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Author
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Topic: Warhammer for OS X (Read 27363 times)
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squirrel
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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.
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Speaking of marketing, we're out of milk.
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rattran
Moderator
Posts: 4257
Unreasonable
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It's just using cider as a wrapper. So the same half-working engine, with the benefit of Transgaming's half-working wine thingy.
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fuser
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1572
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Their expanding into new markets, Linux next!
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Morfiend
Terracotta Army
Posts: 6009
wants a greif tittle
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Hayduke
Terracotta Army
Posts: 560
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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.
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Soulflame
Terracotta Army
Posts: 6486
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iWAR?
Meh, got nothin'.
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ghost
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I think I'm excited......
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Surlyboi
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10963
eat a bag of dicks
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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.
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Tuned in, immediately get to watch cringey Ubisoft talking head offering her deepest sympathies to the families impacted by the Orlando shooting while flanked by a man in a giraffe suit and some sort of "horrifically garish neon costumes through the ages" exhibit or something. We need to stop this fucking planet right now and sort some shit out. -Kail
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squirrel
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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.
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Speaking of marketing, we're out of milk.
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ghost
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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.
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Soulflame
Terracotta Army
Posts: 6486
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All QA ever does is find problems and cost money!
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Redgiant
Terracotta Army
Posts: 304
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What's next, CP/M or RIO?
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A FUCKING COMPANY IS AT STEAK
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23621
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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.
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Surlyboi
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10963
eat a bag of dicks
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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.
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Tuned in, immediately get to watch cringey Ubisoft talking head offering her deepest sympathies to the families impacted by the Orlando shooting while flanked by a man in a giraffe suit and some sort of "horrifically garish neon costumes through the ages" exhibit or something. We need to stop this fucking planet right now and sort some shit out. -Kail
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23621
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And yet you still haven't provided any evidence to support your claim.
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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Now, this could be an interesting slapfight.
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Phildo
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Agreeing with the people that think this is going to be a trainwreck. But hey, whatever populates those servers.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23621
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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/1021336Given 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/
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« Last Edit: July 30, 2009, 10:20:57 PM by Trippy »
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columba
Terracotta Army
Posts: 29
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I wouldn't be surprised that Mythic could make it work even better on a Mac. The sad performance on vista remains, however.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23621
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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.
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columba
Terracotta Army
Posts: 29
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Wow. Then it makes it even harder to understand why they spent time on this.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23621
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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).
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Fordel
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8306
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Blizzard still goes with OpenGL or whatever, no?
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and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
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Surlyboi
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10963
eat a bag of dicks
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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.
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Tuned in, immediately get to watch cringey Ubisoft talking head offering her deepest sympathies to the families impacted by the Orlando shooting while flanked by a man in a giraffe suit and some sort of "horrifically garish neon costumes through the ages" exhibit or something. We need to stop this fucking planet right now and sort some shit out. -Kail
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squirrel
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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.
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« Last Edit: July 31, 2009, 11:02:13 PM by squirrel »
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Speaking of marketing, we're out of milk.
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ghost
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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?
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squirrel
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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.
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Speaking of marketing, we're out of milk.
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ghost
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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.
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Soln
Terracotta Army
Posts: 4737
the opportunity for evil is just delicious
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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.
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Fordel
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8306
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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?
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and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
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tmp
Terracotta Army
Posts: 4257
POW! Right in the Kisser!
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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.
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Fordel
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8306
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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?
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and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
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tmp
Terracotta Army
Posts: 4257
POW! Right in the Kisser!
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That's not a bad way to put it, yah.
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jason
Terracotta Army
Posts: 85
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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.
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columba
Terracotta Army
Posts: 29
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Agreed. Even if things go terribly wrong on this experiment, it's only Warhammer at risk. Low impact.
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