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Half-Life for Macintosh Cancelled
Bobbi Style wrote to us with the word from insidemacgames that the Macinoth version of Half-Life has been cancelled. Valve Software sent out a letter explaining that they had found that the version of Half-Life that would be released for the Macintosh was not up to what they wanted the game to be. Rather then treat Mac users as 2nd class citizens, they have decided to simply not release it at all. Disappointing news, however, which also casts doubts on the viability of projects like Tribes 2 for the Mac.
They didn't say anything about it not running well. They just said they didn't want to spend the time bringing it up to full functionality with the Windows version, and they didn't want to accept the annoyance that would come out of a release with features missing.
I think it's a poor decision (certainly this late in the game), but the only people who can change it is them.
This could happen to any Linux game port in a heartbeat. As far as 'coexistence with Windows', it's a very bad sign. It might be that Linux can't trust the commercial world any more than the Mac can. What a rotten day for gaming (also today iEn, makers of Warbirds and Dawn Of Aces, laid off a big big chunk of their staff)
It's actually an insanely modified version of the original Quake engine... Half Life came out just a few years later than it was planned to...
It clearly mentions some Linux stuff in there, at least on my machine. Can't remember what it is, but it's looking for a .so file in /dll
It's probably for the server stuff, as there is a Linux v. of Half Life server, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'
another thing you might want to think about is that maybe mac users don't _want_ games which are a year and a half old.
Game companies frequently release their mac versions just as the game is ending its cycle of life; frequently the release of the mac version is simultanious with the release of the windows version of the sequel, or the windows version of the next generation of the same kind of game. and then they just assume the mac users won't mind, because hey, they're mac users.
Like mac tomb raider I and II.. they came out at the same windows tomb tomb raider III was released. Mac Starcraft came out at about the same time that the PC Broodwars expansion pack became really popular.
These are bad examples, because tomb raider I and II for mac had extra levels that the windows version didn't, and tomb raider III looked pretty bad from the PSX-based demo i got from Pizza Hut, and Starcraft still has a very healthy online gaming community based around it even so long after the original release. But the point is the same; why would mac users want the cold, leftover crumbs of the windows world?
Even if they HAD released halflife, why would we want it NOW? Quake3 (like halflife only better) is just around the corner, and some form of Tribes (an ORIGINAL game, instead of just more derivitive mindless point-and-shoot..) may be released. Having Halflife would have been cool at the time it was released, but now I for one am no longer very interested in it.
If the game companies really want any serious showing from the mac users, they should develop all versions of the game at the same time.. or exersize *gasp* good programming, and have a bit of an abstraction layer and write the programs in such a way that instead of calling things in MS-propeitary functions directly, you call functions of your own that call the MS API up for you.. so that later instead of doing the mac/linux version ground-up you can just replace the abstraction layer functions with Sprockets/X (i'm totally BSing this, by the way, i've never written a game and i don't know whether you could really do this without taking a massive performance hit. Maybe if you inlined/#defined the functions it would..? never mind)
Anyway, the point is, if you release the mac version a year later, when all the mac users have been playing it on friend's PCs for over a year, the mac users are _much_ less likely to actually buy the game. Meaning you'll make less money.
Oh, and then a funny thinghappens; the game companies just scoff at the idea of porting to the mac in the first place, saying "mac users don't buy games". And ignoring _why_ mac users don't buy games, and if there's anything they could do to get the mac users to buy games..
[ramble] PS.. whatever happened to ambrosia? they used to be the bomb. Avara was so far ahead of its time it was rediculous. Ah well. Anyway, i want tribes 2 for mac. and a mac capable of running tribes 2. Instead of this 7200/75 with no hardware acceleration. WORMS ARMAGGEDDON ROCKS!! [/ramble]
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Have you played the game? I was wondering how different it would be from Half-Life or Quake since it is Christianized. What, no super violent mega gib bloodbath setting? Angel wears a C cup instead of Double D? The Bible would probably make incredible subject matter for a FPS, even though it can be really bloody at times.
The "about the game" section gives some hints about the intentions of the developers. It looks like it is set before the fall of Satan. That seems cool, but Im still wondering about gameplay issues. Hacking someone to death with a sword isnt any better than perforating them with a minigun. Personally, I'd like to see more family friendly games. However I feel like I need to be careful about what religious propaganda that my children are exposed to. How about making games that dont come with prepackaged ideology? Id like to see a return to fun, nonviolent games that value gameplay over graphics. Then all they need to do is port them to the Mac and Linux and we can all have fun.
Unclean is very cool BTW...
-BW
John Carmack said that only about 15k of Quake 3 is platform-specific, when the first test came out. Bungie has certainly done well, and they don't seem to think their focus on cross-platform simultaneous releases has been a waste of resources. It might take a little more to start the project off, but once you have the engine firmly cross-platform, you end up releasing for two platforms (with an easy way to port to other platforms if desired) for less effort than it would have taken to write for one specific platform at the outset and port to another one later.
One thing to bear in mind is that while the Mac market is smaller, there is less competition in that part of the marketplace. Releasing for Windows means advertising in a lot of magazines and fighting for recognition against a slew of other games. Releasing for Mac involves fewer platform-specific magazines to advertise in, not to mention that most of the hype for the Windows side would spill over to the Mac side, and it also means that you're releasing to a market starved for current titles.
Valve may have done the right thing - it is true that the Mac community might have held a grudge if Half-Life had been a bad port. If it had been a good port, though, they might have been able to make up any losses in future sales, since they would have established themselves in the Mac market as a provider of good games.
Naked.
I own a copy of Unreal for the macintosh. It is an excellent game. The best macintosh 3d shooter by far(IMHO). The graphics, maps & multiplay are better than I thought a mac port could ever be.
Westlake Interactive did a very good job porting the game, except that I still don't have a stable version of 224 or 225. My system meets and surpasses the system requirments and it still freezes up every once in a while. Westlake seems to be aware and working on it, and I am happy about that. What I am not happy about is how the date for Unreal Tournament Mac got pushed back 3 or 4 months for what was supposed to be a simultaneous pc/mac release. I am not surprised though, seeing as mac is releasing OS 9. I am under the impression that Westlake is probably making sure that UT will run clean on OS 9, and the same probably holds true for Descent 3, which I thought I was going to see on Mac store shelves last month or this month.
My rambling point is this: maybe Sierra is not interested in ironing out OS 9 bugs or optimizations, and have given up because of that. Or maybe Sierra is nervous because of the G4 ordering fiasco. I have hope(however unlikely) that this trend will not continue.
$var = <STDIN>
$var =~ s/\\$//;
this is slashchomp
As a Mac user I'm completely confuddled by the decision to discontinue Half Life development. First of all, it seems that the decision is based on a kind of speculation that leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. "We don't think the Mac users will forgive us for doing a half-assed job on the Half Life port, so we'd rather avoid looking like the idiots we are..."
Since when does pre-release user feedback based on rumors of poor PC parity have anything to do with the devotion and quality of effort that goes into a project? Why can't these guys just do a good job, and live up to the spirit of their chosen profession? Really I'm confused... oh...
