Slashdot Mirror
Square Enix Pulls, Apologizes For Mac Version of Final Fantasy XIV
_xeno_ writes: Just over a week after Warner Bros. pulled the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight due to bugs, Square Enix is now being forced to do the same thing with the Mac OS X version of Final Fantasy XIV (which was released at the same time as Batman: Arkham Knight). The rather long note explaining the decision apologizes for releasing the port before it was ready and blames OS X and OpenGL for the discrepancy between the game's performance on identical Mac hardware running Windows. It's unclear when (or even if) Square Enix will resume selling an OS X version — the note indicates that the development team is hopeful that "[w]ith the adoption of DirectX 11 for Mac, and the replacement of OpenGL with a new graphics API in Apple's next OS, the fundamental gap in current performance issues may soon be eliminated." (I'm not sure what "the adoption of DirectX 11 for Mac" refers to. OS X gaining DirectX 11 support is news to me — and, I suspect, Microsoft.) Given that the game supports the aging PS3 console, you'd think the developers would be able to find a way to get the same graphics as the PS3 version on more powerful Mac OS X hardware.
Wait what?????????
If I'd made a game for Macs. I'd be apologizing too...
They probably just ran into a million issues on OS X and its implementation of OpenGL and Apple doesn't give a shit.
I also never heard of DX11 on OS X. I imagine he must be referring to Bootcamp, although I don't know the state of Apple's drivers for bootcamp.
I guess they could have just not released the game in the first place instead of pulling it later...
Sounds to me like they Driect X coders who don't know how to code for OpenGL properly but instead of fessing up they decided its easier to blame their tools than themselves. Poor workmen etc...
Even though the GPU makers focus on D3D and not OGL the GL performance is usually quite close to D3D. So when people start blaming their woes on OpenGL I start assuming they don't know what they're on about.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Most other developers seem perfectly content developing with OpenGL.
The port uses Cider, a thing similar to wine. The funny thing is that the game run better on a virtual machine running on OS X than the cider version. So the issue is OS X, but the crappy cider layer.
This is all rather fishy, I am wondering if Steam is actually curating big releases for quality and taking the thing out of steam by themselves and only allowing the publisher/developer to make it seem like it was their own decision all along.
Not understanding the requirements in the first palce
I wouldn't blame the coders, unless they where responsible for the technology choices
It's first and foremost a management issue :
However, in the chaos leading up to the multi-platform launch of our expansion, we released incorrect requirements, which were not updated prior to the Mac version’s official release.
However, due to our miscommunication with retailers, the Mac version was made available earlier than intended. As a result, some customers were able to download and play a pre-release build which suffered from performance problems.
If that's not management rotten to the core, what is ?
Rather, it works by employing middleware developed by TransGaming (presently NVIDIA) to convert Windows’ DirectX drawing method into OpenGL on Mac systems.
Any company relying on Microsoft technology to achieve cross-platform deserves a spectacular failure anyway.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Hay not to fret.
Apple this week unloaded 10.10.4 and dumped, among other things, Discoveryd and replaced it with mDNSresponder, i.e. Bonjour. Ha ha 12 year old technology going back to OS X 10.2!
Now, If Apple can roll-back, Walmart Style, all the other crap and get 10.10 back to 10.6.9 then OS X would be a legitimate os again.
Ha ha
Mac OS is horribly broken as a gaming operating system and basically all games have issues. I've played Kerbal Space Program, Crusader Kings, Planetary Annihilation, Diablo 3 etc. All these games run very nicely on Windows, but everyone one of these exhibit some kind of quirk or bug. Fullscreen or windowed, it doesn't matter.
I have a MacBook Retina which I use for development, it has a 2880x1800 screen, but to you need to go into 'Display' and set it to Scaled and 'More Space' in order for it to render like it has a 1920x1200 screen. So non retina applications the OS reports the resolution to be 1920x1200, then it upscales the application window to 3840x2400 and also does composition at 3840x2400, which is then downscaled to 2880x1800 and displayed. Performance gets even worse if you also have an external screen, because and it also does the same if you have an external 3840x2160 and downscales to 1920x1080. Basically you add an external 1080p screen and it will try to make the integrated graphics render graphics for basically two 4k screens.
