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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.
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)
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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...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.
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