Finally, I should say I was looking very much forward to Half Life single-player, had no idea of what was going on with development, and would have bought the game sight-unseen - and I hardly ever buy games. The success of Unreal on the Mac should have demonstrated that Half Life was destined to be a hit.
Seriously, something very fscked-up is going on with the psychology of these developers.... And it has all the earmarks of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
-- thinkyhead software and media
Sure it's possible to work around problems, but the question is at what time/expense? The game is based on the Quake2 engine, IIRC, which is starting to get a little on the old side. Not onyl that, but there are new cool games coming out (Q3, Unreal Tournament, etc). It's kinda hard to sell a game that has been around for around a year, and by the time the problems were fixed would have been over 2 years old, when your competition is the likes of Q3, UT, and similar titles. Maybe they just decided that they wouldn't be able to get Mac Half-Life out in time to succeed. Let's not get too paranoid about the great anti-Mac conspiracy :)
.plan file for details). Since Half-Life is based on Q2, there are I'm sure many issues with porting to the Mac (or anything else for that matter). The port in this case is NOT easy.
Another issue to consider in your comparisons with Quake, Q3, etc is that those games were designed from the beginning to be relatively platform-independent. This makes porting to another OS somewhat trivial. Quake 2 on the other hand, was not (read John Carmack's
It seems to me that you're getting upset at the company because after they made an honest effort (as best we know) to make the Mac port, they found it can't be done in a reasonable time schedule (gee, they only have to do a little hacking of the engine, reverse engineer some networking protocols, etc etc.) Give them a break. Things don't always work out how one might want them to. I'm sure they would have loved to ship the Mac version, any company likes to make money. But if they can't do it, they can't. I don't see much point in boycotting Sierra for this, I really don't think it was an attempt to screw over the Mac community. And anyway, I doubt Mac users boycotting the company will have any significant effect, except perhaps to make the PHBs think future Mac ports aren't worth bothering with.
To top it off, the same porting house that just brought QUake2 to the Mac is/was porting Half-Life so you KNOW the engine's not the problem.
if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
The state of Mac video cards right now is:
The original iMac (Rev. A) used an ATI RAGE IIc with 2 MB VRAM, expandable to 6.
The Rev. B, C, and D (233, 266, 333 MHz - 266 was the beginning of "flavored" iMacs) all use the ATI RAGE Pro, with 6MB VRAM. All A-D iMacs are PCI-based.
The Blue & White (Yosemite) G3 Macs use ATI RAGE Pro video, but run on a "special" 66 MHz PCI slot.
The Wall Street and Lombard PowerBooks use the ATI RAGE Pro LT. Lombard may use AGP, I'm not sure. I know that Wall Street is PCI.
iBook uses the RAGE Mobility video chipset - a tweaked version of the RAGE Pro LT that's supposed to be pin-compatible. It has 4 MB of VRAM (embedded), and the iBook uses a 2X AGP bus for video.
Finally, the G4 macs all use the ATI RAGE 128 chipset on an AGP 2X bus.
The ATI RAGE 128-based cards are available as retail cards for the Yosemite G3 Macs, as well as for earlier G3 and PCI PowerMacs. But they're constrained by PCI.
Virtually all earlier PCI Macs (clones included) use the older ATI Mach64 chipset and it's cousins. The PowerBook 3400 and the original PowerBook G3 (also known as the 3500 or Kanga) use Cirrus Logic video chipsets, with no 3-D acceleration on board.
I do think that there's OpenGL support for the RAGE IIc and Mach64, but I'm not sure. It wouldn't be too fast, though, given the constraints of both PCI and the earlier ATI chipsets. Fortunately, the Rev. A iMac is the only one that sold in high volume, and it was only on the market for about 2 months (it was announced in May, but it wasn't available until August) before they up-revved it to the B and switched to the RAGE Pro.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Ummm.. Yes, thank you that's entirely my point.
I have absolutely no problem with fantasy being used to sell a game. Indeed it's nice to see a scenario that isn't "think of the 10 nastiest knightmare-causers and add guts" and instead makes some use of thousands of years worth of history and mythology in a partially authentic way. But the implication from the website and your own post is that this particular game is in some way morally / spiritually better than normal fantasy / sci-fi first person shooters. This is why I'm "Up in arms"* about this game. It could be released by zen gnostics as far as religious group goes, my problem is I'm being preached to about right and wrong in an internally inconsistent manner.
henley
*= actually, I'm still slumped in front of my screen 'n' keyboard trying to keep my eyes open, but please bear with me here.
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
What was wrong with OpenGL, which Apple has implemented under MacOS 8/9? Why couldn't Microsoft used those as a base instead of pushing a totally new and incompatible API, DirectX/3D?
As much as GPLing it might result in a finished product, it would still be called "Half-Life" - and Valve would, to some degree, still be seen as being responsible for it.
There are things that no matter how good a programmer you are, you can't beat - such as the relatively poor 3D performance of the Macs at the moment, due to the lacklustre card they're running still. Perhaps if the G3/G4 came with a better card (not only is the current one a bit old, but it was slower than the PC equivilent right from the start).
I think we may see quite a few 3D FPS titles not make it to the Mac, or make it, but not as a full quality product, until Apple decide to do something about the 3D video problem the Mac's are suffering from......
Andrew Meggs was the same guy who walked away from the RC5 project back when Steve Jobs cancelled MacOS clones. He made this big political statement by taking his source code for the MacOS RC5 client and saying he was protesting this action by Steve Jobs. Christ! I thought after that stunt, no one would trust that guy enough to involve him in a project. Now I read in the first paragraph of the letter (http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/index.shtml)fr om the guy at Valve, "Andrew Meggs at Logicware has been doing a good job on the port..." What the hell?!?! So he got tasked with the responsibility of a port of another piece of software to the MacOS and this time he screwed up the project by running it over budget. I really wish people would blacklist that guy until he gives up his grudge against Apple. What a jackass. sjohnson|at|smart.net
This doesn't cast doubts of the viability of Tribes 2, or any other game, for the Macintosh.
The original developers of a game very often are not the same ones who do a port. I don't know what the case was with this project, but the original developers usually go on to bigger and better things, while the port is either done by less experienced programmers or is farmed out. Some of these developers can produce quality projects, and some can't.
I think it speaks volumes of Valves' commitment to gamers that they chose to cut their losses and hold back on what they know is an inferior product rather than push it out the door to make a quick buck. We know there are plenty of companies that wouldn't!
However, as we got closer to shipping the product and reality set in, it was increasingly obvious that in order for us to break even
on the Mac version, much less be profitable, we were going to have to cut some corners.
Essentialy, its a profit - cost over market_share equation. I'm sure the modern busines model promptly said 'cut' and there goes HL. The next step is the 'spin.' Here's another little snippet from Valve.
They are happy because we do our best for them, and that's what they expect from us in the future. -SNIP- I would much rather we just eat the money we've spent so far than take money from Mac customers and short-change them.
Now they're suggesting that they're a responsible company and trying to keep up a decent reputation by 'eating up' the cost. When in reality the could not sell such a shabby product, if they wanted to or not, without a larger loss of revenue.
Don't quote me as either good or bad here, this is just business as usual.
At least spin is portable and multi-platform.
