGL (rather than DirectX), is it substantially easier to make the port?
The answer may seem obvious to many, but for me I'm ignorant of what all else is going on (in addition to graphics) in the making of such a port.
but, for instance, on my Core Duo Mac mini with Intel "graphics", I saw FPS just about double when multi-threaded OpenGL was added.
As already mentioned by another poster, OpenGL is already multithreaded on Windows and Linux - Apple just joined the party.
But the major reason Apple just now joined the party is because of two things:
1. They've only recently had multiprocessor machines in the mainstream (less than 10 years).
2. Most of these multi-processor Macs have had the benefit of video cards with hardware T&L or vertex shader units.
Seriously, why improve the software lighting path if nobody uses it? The fact that NOBODY made an integrated chipset for G4 or G5 meant that Apple was using discrete graphics in every machine, and eventually even the lowest-end multi-processor machine had hardware T&L / vertex shaders. There was no benefit, until now...
The Mac Mini is the first Macintosh released in years that lacks hardware vertex shader or T&L support. Thus, it has to fall-back on the software pipeline, which utilizes the CPU. It's no wonder, with the move to integrated GPUs, that Apple would take the time to make their OpenGL software lighting multithreaded. It's also no surprise that performance doubled with the move to multithreading, because the GMA 950 is definitely vertex-limited in modern games.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
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.
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!!
Most first-person shooters don't stand up to time very well. Not because of the graphics, mind you, but because of the hackers. Usually after a few months on the market, the developer pretty much abandons the game and stops issuing patches to stop the latest cheats. Then the game gets overrun by kids playing with aimbots and wall hacks. I still play Halo 1, and a good 75% of the players in ANY game are using the aimbot.
I used to be a hardcore Mac user, but I got tired of the Mac gaming scene (always hoping and waiting and signing petitions for games to get ported). When that rare game does get ported to the Mac, it's usually six months or a year behind the PC version. Which means that if you play online against PC users, the hackers are already taking over, even if you bought the game on the day of release.
Mac gaming sucks, and I say that as a Mac user for over 20 years.
I tend to think that what Apple needs to do is to acquire an A-List, proven game developer, and start cranking out titles in-house. Then they would start getting a lot of internal feedback on how to modify their internal processes and their business model to accomodate the games market. Granted, there's a 75% chance that such a move would kill off said game company, but Apple hasn't known how to court game developers since the Apple ][ days and they need to do something to jumpstart the process.