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f13.net General Forums => Warhammer Online => Topic started by: squirrel on July 30, 2009, 12:18:35 PM



Title: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: squirrel on July 30, 2009, 12:18:35 PM
No idea how this became a priority for them when they barely have the engine working on XP/Vista. But there you have it. Warhammer for OS X. (http://www.warhammeronline.com/mac/)


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: rattran on July 30, 2009, 12:46:55 PM
It's just using cider as a wrapper. So the same half-working engine, with the benefit of Transgaming's half-working wine thingy.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: fuser on July 30, 2009, 01:48:23 PM
Their expanding into new markets, Linux next!  :why_so_serious:


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Morfiend on July 30, 2009, 02:35:13 PM
 :awesome_for_real:


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Hayduke on July 30, 2009, 02:36:36 PM
It's just using cider as a wrapper. So the same half-working engine, with the benefit of Transgaming's half-working wine thingy.

Yeah EA has done this with a lot of their games, not too exciting.  At least they didn't go full SOE and open a Mac-only server.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Soulflame on July 30, 2009, 03:38:21 PM
iWAR?

Meh, got nothin'.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: ghost on July 30, 2009, 04:15:00 PM
I think I'm excited......


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Surlyboi on July 30, 2009, 04:16:52 PM
Fuck cider. It's the lamest thing a gaming company could do.

Shitty engine? Make it shittier on a Mac by running it through a layer of emulation, so that the
system requirements are almost double what they'd be on a fucking 'doze box.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: squirrel on July 30, 2009, 04:19:32 PM
Yeah, I guess I'm just surpised. Even though it's minimal dev effort there's still QA/Support and marketing that would need to be done. And really  it probably runs better under bootcamp than it will this way. Odd choice.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: ghost on July 30, 2009, 04:22:06 PM
there's still QA/Support and marketing that would need to be done

Thankfully Mythic got rid of all those people, so they don't have to worry about that part.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Soulflame on July 30, 2009, 04:28:33 PM
All QA ever does is find problems and cost money!   :awesome_for_real:


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Redgiant on July 30, 2009, 05:23:17 PM
What's next, CP/M or RIO?


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Trippy on July 30, 2009, 06:48:17 PM
Fuck cider. It's the lamest thing a gaming company could do.

Shitty engine? Make it shittier on a Mac by running it through a layer of emulation, so that the
system requirements are almost double what they'd be on a fucking 'doze box.
Have you actually played a game on the Mac under Cider or are you just making shit up? I can play the Mac version of CoH which also uses Cider on my old Mac Mini even with it's piece of shit GMA 950 and it works, though not great because the GPU is crap.

The only reason the CPU requirements look so high for WAR on the Mac is because the only single core Intel Core Solo CPU Apple ever used was with a old model of the Mac Mini that also has the GMA 950 GPU which WAR doesn't support. Otherwise the requirements are basically the same as with Vista.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Surlyboi on July 30, 2009, 08:56:47 PM
No offense Trippy, but you're out of your element on this one. Trust me
when I say that.

And yes, I've played many games in cider and I've had to troubleshoot
even more. Emulation is a shitty substitute for a native client.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Trippy on July 30, 2009, 09:21:01 PM
And yet you still haven't provided any evidence to support your claim.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: schild on July 30, 2009, 09:54:10 PM
Now, this could be an interesting slapfight.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Phildo on July 30, 2009, 10:03:53 PM
Agreeing with the people that think this is going to be a trainwreck.  But hey, whatever populates those servers.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Trippy on July 30, 2009, 10:12:30 PM
Well since Surlyboi didn't provide any evidence to support his claims and mine was only based on a single game I tried I went looking for benchmarks which are few and far between. I actually now think he may have *understated* his case but it's hard to know for sure given the lack of benchmarks and inconsistent data I've been able to find so far.

Here's an example of the problem. Here's somebody's benchmark of EVE showing how the Mac version WAYYYY slower when running under Cider:

http://themacgamer.com/tag/ati/page/2/

On the other hand here's somebody else with a far less powerful system getting much better performance in EVE on their Mac by making some config file tweaks:

http://www.eve-search.com/thread/1021336

Given the resolution they are running at and GPU on that Mac that's pretty respectable performance but they didn't benchmark EVE running on Windows on that same system so it's unknown what the performance difference under Cider actually is.


Another example: here's somebody saying that BF2142 on the Mac is basically unplayable even with a decent system:

http://osx411.com/full-rundown-of-bf2142-for-the-mac/


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: columba on July 30, 2009, 10:25:16 PM
I wouldn't be surprised that Mythic could make it work even better on a Mac.  The sad performance on vista remains, however.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Trippy on July 30, 2009, 10:29:39 PM
I wouldn't be surprised that Mythic could make it work even better on a Mac.  The sad performance on vista remains, however.
That's not going to happen since they are using Gamebryo instead of their own graphics engine and Gamebryo doesn't have a Mac OS X native version.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: columba on July 31, 2009, 05:06:34 PM
Wow.  Then it makes it even harder to understand why they spent time on this.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Trippy on July 31, 2009, 05:21:52 PM
Cause it's a relatively straightforward way for companies to port their games to the Mac. You need to relink the code against the Cider libraries that provide the translation between DirectX and other MS-specific stuff and the OS X libraries/routines and there's presumably a bunch of code cleanup you have to do but that's far far less work than trying to rewrite your graphics engine to use OpenGL instead of DirectX graphics and rewriting all the other DirectX stuff (DirectSound, DirectInput, etc.).