We all can dream can't we?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I think I caught one of those in a pond when I was 7.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
A lot of companies can't afford to develop for Mac at the same time as for Windows; they need to focus their efforts on bringing in the most money in the shortest amount of time, and that spells Windows. Once the Windows version is out, they have to choose between getting the remaining 10% of the market or preparing the Next Big Thing to battle the next wave of competition -- and that's usually a clear choice. It's only with a very large company making a very popular game that they can afford to release a Mac version. Simultaneous Mac/PC releases are virtually unheard of.
A game company can't scrimp on Mac ports of their games; they need to be feature-complete with the PC version, or else the Mac faithful will scream and yell and boycott the company. Half-Life's failure makes it clear that this is a very steep cliff to climb for very meager rewards (one tenth of the Windows take, at best), and that there just isn't a good return on the investment. Why put your effort into ten percent of the market when you could be putting it into ninety percent? A port is more than ten percent of the original amount of work...
So simultaneous releases are rarely feasible, and late ports usually aren't a sensible place for a game company to put their resources. Where's this leave the state of Mac gaming, then? Will we ever see the day when a majority of games are simultaneous Mac/PC releases, or when a hit game comes out first on the Mac?
I guess there is another reason they are not telling us is the cost issue. Half Life has been out on the PC for quite some time now and maybe they thought that they might never be able to cover the development costs necessary for porting it because people who really want Half Life already have played it on a PC and wouldn't buy it twice.
Just a thought of mine, not necessarily true.
Uhhh. Let's see.
Microsoft makes a totally proprietary APIs that in some instances has been designed to make it difficult to port to any other API.
Now they should open these APIs into shared libaries that can be used across multiple platforms. Without breaking existing apps of course.
Does this sound like Microsoft? It just isn't going to happen... for all that Microsoft cries "open standards", any time they're in control of a closed standard they refuse to open it.
Moof!
I find it annoying that other users besides Mac dudes don't find this incident disturbing. Game developers are increasingly ignoring markets like Macintosh and Linux because they're "small." It's very insulting to think that countless millions of users are ignored, and their potential revenue dismissed as petty. Some people think that the API that Apple uses is pathetic and we should all bow down to Microsoft's DirecctPlay. What is wrong with Apple's API acceptance of OpenGL? Plainly put, it is a portable, scalable, and industry standard gaming API that runs on any platform. With Half-Life being ditched from the Mac, it sends a heartless message to consumers and developers: You aren't anybody unless you use Windows(TM)... no matter how crappy, proprietary, and ugly the code.. it just makes more money for developers.. period. Bottom line is everything and consumer choice is irrelevant. Things need to change and I'm hoping that you Linux/Unix/whoever guys will realize that when Mac users get shafted by software developers it will eventually or indirectly affect you too! In some ways Mac users and Linux/Unix/other users share the same disadvantage of being underdogs in the marketing/corporate standpoint. Only by resisting such developer prejudice can we make the Windows-diluted press realize that there are "other" people on this planet. It's obvious that the mainstream press doesn't give a damn about Macs/unix.. CNN's online site list of top 10 budget pcs don't even mention the TOP SELLING iMac nor do does their top power PCs include any PowerPCs! They regard Unix and its variants as rogue software only used by hobbyist tinkers and not by people of productivity. We need to gain more public attention... we can't get ahead by just always watching for Microsoft's "daily bug and security flaw" (however it's so invigorating to constantly see this in the news). We need to contact developers and let them know what we think and tell them that dammit... WE DON'T USE WINDOWS AND WE ARE REAL PEOPLE.. AND WE DESERVE SOFTWARE!!
OpenGL at Apple's site
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Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
There is a world of difference porting a game that was written using the specific advantages of one operating system over to another system, and creatinga game from the ground up with multi-platform interoperability in mind.
Valve couldn't turn Half-Life for the Mac into the same semi-high-quality product it was on the Windows platform. Half-Life is a buggy piece of shit on the PC. Great game though.
Trust me on this, if the Mac version didn't include TFC, you'd be pissed. If you couldn't connect to the servers that are available, you'd be pissed. The auto-update function is superfluous. If you couldn't use all the mods that are available or all the mapos, you'd be pissed.
I think it was BS that they announced the port and then backed out of it, but the port wasn't goign to give you the award winning game of Half-Life, it was going to give some half-baked piece of crap that had shitty models (I've seen the screen shots and they sucked bigtime compared to the PC game).
No Microsoft isn't conspiring against Apple. That is ludicrous in light of the lawsuit against them. They need Apple around to prove that there is viable competetition in the market. If there are "Halloween Papers" outlining MS's strategy against Apple, I'd like you to post them, otherwise, quit trying to blow smoke up everybody's ass. Save it for Art Bell.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
I posted here yesterday about my disapointment in Half-Life being cancelled. I have been reading everyone's views and I am going to try to do the following: 1. Find 5-10 programmers to finish this, volunteers welcome! (Send cv/portfolio) 2. Go to our bank and BUY the porting contract for $250,000 (preferibly less) to finish and release Half-Life. This is much less risk than what our record label usually takes with product! 3. Form a new Mac Games company. If that is all it requires, which is less risk than the music industry, I see no reason as an avid gamer and business prospector to not do this. If there are any Sierra people reading this, please email me at : Bobbi.Style@LTLrecords.com. Also, any well versed and experienced Mac programmers. Our office's G4's & G3's await you! Yours sincerely Bobbi Style CEO-President LTL Records Ltd - LakesWEB Communications Ltd http://www.LTLrecords.com http://www.LakesWEB.com
Reading Andrew Meggs's .plan updates, there was never any indication that the game could not run well on the Mac, and given that the game is almost 2 years old anyway, performance should be more than sufficient on the current generation of hardware.
This decision is political, not technical. Somehow, Valve thought that by cancelling such a hotly-anticipated game they could avert a flood of angry emails. Well, I bet they are getting a flood of angry emails right now.
Hmmm, Q3A for the Mac is looking better by the second - it's a shame that Valve couldn't get a decent port of Half-Life done for the Mac, as it would pretty much have been the only real competition for Q3A in the current generation FPS genre......
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
OK ... lets see
which settings? (all to maximum?)
which resolution (1024x768 being minimum, right?)
how much fps (less than 30 is not playable)
... what do you call *great* ?
--- use linux -> no bsod, no gpf, no error -1
Yep, Wintel is even better than Playstations these days.
The difference being, DirectX doesn't choke out halfway through a game, and you don't need to download newer drivers. Pure silliness.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Apple should negotiate with Microsoft to include an Apple implementation of the DirectX API.
Carmack once discussed this possibility in a plan update -- dicussing options for 3D graphics platforms. In essence, he felt that this would be stupid, as Apple would be guaranteed to always get a later release from MS, ala Microsoft Office. In the end, he felt OpenGL was a better choice.
Additionally, Apple should work on a better gaming API than DirectX, and make it available for Win95/98/NT
This seems like a suicide mission. There's no way Apple is going to be able to get better performance and functionality out of Windows than Microsoft.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I'm happy to see someone willing to stand up and take action when a project is all over the floor.
Hey Gabe! Throw the port source under GPL and let a fresh set of eyes hack a bit.
