Mac Gaming Discussion Thread

I've been wondering recently; is Mac game development more promising for indie developers than PC game development is? I figured this for the following reason:

So much PC games are getting released nowadays, you really have to stand out if you don't want your game being buried by the hundreds released every month. On the other hand, there aren't much Mac games out there. From what I've seen, most of the Mac games out there are made by independent developers. Then again, I won't be surprised if I'm completely wrong about that since I don't focus all that much on Macs in general. I'm just assuming that from the little amount of research I've done.

Feel free to correct me. I'm just wondering and guessing. After all, isn't it time we broaden the modding community?

Edited by (in order): Chunky, Chunky

Macs now shipping with intel cores and run windows apps and os nativly would make me tend to think mac gaming will be on a rise
but honestly there not made for upgrading or games so the gol old beige box will be the gaming center for quite some time.

I mostly think that Macs and such are for work or projects. Not really for.. eh... fun?

TKAzA wrote: Macs now shipping with intel cores and run windows apps and os nativly would make me tend to think mac gaming will be on a rise...

Yeah. They really needed to. Sorry, I'm not a huge MAC fan as most people know. 500 bucks to the first person who catches me playing a game on a MAC.

--

The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them.

VAU: amateurs with proessional standards

One of the few games I know of for mac are not real intensive, IE, counter-strike. Mac's are huge in the developement of games and such things though. So they get their fair share of the pie.

Also, after looking at the benchmarks for XP on a macbook pro, clearly you are better just playing games on a pc, as the mac's cant run XP as fast as MacOS (although that would seem rather obvious).

Edited by: Spector

i sorta look at that fake commercial for macs that was done by the guys that did red vs blue. I do not like macs at all and as baza said will never be playing a game on one. i know scientists and graphics artists like them. but i can not stand them and will always continue to make my games for PC.

Ok, coming from someone who has dabbled into Mac and Windows Development and knows the ins and outs.

The biggest hurdle preventing people from porting games from PC to Mac is DirectX. It is a propertiary Windows componant (Unless you count the X-Box version) that will never see the light of day on the Mac. Therefore, if a developer is to port a game to Mac, they have to rewrite half the graphics pipeline to make use of OpenGL calls instead. Not to mention, OpenGL and DirectX differ in archictecture quite a bit from my experiance (I personally perfer OpenGL as it has a nice clean interface). Currently, on the Intel Macs, the OpenGL drivers are not optimised for the x86 platform and are therefore slower than those running on XP. If Apple fix up OpenGL, and the commity behind OpenGL adds in all the shiny things that it lacks under DirectX, maybe people will steer closer to OpenGL as a graphics platform and we could have more games for Macs. It is starting already, as reports have said that the Unreal Engine 3.0 development tools are currently running on Windows, Linux and OS X.

But to answer your question, I do feel that indie dev will give you more exposure to people because of lack of games on OS X, but for Windows there is just that larger user base.

i just want more mods/games available to mac.

i dont know ANY thing about getting PC features to work on macs, i just want to play like every other PC user. i see so many projects here at moddb and they all say something about reporting bugs to bugzilla er what ever, why doesn't some one who knows something about mac and PC just work on it. your average joe who knows nothing about computers wont take time to report something he doesnt understand

i am your average n00b :]

Edited by (in order): Jam3s007, Jam3s007

Most mods are cross-platform, for example, any UT2004 mods will work on Windows, Mac and Linux WITHOUT any code changes. I think this is also the same for StarCraft, and Quake (1). Not too sure about Quake 3, since they can either be compiled in the VM or into DLL's, although I may be wrong.

Also, it may be worthwhile checking out Wine HQ, as it provides a compatibility layer of the Windows API on top of Linux/Unix. Maybe not for Mac OS yet, but it's GNU (I think) so code changes wouldn't be so hard, so maybe there is one out there.

But yeah, Apple need to get their act together with regard to OpenGL support.

Why don't you just get a Windows PC? Surely that would be easiest. Macs aren't meant for gaming.

BlckWyerve wrote: Why don't you just get a Windows PC? Surely that would be easiest. Macs aren't meant for gaming.

ok, i'll just pull $1,500 out my ass and go to the nearest PC retailer and live happily ever after.

thanks for the idea :]

^^ You're going to do the same thing for a Mac with lesser specs anyway. Macs are notoriously expensive.

It's too late for macs to become par in any factors with PC. Mac is dead period.

If you do end up with a Mac, I highly advise scouring the internet for a copy of the Marathon Trilogy, which is easily one of the best game series ever made. With the exception of a single title that was ported over, the entire thing is Mac exclusive.