None of the mentioned games get all of this right, either they don't detect the actual resolution, they render really slowly or there are issues with mouse cursor positions and you have to fiddle with fullscreen vs. windowed mode. Then you might get rid of some issues by using windowed mode, but then top menu renders over the game UI, or the bottom dock pops up when you slide the mouse to the edge of the screen or the window border will offset the position of mouse clicks. This is basic stuff, I can't imagine that all of these developers go out of their way to mess up, the OS is really funky.
But still, I love my Mac, it's great for development and normal GUI applications written for Cocoa, but don't use it for games.
But wait, It isn't possible.
Macs just work!
How retarded is that?
Just because M$ is the market leader suddenly there is a DirectX for Macs? Never heard about that before.
And game vendors prefer DirectX over OpenGL?
One of the reasons I don't work in the game industry ... I would vomit before going to work, several times in between and several times after.
How anyone think she can program a game for DirectX and then port it to OpenGL instead of the other way around or simply only doing OpenGL is beyond me.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm noticing a trend here, all these high profile, multimillion dollar budget games that run on the latest h/w all have major bugs. And I mean major bugs that ruin the experience. With these sky rocketing project budgets is kinda odd.
Could it be that big budget games are getting pressure by their iOS/Android counterparts (hence rushed and over hyped?) ? Sounds similar to youtube/shorts/webisodes vs scripted major network content.
Or is it that with all the great tools and superstar coders mean nothing: rushing a major game to market (within 1 yr) has hit its limits, games take 12-16months for example. Otherwise expect some level of failure. No different from a Pixar movie that typically takes 4yrs, compared to a 35 day Transformers shoot..... time == quality.
Given that the game supports the aging PS3 console, you'd think the developers would be able to find a way to get the same graphics as the PS3 version on more powerful Mac OS X hardware.
Umm, you do realize that the PS3 no longer has ANYTHING in common with modern Mac OS X hardware, right? Since about 2006, so almost a decade! Just because the dev machines for the PS3 were PowerMac G5s doesn't mean a damn thing today!
And Apple moved away from PowerPC about that same time.
They tested the mac version on a mac running Windows, or as I like to call it, A WINDOWS PC. What about that was supposed to work? I think I know where they went wrong: designing a game for a mac.
Looks like this has been said in previous comments - If you remember TransGaming's Cedega for Linux, a closed version of Wine that was considered reasonable competition to the open source version way back in the day, then you've now heard of TransGaming's Mac port of it. It's also considered a bit outdated as well, as current builds of Wine seem to work better on OS X for running games. I remember EA went through a phase of using it and the end results were pretty terrible. I'm amazed that Square Enix actually went this route. Cider is terrible. I bet you if they went for current Wine builds and put it in an app bundle (which people do for many DirectX Windows games to run them on OS X), it would work much better, but I'm sure that going that route versus using a commercial solution causes legal woes.
Few devs would be bothered to write a native OS X (or Linux) version of an existing game. They just recompile the Windows source against a commercial variant of winelib that implements DirectX over OpenGL. It dramatically reduces the amount of porting necessary although there are bound to be plenty of loose ends to sort out. I assume SE did this too or lobbed it to some porting company to do the same and for whatever reason the quality of the port isn't up to snuff.
Wine/Cider version is not an OS X version, it's running the Windows binaries through a translation layer. Of course it runs like shit.
Wake me up when they do a native port.
Has to be said, also, FFXIV runs terrible on wine.
Notably due to occlusion culling not working, but not only.
Now they should apologize for *all* versions of Final Fantasy XIV.
I believe the point they are trying to make is that the PS3 is an aging platform that has very strange development requirements due to its hardware. It's odd that they can't get similarly good performance out of something that's the same commodity hardware as the performant Windows PC, when something so different (the PS3) works fine.