Even though Meggs may be anti-Apple, he works for Logicware. I doubt they hired him for political reasons, just that he can port code. And porting code to MacOS is virtually all that Logicware does. They were the ones that did Quake II for the Mac.
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
I'm supprised that it doesnt seem to run well on a Mac. Some of these macs are pumped up higher than my AMD 450 (not sitting in canola oil). Poor poor apple.
-Tim
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
And here I thought the Macintosh had a short Half Life. :)
At least Carmack (with Quake) and Netscape (from the beginning, but especially with Mozilla) managed to get this one right. Program cross-platform apps from the beginning, use or make standard libraries to simplify your task.
This is a lesson that I would like to see Microsoft learn. They release software late for the Macintosh all the time. (and some Mac users were happy about this? Anyone who thought Office '98 was better than Office '97 because it had a higher version number deserves to be stuck using it....)
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
at least they didn't try and release a shoddy product. This goes to show that game developers have standards when it comes to releasing good products. This is very unlike "business solutions" software being ported to different OSes. The only business software that works on both windows and MAC is sad to say is made by microsoft. They rewrite the code from scratch, and it works great.
On the other hand, in the world of design software, Adobe and Macromedia's software is horrible on the windows platform. I hate to say this, but companies should take the microsoft approach and rewrite it from scratch.
Also, someone should tell the makers of halflife that they should opensource the engine, and let the public port it to any OS they please. They still retain the rights to all the other pieces of software in the package. I don't understand why companies just don't opensource the important parts of the software.
This might have been funny except for one thing:
Half Life is built on the Quake engine.
Granted, nearly everything except the 3D engine is completely new, but it's still got Quake internals at it's core.
And Quake, Quake 2, and obviously Quake 3 have been ported to the Mac. The engine isn't the problem. Mac -> PC networking is a reality with them, so networking them isn't an insurmountable problem.
What is the problem? Valve? Didn't they just have responsibility to "sign off" on releases, not to foot the bill? Sierra, being the publisher, is the one signing the checks, since they're the ones getting the money from distributors and dispersing it to appropriate parties.
In other words - this smells.
Moof!
The funny thing about comments like "the Mac has the worst OS on the planet," is that if (and it's a big "if") there had been decent GL and Glide support a few years back, and decent drivers -- which are not part of the OS -- the MacOS would actually be the best gaming OS on the planet. The reason is the same reason that most people say the MacOS sucks (and why it usually does): A single process can starve the entire processor. (Pro audio and video editing software has been taking advantage of this fact on the Mac for years.) In other words, a game could get every single cycle....
(Insert obligatory disclaimer about memory protection, multi-user support, security and the rest being missing in the MacOS.)
Half-Life for the Mac is not being cancelled because of DirectX, or poor performance on a crappy OS, or because it's based on the LithTech engine, or because it's impossible to make a decent first-person shooter on the Mac.
Half-Life is based on the Q2 engine. Folks, Q2 is available for the Mac right now, and it plays well. Unreal runs well, and you can expect Unreal Tournament and Q3A to run well, too.
Half-Life for the Mac used OpenGL, and was working great. DirectX is not part of the equation.
Valve (the developer) made the decision to cancel the port, not Sierra, the publisher. Note that this is a little unusual as the publisher generally pays a fee to the developer in exchange for the right to license their material to a different firm to actually handle the port, so ordinarily Sierra would be the ones cancelling it.
The reasons that Half-Life for the Mac was cancelled had mainly to do with networking issues. I'm going to take a wild, uninformed leap and suggest that the reason for this is that Half-Life for the PC was written to use DirectPlay, Microsoft's extremely proprietary networking protocol. DirectPlay cannot and will not be ported to any platform other than Windows, as Microsoft won't license it, and most likely sees DirectPlay as a competitive advantage to keep the best games on Windows. Half-Life for the Mac may indeed have been a victim of this strategy.
I'm not that worried about game support on the Mac. It's getting better:
Apple did have a proprietary gaming API (gamesprockets). And a proprietary 3-D api (qd3d/rave). And a proprietary game networking api(netsprockets). And according to developers who have used them, every one of those api's was vastly superior to the then-current standards. And guess what? Not many games. Now that Apple's pretty much killed all those in favor of cross-platform standards like OpenGL, we're getting some pretty good games. And the current generation of Mac hardware, while a little behind current Wintel standards, is still pretty darn cross-platform as well: PCI, AGP, USB, etc. (You can take a 3dfx card out of your PC and plug it right into a Mac. Not too shabby. And there are two independent programmers working on TNT2 drivers, too, so Mac users won't be stuck with *cough* ATI forever.)
I still would like to see Valve change their minds, and release Half-Life for the Mac even if it is crippled. Sure, there's a vibrant online community surrounding Half-Life, but the single-player game is what really turned the PC gaming world on its head last year. Here's hoping Valve revisits their decision soon (and here's hoping the Mac zealots don't knee-jerk themselves into doing something stupid like mailbombing Valve).
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Anonymous cowards are working on a massively multiplayer shared first-person persistent virtual reality that's cross-platform, open source and hosted on thousands of independent servers.
Oh great, another "Mine's bigger than yours" type argument.
So you run a dualboot system. You are obviously soooo much more skilled than all those dumb lusers out there who don't know how, especially the Mac users. Do you ever write any Perl scripts? Are you familiar with "There's more than one way to do it"???
So just why is MacOS the WORST OS on the market? I think you'll probably find if you went out and really asked people what they think, the vast majority of Windows users would say something along the lines of "Huh? OS? What's that?"
Why are Macs not games machines? I remember showing some friends of mine Marathon Infinity's network gameplay and them being completely blown away by it - and some of them were hardcore Quake players!
Game developers have better things to do than blow time and money producing a game for a niche product that doesn't have nearly as many gamers as x86 machines do.
Just like publishers shouldn't publish any books that don't sell in airport bookstalls, TV moguls shouldn't make community TV shows, minority newspapers shouldn't be allowed, expensive sports cars shouldn't be made as only a few people can afford them... the thing is that the Mac is hardly a 'niche' product. Whatever percentage Apple currently have of the market is still pretty damned amazing when you consider just how many computers get sold each year.
Do us all a favour and go get some perspective before you start shouting your worthless drivel at us.
And yes, before you shout, I have two Macs. I also have about fifty various Linux/Solaris/HPUX boxes to look after at work, along with a RH6 box on my desk and a W98 laptop. I use them all.
There's more than one way to do it
Apparently, at least Apple has revived its gaming API, Game Sprockets. It is a highly advanced programming standard and is very well documented along with OpenGL. Hopefully some forward-thinking companies will catch on and try it in their next PC-Mac ports. For a cool description of what was shown at a recent Game DevCon...
take a peek here!