PC game developers that write their own graphics engines and have budgets/profits big enough to support this sort of porting effort do sometimes write Mac OS X native versions of their games but that's rare (see id and Blizzard).


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Fordel on July 31, 2009, 05:29:20 PM
Blizzard still goes with OpenGL or whatever, no?


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Surlyboi on July 31, 2009, 05:43:04 PM
Blizzard still goes with OpenGL or whatever, no?

Yes, as does Id. I hate Blizz for a lot of shit, but coding for OpenGL instead of taking the easy way out is something I'll always sing their praises for.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: squirrel on July 31, 2009, 10:59:22 PM
Performance is not horrible. Not great either though. I installed the Mac client and the windows client on my Macbook Pro (2.6 C2D, x1600, 2G RAM). No I didn't resub, I used the trial tyvm.

The OS X version was subjectively about 20-30% slower at the same settings. Most notably if I had all spell/particle effects turned on it was really severe under the Cider port, not as bad under XP. Both sucked ass compared to my Quad gaming box, but that's to be expected.

It's still a really weird choice to even bother with this. I can't think of a single reason why. They won't get any new subs, any mac players were already using bootcamp and they're not going to market this, so why bother?

EDIT: Subjectively meaning I didn't log or monitor FPS that carefully, but the fps was certainly slower and graphic lag difference was noticeable.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: ghost on July 31, 2009, 11:04:08 PM
Doesn't matter.  You're still going to lag down and die/get booted in a big city or fortress raid anyway, so why does anyone care?


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: squirrel on July 31, 2009, 11:07:33 PM
Doesn't matter.  You're still going to lag down and die/get booted in a big city or fortress raid anyway, so why does anyone care?

Well - T1 - late T2 are actually fun. If you want to pay for RPG Team Fortress sorta. Agreed in general, just trying to figure out why they said "I know, let's use Cider to make an OS X port! That'll help!"

nm it's Mythic. Who the fuxk knows.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: ghost on July 31, 2009, 11:15:52 PM
I personally think the New Emskrank area is very well done and fun.  If I can play that in OS X and enjoy it then so much the better.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Soln on August 01, 2009, 01:23:43 PM
this probably is one of MJ/PB or other's legacies.  Namely, copy everything of Blizz, including cross platform.  It was released before earnings because it was in the works that long.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Fordel on August 01, 2009, 02:26:06 PM
Blizzard still goes with OpenGL or whatever, no?

Yes, as does Id. I hate Blizz for a lot of shit, but coding for OpenGL instead of taking the easy way out is something I'll always sing their praises for.


Is OpenGL just harder to use or something? If it can work on both PC's and Mac's, why doesn't everyone do it?




Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: tmp on August 01, 2009, 06:29:38 PM
Is OpenGL just harder to use or something? If it can work on both PC's and Mac's, why doesn't everyone do it?
They are similar in terms of effort and complexity, but OpenGL is strictly API for graphics while directX provides also libraries to handle sound, input and such. Since these other things have to be done for game to be complete it makes sense for many to pick one API for all. And since the other platforms are limited in size the incentive to go for more universa, cross-platforml solution is equally small.

There's also the matter of implementation -- both nVidia and ATI take some liberties in how their drivers handle openGL specifications, and both companies like to introduce their own 'extensions' to the basic specification. This means for maximum performance an openGL application may require multiple "render paths" to handle range of abilities provided by hardware. If i understand it right directX has similar issue (cards come with different capabilities and the game code has to adapt, something directX 10 tried to address) ... but it's less severe.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Fordel on August 02, 2009, 02:14:54 AM
So to Overly simply it, DirectX is a Television, while OpenGL is just a monitor and I would have to find my own speakers and remote control?


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: tmp on August 02, 2009, 05:06:47 AM
That's not a bad way to put it, yah.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: jason on August 02, 2009, 06:26:23 AM
I can think of one fairly decent reason why they would bother to port Warhammer over to the Mac: Practice.

If they plan on future games being on both platforms, take a small team, get them to work on porting Warhammer over and they can learn a bunch of the problems and pitfalls of how their codebase/engines/etc handle the transition and can help the team making the new games avoid choices that hurt the porting process.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: columba on August 02, 2009, 10:58:25 AM
Agreed.  Even if things go terribly wrong on this experiment, it's only Warhammer at risk.  Low impact.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Azazel on August 04, 2009, 12:36:22 AM
That's a bloody good point when you think about it, considering that other game the EA MMO division is working on..


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: 01101010 on August 04, 2009, 08:06:23 AM
In other words, WAR has become the point man. I expect it comes out of this with no less than three missing limbs.


Title: Re: Warhammer for OS X
Post by: Surlyboi on August 04, 2009, 08:29:13 AM
And severe head trauma.