Mac Gaming...in general

[spike]

So, seems to me Mac gaming is held up by a small group of fps games(im sure i'll get ripped for that statement by typhy and the likes, but still), one game service, seemingly on the verge of chaos(always) and apple doesnt seem to interested in making gaming a big thing. what does the mac gaming community need?

[Typhy]

what does the mac gaming community need?

PCs.

It's a simple and well known fact that PCs are better gaming machines than Macs.

There's nothing that Apple could do to help gamers, aside from suggest that they buy PCs. The gaming companies choose to make their games for 98% of the market ( smart choice ). Later on, they may be willing to allow someone to port it. Slow shitty ports aren't Apple's fault. Nor is it Apple's fault that the 256MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and it's superiour ( right, Sin? ) the 256MB NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra are avalible for mac.

At this point, Apple needs to accept the fact that games aren't their thing. Rather than making weak comparisons ( like Quake 3 ), they should simply talk about the sort of gaming proformace than their machines get, rather than comparing them to PCs. Rather than trying to advertise their machines as "everything", they should admit that they don't make gaming machines, and focus on the advantages that macs do have.

[Mr. Lothario]

     Or they could produce gaming machines. The G5s should be very respectable in that area, with the addition of PC-spec high-end video cards such as the 256 MB Radeon and GeForce, Apple's hardware would likely be competitive with PCs in terms of gaming. More importantly than that, however, Apple needs to make an effort to seduce game developers to develop for the Mac. Apple has money, they have expertise, and they have manpower. They could institute a program in which they provide financial incentives and technical support for companies to simultaneously develop their games for the Mac. It does not require vastly much more effort to produce a game engine using the C++ standard libraries, along with custom libraries built using standard calls and/or a cross-platform game toolkit such as SDL. All the data manipulation in an engine can be handled using 100% cross-platform compatible code. The graphics and sound is trickier, but those functions can be abstracted into a library that makes OpenGL/DirectDraw and CoreAudio/DirectSound calls, depending on which platform it is compiled for.

     It would require more work on the part of the developer, but only once. Once an abstraction library like that has been constructed, the company can link against it for all their future games, speeding their development somewhat. Not to mention the main benefit of creating a program that is designed to be cross-platform from square one: better code. Writing code that will work on multiple different systems requires a rigor that is not found in a project intended for one target, and that rigor forces clean code, which results in fewer bugs that are easier to track down when they are found.

     Simultaneous cross-platform development with the support of Apple's engineers would result in games that played equally well in its PC and Mac incarnations, and which were released at the same time on both platforms, and which (hopefully) did not suffer from the DirectX-induced inability to network the two versions. This would mean that Macs would be equal to PCs as gaming machines, so the people who would rather use a Mac but who buy a PC because of the gaming selection (I personally know at least five people like that in my meatspace life) would go with the Mac, giving more money and market share to Apple, which would make it that much easier for Apple to entice development studios to simultaneously develop a Mac and PC version of their games, and so on.

     I hold that Apple could forge the Mac into a viable alternative for gaming, but it seems that they don't want to.

     Edit: rephrased the second sentence so that it actually said what I intended.

[[d]-[p a t]]

or you could go buy a pc for 1000 dollars like im doing and get better fps than a g5.

[Mr. Lothario]

     You got about two sentences into my post and then stopped reading, didn't you?

[Typhy]

or you could go buy a pc for 1000 dollars like im doing and get better fps than a g5.

100% correct, Pat.

Loth, very good points, however, it's not all in the hardware. If a game is perfectly optimized, it'll get spectacular framerates on the G5, if not, it'll be much the same as the G4.

[Mr. Lothario]

     At no point did I claim that the G5 by itself would be the savior of Mac gaming. I said that it would provide a competitive base, which Apple could exploit by inducing the development of Mac games simultaneously with their PC counterparts. Simultaneous development means that the game would be developed with an eye towards optimization on both platforms. The piss-poor porting scene is due in part to developers who develop their game for one platform and one platform only, Windows. That leads to specialized code which only works in that environment, which means that the porting house has to replace large sections of code. When the port is assigned to a group of craptastic programmers like Aspyr seems to be chock-full of, the code replacement phase of the port leads to huge optimization problems. Simultaneous first-party development of both versions would avoid that scenario entirely, and would produce Mac games that were thoroughly optimized for the Mac at a low level. That, combined with the competitive hardware in the G5s, would result in the Mac becoming a viable gaming platform.

[Jeb]

i use a mac, i love unix, and i enjoy games sometimes.
I don't like windows, i hate dos, and i don't like the bastards in pc gaming communities.

The last game that was ported to mac which had some effort put into it was Quake3 (or RTCW perhaps).
As far as RVS goes, there is already a good base with the UT2k3 engine being  on mac to build the game off of. The porting process won't be as tough.

[iGnome]

one word   Shit.

[Supernatural Pie]

If every game's FPS matched RTCW, no one would need a G5 for gaming. It's a shame though, that mac developers are too lazy to make their games NOT run like crap.

[BTs_Mysterio]

I think that its BS to say go buy a PC for gaming. Gaming shouldn't be a priority in the PC world. You want ownage in games go buy a xBox or PS2. Anyone who buys a computer for gaming is a misguided "dumbass". I buy a mac for it's general pleasure to use. And I dont see why Frame rates are so important to all you idiots. I've had so much fun in games that are pretty choppy on a 600 mhz g3 imac. It just shows that you need these frame rates to boast your misguided ego.

And to typhy: You are completely wrong. In every review I read the NVIDA fell to the 256 ATI Radeon 9800. I'll show you on AIM later if you must see. And also cause I just know your gonna say it, no game is optimized for either NVIDA or ATI. Its all advertising typhy.

Mac gaming has the games I want to play. There are no games I've ever gave a damn about that haven't been ported.

[iGnome]

Snipe RTCW is shit

[Typhy]

iGnome, what the fuck are you on?

RTCW is amazingly good. The multiplayer is totally teamwork based, the graphics are good and the gameplay is ownage.

On top of all that, it gets 100 FPS on my Powerbook G4.

[Maniac]

is that a 1ghz too?

[Typhy]

is that a 1ghz too?

Yes.

[iGnome]

Meh Snipe didnt mention about mutiplayer but single player sucks and i never bothered to play it online

[-SW- bazz]

yea RTCW isn't good online cause u had to have a legal copy...

also, i agree with myst for once. most PC people can only argue now that PCs are better because they get .00000001 frames more in UT or whatever than macs, and those people are usually the ones who couldn't define getting a life.

[S.p.i.d.e.r.]

Bazz, why is multiplayer in RtCW or any Quake 3 based game bad? Just because a little parasite like you could not purchase it legally?

That is not a viable reason, drone.

[BTs_Mysterio]

Thats odd, I was able to play RTCW MP.

[iGnome]

I can't myst my monitor is fuct