-----
Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
Having experience with MacOs, Windows, Linux (Suse) and BeOs, I believe I should set the record straight here. MacOs is NOT the worst system out there. Granted, it has plenty of flaws, and granted again, you shouldn't buy it if you want to play games. However saying that MacOs can only run Adobe software is idiotic. There are a number of things that Macs do better than other platforms. One is recording multitrack direct-to-disk. With its better multitasking, Linux could do that even better, but it lacks the software (VST effects, etc) and support for high-end sound acquisition hardware. Between Mac fans touting the mac as the panacea and those poking fun at it without really knowing much about it, it's amazing how many myths float about this platform. The truth is the Mac is still relevant for a limited market of people with very specific creative needs (Publishing, music recording, etc). This relevance may dwindle if support for BeOs increases, but this battle is not won yet. Also MacOs X, due early next year, may bring considerable improvement to the platform, as it should be Unix technology dressed up with the Mac's superior interface. That is, if Apple doesn't screw up again, something they seem to be as good at as designing good GUIs...
>The Blue & White (Yosemite) G3 Macs use ATI RAGE Pro video, but run on a "special" 66 MHz PCI slot.
Wrong. The Yosemites have and have always had a Rage 128.
still, it came out in an odd-numbered year (1999), so they're still going by the original plan.
maybe they'll continue this pattern and release Office 2001 for the mac in the year 2000, and then Office 2010 for windows in the year 2001, and so on until by 2006 they release "office 4029" for linux and go bankrupt.. [trails off]
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Half-Life cancelled? That's terrible. I was really looking forward to it. There are many games coming out in the near future for Mac. Some of them may even be playable on my system (150MHz 604 w/ 3Dfx). I may even get a G3 upgrade. But of all the games coming out, I'm very picky...average shooters have long bored me. Although I loved the Marathon series and
Dark Forces, DOOM & Quake & Duke Nukem & Shadow Warrior etc have always bored me. I pretty much won't buy anything I can't demo 1st to see if I like it. I only am interested in really good
stuff (it isn't just the $...I simply don't have time to play as much as I'd like, and I don't want a collection of $50 coasters). Of all the stuff coming out that might be playable by me, with or without a demo I only have high hopes of Oni, Heretic II, & Half-Life living up to being something I would want. Things I might well buy even if I couldn't demo 1st. Half-Life has garnered so many awards, it must have something great going for it. And now I won't get that chance. Nothing's going to step in to take it's place. I still have hopes for Oni & Heretic II, but even with Half-Life gone I don't expect to have any interest in Quake III (same-old same-old), Unreal Tournament, Star Wars Racer, or all the other carbon-copy or dull stuff out there.
Hopefully I'll demo something that will run for me and surprise me as to how good it can be. I guess I'll have to wait & see.
My goof. I thought it was Rage Pro. I'm sure I've got the PCI-66 part right, though.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Well, as far as I know, the PSX2 is going to be running on some variant of Linux. So, it makes people wonder how many of those games are going to be ported for desktop Linux systems? Which will be great, because you'd be able to play wicked games on your nice hardware machine. So it looks like the PCs will be able to catch up even more. :)
put them all to the sword. Every last man, woman, and child. . .
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
But Newell didn't dispute the fact that Half-Life would have done well on the Mac. Heck, Duke Nukem 3D/Mac's development paid for itself within hours of going on sale--and one day isn't enough lead time for the Mac gaming market to make an informed purchse, so all of that was based on the strength of DN3D/PC's reputation.
Newell talks about having happy, satisfied PC customers, versus having ticked-off, short-changed Mac customers. Well, sadly, Mac gamers are used to making compromises on ported apps, so while it would have been a minor irritation, it wouldn't have been enough to keep the game from selling well. Also, the Mac game market is significantly smaller than the PC game market; Half-Life for Mac would have done well simply by virtue of the fact that the competition isn't that strong right now.
Of course, if Newell really cared about doing right by the Mac community, he would have made Half-Life 2 cross-platform from the start.
hey, I think Unreal Tournament is going to be out for the mac, as some AC above has noted. It is, in my opinion, a lot more fun than q3 anyhow. I wanted to point out that they are also making a linux version, which should be dandy.
Juln
>What do you think...is Sierra dying? Will they
>be dead and gone by a couple years from now?
As far as I'm concerned, when they laid off the entire Yosemite Entertainment group (most of the classic hard working Sierra folk), that was when Sierra slit it's collective wrists.
Then to see whats left of the company butcher it's product line, (like you said, with some of them EAGERLY awaited and almost completely ready to ship), is like watching watching an old friend on his death bed writhe in agnoy.
This bit about the Mac Half-Life being cancelled really sucks. I'm not a Mac guy, but I sympathize with them. I had high hopes for a Linux port of the client, also denied.
If it's as difficult to port as it sounds, then damn. The actual game itself is nice enough, but some of their design decisions leave me a bit mystified: being forced into 640x480x16-bit to access the game menu (even while playing), hiding access to the 'console' behind a command line switch, etc. If that sort of mentality carried though into the source, I'm not suprised.
(But hey, the game itself is some of the best FPS action I've ever experienced so far. A shame they inadvertently limited that experience to only the Windows 95 crowd.)
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
If there is no Mac port for money/commerce reasons then were's the money for a Linux one? (I do use Linux PPC.)
>This might have been funny except for one thing:
:)
>Half Life is built on the Quake engine.
You wrote, word for word, exactly what I was thinking while reading that.
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
In an IRC chat with some of the Valve guys a while ago, I asked them if they'd allow someone to attempt a Linux port if the person worked signed under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. They said "sure".
I think now, all it would take is someone with some good Win95 porting skills to give it a shot and ask permission (possibly making it more portable in the process and then be ported to Macs...?)
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
Well, one option is to turn your threshold to -1. Did you try that?
Also, while it sucks that HL is not coming to the Mac, I am not too worried. I have three computers: an old Power Mac as a voice controlled MP3 jukebox, a Windowze box for games, and a beige G3 (soon to be a Graphite G4, mwahahhahahaaa...) for everything else.
The one and (thankfully) only,
LafinJack
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
Aren't Apple's gaming APIs now open source as part of the "OpenPlay" portion of Darwin?
infobhan
Agreed. Co-op multitasking looks good on paper and in some cases is very useful (say, when you're sharing computing resources with other users). With a Mac, though, you generally want the front-most process hogging the CPU as much as possible. I'll take preemptive multitasking any day, but not if it slows down my Photoshop filters.
The REAL problem on the Mac has been, in my opinion, the lack of real good memory protection. In particular, extentions (or for the old school, 'INITs') have been the bane of Mac users wanting stability. I do think though that this has improved quite a bit in the last couple years through, from MacOS 8 and up, and to a very limited degree in MacOS 7.6.1.
Recent versions of the OS can run a couple weeks straight without a reboot. This is nothing compared to a well-tuned Linux box, but I'm not promoting the MacOS as a server OS either. For a workstation, it's perfectly usable.
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
I wouldn't take him too seriously. From what I can tell, he has some 'issues' to take care of. Inbreeding may be a distinct possibility. Anyone who uses the term 'Crapple' with a straight face deserves whatever they get.
:>
As for Perl scripts, well, I'm proof that Mac users can hack Perl.
Anyhow, thanks for the open mind.
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
Okay, enough Microsoft Bashing. Microsoft considers their OS code the Crown Jewels, (as does just about everyone) not the API. The API is published. Using the published API, one could write an implementation for DirectX for any platform.
Also, Microsoft and Apple have a symbiotic relationship. Apple gets Microsoft Apps on their platform, and Microsoft gets to wave Apple around and say (look, we have a competitor, see).
