Alex Handy Sez: 'Mac Gaming? Hah!'
[The fourth in a ragged series of 'Alex Handy Sez' missives, in which the former Game Developer editor and current Gamasutra contributor riffs on something or other, focuses on Apple's WWDC gaming splash - thanks to Engadget for the 'John Hodgman as Steve Jobs' pic!]
So EA and id are on board the Apple train. When it comes down to it, though, this news is just a bunch of fluff. We've been here before. I've been here before. Waaaaaaaay back in 1999, id was right there at MacWorld, with Carmack talking about how rad the OS was, and demanding that a multi-button mouse arrive. And this was Mac OS 9!
People applauded. Those, like myself, who covered the Macintosh gaming world for a living saw a bright future ahead. EA wasn't there, but Activision was, and Aspyr was bringing Madden to the Mac anyway. MacSoft was bringing Unreal Tournament over, and StarCraft was still on the Mac, and still kicking ass.
And then, nothing happened. There was a little while there when Mac game companies were expanding, and the best PC to Mac game porting house, Westlake Interactive, was barely able to keep up with all the demand for its services. Elsewhere, Lane Roathe's latest games company was floundering in its attempts to bring Half-Life onto the Mac. Oh, and don't forget that Jason Whong was eating bugs for Ambrosia!
By 2001, the brief flash that was the Mac game boom was gone. It was mostly reduced to a dull roar, as Apple's former three-person game developer relations team dwindled and was reduced to Fishman alone. The rest of the world moved on. If anything, the Macintosh games rush of 1999 was a result of the dearth of new consoles at the time. This is the same era in which the Phantom was beginning to take shape and the Dreamcast was king, after all.
So, back during those heady days, I was flown down to Santa Monica to get a glimpse of Quake 3 at Activision headquarters. And when I arrived, I wasn't the only Mac guy there. Chris Breen, the old man on the mountain of Mac game coverage was there too, as were a handful of other folks. I don't know if Breen was sucked in by the hype, but I certainly was. I genuinely believed, at the time, that the Mac could still do it. But, as most recovered Mac junkies will tell you, eventually the shine wears off.
Of course, this time around, the processors in the Macs and in the PCs are the same. Unfortunately, I don't see that helping so much. You see, last time we did all this, the fight was over 3D hardware and acceleration libraries. OpenGL was all over the Mac, and all up in SGI's shit. 3DFX was making cards for the Mac as well as the PC: Voodoo 3's and 5's could work in either, and they sent me about three cards to prove it.
But in the end, 3DFX died out, and OpenGL seems to have been relegated to a secondary seat on most popular Windows games. Direct X and Direct 3D have both taken up a large portion of the market, and neither of those APIs have ever been translated well to the Mac. Back in '99, even, I remember many a company asking me if I knew anyone who could translate DirectX games to the Mac platform. They'd have beaten a path to that fellow's door, if he had existed.
In the end, there's not much call for gaming on the Mac. Casual games are all over the Web, and are thus cross platform. WoW has been out for the Mac for years now, too. In truth, the PC gaming world is only getting more hardcore, and with hardware as cheap as it is these days, you can buy yerself a new PC for less than a Playstation 3.
Oooooooor, you can do what I do, and just use BootCamp to run Windows XP on yer Mac. It's the only way I have the hardware to run Company of Heroes!
Comments
Will Bootcamp be sufficient to run the gaggle of DirectX10 games coming out soon (Crysis, etc?) Can you stuff a high end Nvidia card in a Mac tower and get the best of both worlds: productivity on the Mac side and Gaming on the Windows side on one machine? Thanks!
Posted by: Tom | June 13, 2007 3:51 AM
Actually, back in like the mid-1990s there was MacDX, which allowed you to port 'most of' a DirectX game to the Mac. I think it's still under active development.
Now, the EA games (and a lot of others) are based on top of Transgaming Cider, which is pretty much WineLib + Direct3D patches for OS X. Of course, the downside there is that they only run on Intel-based Macs, but you can practically have a new SKU in a weekend with Cider (or so I hear).
Posted by: ravuya | June 13, 2007 7:06 AM
Tom: Boot Camp doesn't matter. It's actually the one area that isn't a problem. The Mac Pro (the only Mac with an upgradeable gpu) uses normal PCIe cards, and when in Windows you can just install the latest drivers straight from ATI or nVidia.
The problem here -- and the biggest problem with Mac gaming in general -- is that Apple tends to lag horribly with driver support for new GPUs. Until they actually add models from a new line of cards as build-to-order options, upgrading to one yourself is unlikely to work under OS X. (Meanwhile, boot into Windows and it will work fine.)
Additionally, most people claim that the OS X drivers aren't remotely optimized for videogames. They're just not set up to get nearly the same level of performance as you'd get in windows.
Apple also tends to lag behind in adding support for new OpenGL extensions, and futhermore, OpenGL tends to lag behind DirectX in standardizing extensions that support new hardware features. Even though the latest MacBook Pros are shipping with DX10-capable GPUs, I expect it will be a while before their full capabilities become usable under OS X.
Posted by: Westacular | June 13, 2007 3:53 PM
Well I understand your article, however all of these games will be intel-only. I forget the name of the technology, but it makes it very easy to make a Windows game an Mactel game. Read into it some more. This is not the gaming companies really wanting to spend money to bring games to the mac, but since they can do it easily now they said "what the heck" and did it.
Posted by: Tim | June 14, 2007 10:14 AM
microsoft has cornered a lot of the games market with direct x and direct3d so what do you honestly expect?
games markets rely on a healthy install base of computers, so yes their bound to make new pc games compatible with mac's, it's hard going getting another party doing it hence the low amount of games mac have at the moment
Posted by: MattyG | June 14, 2007 12:47 PM
Who cares? Honestly. Since Mac offers so much virtualization that works great. Paralells offers Direct X 9/10 & Open GL support. Logitech Mouse + Paralells = game on.
Posted by: crunchycrotch | June 14, 2007 12:59 PM
As Tim pointed out, all of EA's games will be Intel-only because they use a translation technology. It's TransGaming's "Cider" and you can find more info about it at their website, but the gist of it is that you don't have to rewrite any of the Windows game's code, just wrap it in Cider and it runs on OS X. The wrapper is an optimized implementation of the Win32 APIs and DirectX.
Posted by: Prosody | June 14, 2007 3:52 PM
Just to show you all how serious Apple is taking gaming... Apple will not be at E3 this year.
As the matter of fact, Apple will continue to be a no-show for all major game expos and gaming industry events: E3, GDC, Tokyo Game Show, and GC.
And Apple expects people to take them seriously when they talk about gaming??
Posted by: ktchong | June 15, 2007 6:27 AM
It's easy enough, if you have the $ to take a high end PC Graphics card, and shoehorn it into your mac for use within windows. As for use with the Mac OS, that's a bit more tricky, but possible. The guys at MacVidia.com have tons of drivers for tons of high end cards, but if you're playing games in windows, and content to use the Mac's graphics card in Mac OS, then it's quite simple to put even an nVidia 8800 into a Mac.
Posted by: Clay Garland | June 15, 2007 9:58 AM