Furthermore, as Microsoft's "investment" in Apple (non-voting, non-convertable, non-useful preferred stock, gee, Apple drops a lawsuit, and Microsoft pays $150m for a worthless piece of paper and several software pledges) demonstrates, Apple has something on them. Apple probably has enough leverage to get Microsoft to work with them to get the new version specs out earlier.
If not, Apple could start working with the developer SDKs to know the interface, and start writing their own implementation. Even if the new libraries open up for Apple 6 months after Microsoft, that's about the same time that games come out requiring the new version. With DirectX, porting times could drop from a year to a matter of weeks to a few months, with appropriate beta testing still needed of course.
Alex
They still recieved a large chunk of the Quake II source from ID.. Read the Valve interviews.
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
A quick hack is not commercial-quality software.
"Throw all that hard work down tubes"?
Do consider what we are talking about here, really. A small group of programmers working for 3-4 months. This is probably somewhere around $40-60 thousand dollars.
Those are the sunk costs. Any economic analysis starts by discarding sunk costs because in the end, they don't matter. Psychologicaly they do, but when you are looking at profitability, they don't matter.
Now, we need to add the costs of finishing the project (another month? Who knows?), beta testing, marketing, distribution, etc. Then we need to come up with a figure to represent the "bad feelings" that the game may generate, as well as the support costs that come up afterwards (patches, tech support, etc.)
I don't know these numbers, chances are nobody outside the developers do. But it's not as simple as saying that the game was almost finished therefore they should have released it.
Personally, I think that ports are a bad idea. Getting a game that was a hit a year ago and then porting it to another platform invariably ends up with discrepancies in the support, having the game really be treated as a second class citizen.
Now, there's a difference with games that weren't ports, but were coded that way. For example, the games by Bungie and Blizzard. There's also Imperialism II, by SSI. Those were good cross-platform games, and didn't feel like ports.
r.
modified or not, they have no right to publically release the code if even ONE LINE was written by john carmac
Doesn't option 1 basically invalidate the trend toward microkernels and preventing direct hardware writes? The whole point of the NT kernel was to prevent programs from accessing the hardware directly, potentially crashing the entire system.
-Malachi
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
The guy in charge of development now is from NeXT, which bodes well for the OS...
infobhan
There WAS a superior cross-platform 3d API than DirectX. It was called QuickDraw3D.
It was "Steved" in favor of OpenGL.
Ask anyone who used it, it was a great high-level 3d API. It lives on in an Open Source project called QUESA (they're trying to make it live on top of the Mesa OpenGL implimentation).
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
In reference to Eternal Warriors.
I've had many emotions and thoughts in the 5 minutes since I made the mistake of following the link.
Mostly, I think I've been spoofed. On the offchance that this IS real, then what's the message?
"Death, killing, blood and war is bad, mmkay? You shouldn't play Quake" But: "Death, war, blood is good as long as it's Angels vs Demons" ?
No, I can't believe it. This is a spoof, right?
Please?
henley
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
>I'm glad that Half-Life: Opposing Force is being made by another company...means there's much more chance we'll actually get to see it.
Well, Opposing Force is just an expansion of Half-Life so its much easier to get out than creating an new game/new platform.
(I think that the whole thing sucks if you own a Mac. Half-Life is three excellent games in one. Single player, Multiplayer and Team Fortress Classic. On the other hand I understand Valve's position, would you pay $X for half a game?)
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Actually, testing on a Mac is a b*tch. One bad pointer and your machine is toast, due to no memory protection. Forget to relinquish control of the program and the OS never saves you, you have to reboot. Best to do lots of debugging on the Windows machine and then struggle through the macintosh development afterwards. But if Macintosh had some level of security in the operating system, you could probably get done testing a lot faster than on a PC. Then again, I've never tried to collect 'one of everything' for PCs before I released a program. If you are releasing an OpenGL game, you are pretty much limited to three machines - G3, G4, and third rev iMac (they changed the video card when they started making them in other colors). Now the iBook and the new version of the iMac. That is still a lot of hardware to test on. I usually just test it on the PC by swapping out video cards. Hardware is abstracted for most things besides 3d video, so if there is a problem it is more likely a system issue than an appication issue. So if issues like that come up after release, I just work with the person (sometimes even having them send me their computer for testing!) to get it fixed for them. So far, it has always been the user messing with the registry settings or bad hardware/ram.
Half-Life is four games, Single-player, Multi-player, TeamFortress and CounterStrike.
How could I forget CounterStrike!
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Thing is, many Mac gamers such as myself were willing to buy even a crippled version of Half-Life. I didn't care if Team Fortress Classic was on there. I was even able to live without the Windows multi-player compatibility. Why? Because the single-player game itself was so good! Please! If anyone at Valve is reading this, please reconsider!
...here I'd been telling all my Macophile friends about how good Half-Life was, and some were even looking forward to playing it. I'd been hoping I would be able to gib them on my favorite 3D-shooter game, but alas...and if Gabe's note is to be believed, I wouldn't have been able to anyway.
I posted about this to the Half-Life newsgroup, and thus far every one of the 10 or so responses has been resoundingly antiMac ("Great! Now they need to cancel the Macintosh!"). Losers
When I mentioned this to some of my chatroom friends, they wondered if Gabe's note might not be the whole story. Sierra, it seems, is being gutted from the inside out, with even some of the more popular games being pulled for no apparent reason (such as the B5 flightsim, which was essentially ready for release when it was canned...what sense does that make?). They seem, my friend suggested, to be staking their life on "Deer Hunter".
What do you think...is Sierra dying? Will they be dead and gone by a couple years from now?
I'm glad that Half-Life: Opposing Force is being made by another company...means there's much more chance we'll actually get to see it.
In related news, has anyone heard about the Christian first-person-shooter game that's hitting stores this week? There was a story in the NY Times about it the other day. It sounds like a dumb idea, but then, so did "Deer Hunter" and look at how well that's done.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I don't think they could open-source the engine even if they wanted to...if I recall correctly, they used (a modified version of?) the Quake II engine for Half-Life.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Unfortunately with all the flak Macs have been receiving lately, I do not find this surprising. Macintosh has always been notoriously hard to get good *current* games for. It's nice hardware, but all these years later, we still cannot get the same quality/quantity of software that's available for the Wintel platform.
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither. " Ben Franklin
Morons should have ported the game to OS X, so that by the time they finished it, OS X consumer would be out - and as an added bonus, a Linux port would be a cakewalk, because OS X is really BSD. (okay, close enough).
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
They already have a gaming API, which is said to be better than DirectX (I don't know, I haven't used DX). However, much of the advantage lies in the simplicity of it's design; this, in turn, stems from one of the main advantages of the Mac: viz, being monopolized for most of it's history, there are strong standards for everything, drafted before implementation. Example: graphics hardware. Windows is built on top of DOS (surprise) which was, from the beginning, entirely text-based. Lots of different people made graphics cards, and the standards were made up later. This means that on the mac, each monitor has two sets of attributes: dimensions (arbitrary, although the smallest in practice was 512*344) and bit depth. There is only one interpretation of each bit depth. Pixels are always square. Therefore, DrawSprocket has less mess to contend with that DirectDraw, and it follows that it is simpler to use. As such, it would be hard to port it to Windows without some rather messy emulation of different screen modes.
(Gawd, that was a long, messy paragraph...)
On the other hand, Apple has released the "sequel" to NetSprocket, OpenPlay (formerly Über) as open source, and I believe it's being ported to Windows and Linux.
UT flogs my system like a redheaded stepchild, even at only 800x600.. Q3A on the other hand, runs perfect, never lags out. Guess which one I'll be playing.
Time to visit your System Folder again:
DrawSprocketLib
InputSprocket Extension
NetSprocketLib
SoundSprocketLib
SoundSprocket Filter
OpenGLEngine
OpenGLLibrary
OpenGLMemory
OpenGLRenderer
OpenGLRendererATI
OpenGLUtility
Those aren't only for filling up your hard disk. They account for over 6 Megs of runtime libraries developers can (and do) use for game development.
In fact, they are also used by other kind of programs most expecially NetSprocketLib and OpenGL stuff.
That site looks like it's either (A) a MANOWAR fan site (B) a Dio fansite or (C) a Robert Jordan fan site. I noticed that you can fight on either side...I wonder if there are separate endings for each of the possible outcomes (Host, Fallen, Win, Lose)? Oh, and it's strangely appropriate that the game uses a "non-Euclidean" engine, eh?
Oh well, Christianity always has been the English of religions, always blindly assimilating whatever local trends and traditions are around it at the moment. I guess this continues unabated (i.e. "Christian Rock", "Christian Rap", etc.). Perhaps we'll see some Christian Porn soon...that should be interesting.
Still, it's nice to know that Heaven is populated by white people in suits of full plate armor, eh?
Please don't accuse me of flaming Christians; I'm an equal-opportunity bastard. Everyone is free to follow whatever spiritual path they wish, but the actions of some religious people certainly do lend themselves to parody - this is definately one of them. Assuming that this is not a hoax, I would strongly urge the people who wrote this game to take a break and give their holy book a thorough reading. I don't remember "Thou Shalt Kick Ass" being on that list anywhere...
--
Posted with Mozilla
Time to visit your System Folder again:
DrawSprocketLib
InputSprocket Extension
NetSprocketLib
SoundSprocketLib
SoundSprocket Filter
OpenGLEngine
OpenGLLibrary
OpenGLMemory
OpenGLRenderer
OpenGLRendererATI
OpenGLUtility
Those aren't only for filling up your hard disk. They account for over 6 Megs of runtime libraries developers can (and do) use for game development.
In fact, they are also used by other kind of programs most expecially NetSprocketLib and OpenGL stuff.
Didn't John Carmack (a reliable source on game development if there is one) say in one of his .plan updates a few months back, something along the lines of "90-95% of game code is identical across windoze, Linux, AND Macintosh"????
.plan is REALLY fuzzy, or he was lieing) to convert a game, and the potential for easy money; the only reason a game would NOT be released simultaneously for windoze, Linux, and Macintosh, is purely political.
Common sense would seem to dictate that CONVERTING that 5-10% that IS different, would be a trivial effort compared to the effort put into writing the 90-95% that is IDENTICAL across ALL THREE platforms.
I find it hard to belive that a small company like Id somehow has the resoueces and programming competancey to release all three versions of a game SIMULTANEOUSLY (as Carmack has promised to do with Q3), whilst a gigantic company like Sierra can't come up with the resources or programming skill to release seperate versions at all!?!?!?
Something smells fishy here.
Networking issues??? I don't know about the windoze version, but neither the Linux or Mac version of Q3test have ANY problem playing against people on other platforms. Again, if Id can pull it off, why can't a giant like Sierra? Hm... mabye lack of competency isn't that far off...
More than fishy, smells downright rotten...
Moreover, what economic motive would a company have for turning down additional profits (at the cost of modifying 5-10% of the code)? Apple's sold something like 2 million of those iMacs(2 mil * $50 price of game == 100 million, a healthy chunk of change (and this is JUST iMacs)), doubled it's market share and is still growing, as for Linux, I'm not sure how many people, demographically, use it NOW, but i KNOW it's expanding rapidly. Not only that, Linux users are willing to give up their own time to IMPROVE a game (see LokiHack). So why would a developer give up extra money unless they had a hidden adgenda.
Smells like salmon.... washington salmon...
Seems to me, that given the minimal necessary effort (unless my recollection of Carmack's
washington salmon... perhaps from just outside Seattle, a town whose name starts with an 'R'...
Political reasons like oh.... Perhaps die hard OS fanatics infiltrating game developers? Partisans who belive that there is only one true OS, and that this is a gift handed down from bill, the great one? Fanatics who want to destroy all other operating systems and force the world to assimilate into their collective?
Eh... can you say "Halloween Papers"? I knew you could...
john
Imagine all the people...
That's what this is. Logicware could easily have made Half-Life for the Mac have total feature-parity with the PC version, or even have added features (as evidence, I give you Westlake Interactive, who has done this with Quake, Unreal, the Tomb Raider series, Shadow Warrior, Unreal Tournament, Total Annhilation, Railroad Tycoon 2, Alpha Centauri, Madden NFL 2000, and others). The fact is, they chose not to.
Why? I don't know for certain, though I have a few suspicions. I do know that Logicware's Andrew Meggs, head of the Half-life project, is very anti-Mac, and has been since his shareware company fell flat after releasing one game. He even says as much if you read the original press release; he's happy to not be working on a Mac project anymore. But hey, why was Sierra dumb enough to put a well-known Mac-loather on the Half-Life team, anyway? That would be like putting John Dvorak on the design team for the next generation of iMac.
Look. None of the reasons Sierra cancelled the project were actually valid, because all of them could have been worked around. Quake/MacOS is compatible with PC mods, so Half-Life (which, last I checked, was based on Quake) has no excuse not to be. Quake/MacOS's networking code works perfectly with its PC counterparts, so Half-life has no excuse there, even with this DirectPlay stuff (if worse comes to worst, networking protocols aren't that tough to decode, especially when you're paid to do it, and since reverse-engineering to achieve compatibility is known to fall under the fair use clause there's no problem there).
Whatever. I won't be buying Sierra or Logicware stuff for a long time because of this. Even though it probably won't happen, I hope that Sierra takes their code to Westlake and pays them to finish it; they'll do it right.
I don't know... I have a feeling that the difficult of ports is in large part due to poorly written programs in the first place. A good program should be at least 40% design, and most of the implementation (i.e. the core logic of the game) could easily be cross-platform IF IT'S KEPT IN MIND TO BEGIN WITH.
I don't know if it's as little as 10%, especially for a performance-intensive game, but certainly the overhead of producing a Mac version goes WAY down if the game is designed with both platforms in mind to begin with rather than porting it as an afterthought, when the platform-specific code is deeply engrained in the program.
Also, as 47Ronin points out, a lot more Mac users would buy the game if it came out within, say, a decade of the PC version. Really.. When a game like X-Wing comes out a few YEARS after the PC version, don't you think the market would've faded a bit by then?
Apple really needs to get it's act together in terms of supporting gaming. I don't know the state of OpenGL support, but I'm sure that it is reasonably solid. Unfortunantly, OpenGL is only part of the solution.
Apple should negotiate with Microsoft to include an Apple implementation of the DirectX API. That would make porting games to the Macintosh relatively simple. While the DirectX API may not be amazing, it is programmed to, so an implementation on any operating system makes porting games easier. As long as any assembly language is well contained within modules and abstracted, reimplementing those procedures shouldn't be too difficult.
Additionally, Apple should work on a better gaming API than DirectX, and make it available for Win95/98/NT. Even if it uses DirectX through a wrapper for some parts, if a superior API existed that would compile for Win32 and MacOS, developers would write to it. This would prevent Macintosh from playing second fiddle to Windows.
I'm hoping that with MacOS X, this situtation is resolved in a manner that makes cross platform games easier to develop. That would improve Apple's position in the home market.
Improving Apple in the business world is another story, but would involve working with Sun to make AWT not suck...
Alex
What really bugs me about this isn't that the game was cancelled for Mac... (I happen to own both a Mac and PC. The Mac for real work, the PC (of course) for games.)
From what I know of programming, it's equally easy to make a *universal* version of the game than an *only* Windoze version, or an *only* Mac version. Being equally easy makes it equally expensive, meaning the only additional cost to making a hybrid game is in the marketing/packaging.
So why isn't this done? Games companies seem to be throwing away 10%+ of the market for every game they release. In any other industry, this would be seen as insane. In the computer industry, it's normal.
A plea: Come on, game makers. Why should you throw away a portion of the market *and* force some of your best customers to wait 6 months or more for your game? Use some common sense.
- James Schend, an annoyed Mac user.
Comment of the year
Apple really needs to get it's act together in terms of supporting gaming. I don't know the state of OpenGL support, but I'm sure that it is reasonably solid. Unfortunantly, OpenGL is only part of the solution.
Apple should negotiate with Microsoft to include an Apple implementation of the DirectX API. That would make porting games to the Macintosh relatively simple. While the DirectX API may not be amazing, it is programmed to, so an implementation on any operating system makes porting games easier. As long as any assembly language is well contained within modules and abstracted, reimplementing those procedures shouldn't be too difficult.
Additionally, Apple should work on a better gaming API than DirectX, and make it available for Win95/98/NT. Even if it uses DirectX through a wrapper for some parts, if a superior API existed that would compile for Win32 and MacOS, developers would write to it. This would prevent Macintosh from playing second fiddle to Windows.
I'm hoping that with MacOS X, this situtation is resolved in a manner that makes cross platform games easier to develop. That would improve Apple's position in the home market.
Improving Apple in the business world is another story, but would involve working with Sun to make AWT not suck...
Alex
As I understand it, the real problem with the release was that they couldn't figure out how to make the box in clear blue plastic.
Is it just me, or is the world now being made out of clear plastic? Man, Steve Jobs has more control over the appearance of more objects...
Hotnutz.com
I know what I'm going as for Halloween! (hint: it's UNCLEAN!!!!)
Hey guys. I'm just attaching this here since it's near the top. There's a petition going on to save Half Life at Demand Mac.
TML
I just got my G4/450 three days ago. Got q3test two days ago, and I didn't do much yesterday :) I've put it side by side with the Diamond V770-based PCs we have here (at the same resolution) and it is just plain *great*, even with 32-bit textures. I mean, have you *seen* how good this looks? High frame rates, good stable gameplay, the works,...
"Professional coder on closed source. Do not attempt."
MS made a promise to port direct 3d to the mac, when QD3d announced. never made it.
Lot's of FUD. Never seen lots of things, such as MSN for mac.
Well, according to a TV interview transcript posted on their site, nobody actually gets "killed"...the angels and demons just get "banished" to their respective planes when you deal them enough damage. Also, it's hinted that if you play as a demon and "win," you really lose in the end. "Evil demands its own reward" and so forth.
Isn't it funny how people's opinions and motives of something Christian change depending on whether it's expressly produced by evangelical Christians or not? In Nomine, the Steve Jackson Games RPG of demons vs. angels, is simply a game using the war in Heaven as an interesting setting, and I doubt slashdotters would be up in arms over that...but one whiff of serious intent behind it, and boom, it's ridiculous.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I remember I would sometimes not do homework in school rather than do it half-baked because "I forgot" seemed a better excuse than "I didn't study and I have no idea how to do the problems." Did they even try to make a Mac version? Nice of them to hold Apple in such esteem anyways.
office 98 was not released "late". the mac versions are on a different timetable. they release odd numbered years for windows and even numbered years for mac. So office '97 and '99 were windows, office '98 and '00 are for mac. At least, this was the original plan, i dunno if they're still sticking to it. And office '98 really wasn't office '97, it was a slightly differnet program that was written for mac ground-up to be for the mac. They really don't want to release the same product for mac and windows because mac and windows are different.. for an example of this look at Word 6, which was a massive insult to all mac users. Word 6 was actually running on a win32 emulation layer, and it was slow as all-get-out, and almost everyone who got it continued to use word 5. (Word6/mac is also a cautionary tale for everyone who thinks they want a WINE-like MS-sponsored win32 layer for linux..)
This isn't important, really, but kind of interesting.
-mcc-baka
i use clariworks.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
My suspicion is that the site is a spoof. I don't see the fundamentalist-Christian types going for this sort of thing. Or even the not-so-fundamentalist ones :) (Though I haven't been able to actually visit the Eternal Warriors site, it seems to be /.ed)
:-p
I don't think we're going to be seeing Christian Porn anytime soon (whatever *that* would be! funny idea...), since Christianity IMHO has not done its assimilating blindly. Using local art forms to spread your message is one thing, but using something you find offensive is another.
I think "Thou Shalt Kick Ass" would be a bitchin' 11th Commandment. Add a 12th: "Thou Shalt Be Assimilated".
Hmm...Christianity as the Borg?
std_disclaimer: yes, I am a Christian. No, not one of the annoying ones
Hopefully they're cancelling the MacOS port in favor of a Linux port.
With my physic abilities I look into the Valve's meetings with the dev team
OoooOoooOoOOoooo OoooOoooOoOOoooo OoooOoooOoOOoooo
Marketing guy: we need the Macintosh market, if we can get Half Life on those cute little iMac's well sell millions
Dev dude: ya, but iMac's only have a rage 128 (I think). It's no game card. We might be able to get the performance out of a G4, with a snazzy new card
Marketing guy: video what?
Dev dude: also we build the game on top of Monolith's engine, which is build on DirectX.
Marketing guy: and.....
Dev dude: well how are we going to re-write Monolith's engine to work with OpenGL or a 3D API that works with mac's
Marketing guy: ya... sounds great. Write up a spec and when you think we can start shipping beta' we need this in time for Christmas.
Dev dude: excuse me.... BUT ARE YOU NUTS? This will take at least a year! We don't have anything to work with!
Marketing guys: [blank stare] ok well, who feels like lunch?
OoooOoooOoOOoooo OoooOoooOoOOoooo OoooOoooOoOOoooo OoooOoooOoOOoooo
-Jon
this is my sig.