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Apple Businesses

Half-Life for Macintosh Cancelled 228

Posted by Hemos from the too-bad-for-mac-gaming dept.
Bobbi Style wrote to us with the word from insidemacgames that the Macinoth version of Half-Life has been cancelled. Valve Software sent out a letter explaining that they had found that the version of Half-Life that would be released for the Macintosh was not up to what they wanted the game to be. Rather then treat Mac users as 2nd class citizens, they have decided to simply not release it at all. Disappointing news, however, which also casts doubts on the viability of projects like Tribes 2 for the Mac.
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Half-Life for Macintosh Cancelled More

Half-Life for Macintosh Cancelled

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  • They didn't say anything about it not running well. They just said they didn't want to spend the time bringing it up to full functionality with the Windows version, and they didn't want to accept the annoyance that would come out of a release with features missing.

    I think it's a poor decision (certainly this late in the game), but the only people who can change it is them.
  • This could happen to any Linux game port in a heartbeat. As far as 'coexistence with Windows', it's a very bad sign. It might be that Linux can't trust the commercial world any more than the Mac can. What a rotten day for gaming (also today iEn, makers of Warbirds and Dawn Of Aces, laid off a big big chunk of their staff)
  • It's actually an insanely modified version of the original Quake engine... Half Life came out just a few years later than it was planned to...
  • It clearly mentions some Linux stuff in there, at least on my machine. Can't remember what it is, but it's looking for a .so file in /dll

    It's probably for the server stuff, as there is a Linux v. of Half Life server, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

    I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
    what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'
  • another thing you might want to think about is that maybe mac users don't _want_ games which are a year and a half old.

    Game companies frequently release their mac versions just as the game is ending its cycle of life; frequently the release of the mac version is simultanious with the release of the windows version of the sequel, or the windows version of the next generation of the same kind of game. and then they just assume the mac users won't mind, because hey, they're mac users.
    Like mac tomb raider I and II.. they came out at the same windows tomb tomb raider III was released. Mac Starcraft came out at about the same time that the PC Broodwars expansion pack became really popular.
    These are bad examples, because tomb raider I and II for mac had extra levels that the windows version didn't, and tomb raider III looked pretty bad from the PSX-based demo i got from Pizza Hut, and Starcraft still has a very healthy online gaming community based around it even so long after the original release. But the point is the same; why would mac users want the cold, leftover crumbs of the windows world?
    Even if they HAD released halflife, why would we want it NOW? Quake3 (like halflife only better) is just around the corner, and some form of Tribes (an ORIGINAL game, instead of just more derivitive mindless point-and-shoot..) may be released. Having Halflife would have been cool at the time it was released, but now I for one am no longer very interested in it.

    If the game companies really want any serious showing from the mac users, they should develop all versions of the game at the same time.. or exersize *gasp* good programming, and have a bit of an abstraction layer and write the programs in such a way that instead of calling things in MS-propeitary functions directly, you call functions of your own that call the MS API up for you.. so that later instead of doing the mac/linux version ground-up you can just replace the abstraction layer functions with Sprockets/X (i'm totally BSing this, by the way, i've never written a game and i don't know whether you could really do this without taking a massive performance hit. Maybe if you inlined/#defined the functions it would..? never mind)

    Anyway, the point is, if you release the mac version a year later, when all the mac users have been playing it on friend's PCs for over a year, the mac users are _much_ less likely to actually buy the game. Meaning you'll make less money.
    Oh, and then a funny thinghappens; the game companies just scoff at the idea of porting to the mac in the first place, saying "mac users don't buy games". And ignoring _why_ mac users don't buy games, and if there's anything they could do to get the mac users to buy games..

    [ramble] PS.. whatever happened to ambrosia? they used to be the bomb. Avara was so far ahead of its time it was rediculous. Ah well. Anyway, i want tribes 2 for mac. and a mac capable of running tribes 2. Instead of this 7200/75 with no hardware acceleration. WORMS ARMAGGEDDON ROCKS!! [/ramble]
  • Have you played the game? I was wondering how different it would be from Half-Life or Quake since it is Christianized. What, no super violent mega gib bloodbath setting? Angel wears a C cup instead of Double D? The Bible would probably make incredible subject matter for a FPS, even though it can be really bloody at times.

    The "about the game" section gives some hints about the intentions of the developers. It looks like it is set before the fall of Satan. That seems cool, but Im still wondering about gameplay issues. Hacking someone to death with a sword isnt any better than perforating them with a minigun. Personally, I'd like to see more family friendly games. However I feel like I need to be careful about what religious propaganda that my children are exposed to. How about making games that dont come with prepackaged ideology? Id like to see a return to fun, nonviolent games that value gameplay over graphics. Then all they need to do is port them to the Mac and Linux and we can all have fun.

    Unclean is very cool BTW...

    -BW
  • John Carmack said that only about 15k of Quake 3 is platform-specific, when the first test came out. Bungie has certainly done well, and they don't seem to think their focus on cross-platform simultaneous releases has been a waste of resources. It might take a little more to start the project off, but once you have the engine firmly cross-platform, you end up releasing for two platforms (with an easy way to port to other platforms if desired) for less effort than it would have taken to write for one specific platform at the outset and port to another one later.

    One thing to bear in mind is that while the Mac market is smaller, there is less competition in that part of the marketplace. Releasing for Windows means advertising in a lot of magazines and fighting for recognition against a slew of other games. Releasing for Mac involves fewer platform-specific magazines to advertise in, not to mention that most of the hype for the Windows side would spill over to the Mac side, and it also means that you're releasing to a market starved for current titles.

    Valve may have done the right thing - it is true that the Mac community might have held a grudge if Half-Life had been a bad port. If it had been a good port, though, they might have been able to make up any losses in future sales, since they would have established themselves in the Mac market as a provider of good games.

  • I own a copy of Unreal for the macintosh. It is an excellent game. The best macintosh 3d shooter by far(IMHO). The graphics, maps & multiplay are better than I thought a mac port could ever be.

    Westlake Interactive did a very good job porting the game, except that I still don't have a stable version of 224 or 225. My system meets and surpasses the system requirments and it still freezes up every once in a while. Westlake seems to be aware and working on it, and I am happy about that. What I am not happy about is how the date for Unreal Tournament Mac got pushed back 3 or 4 months for what was supposed to be a simultaneous pc/mac release. I am not surprised though, seeing as mac is releasing OS 9. I am under the impression that Westlake is probably making sure that UT will run clean on OS 9, and the same probably holds true for Descent 3, which I thought I was going to see on Mac store shelves last month or this month.

    My rambling point is this: maybe Sierra is not interested in ironing out OS 9 bugs or optimizations, and have given up because of that. Or maybe Sierra is nervous because of the G4 ordering fiasco. I have hope(however unlikely) that this trend will not continue.

  • As a Mac user I'm completely confuddled by the decision to discontinue Half Life development. First of all, it seems that the decision is based on a kind of speculation that leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. "We don't think the Mac users will forgive us for doing a half-assed job on the Half Life port, so we'd rather avoid looking like the idiots we are..."

    Since when does pre-release user feedback based on rumors of poor PC parity have anything to do with the devotion and quality of effort that goes into a project? Why can't these guys just do a good job, and live up to the spirit of their chosen profession? Really I'm confused... oh...

    Finally, I should say I was looking very much forward to Half Life single-player, had no idea of what was going on with development, and would have bought the game sight-unseen - and I hardly ever buy games. The success of Unreal on the Mac should have demonstrated that Half Life was destined to be a hit.

    Seriously, something very fscked-up is going on with the psychology of these developers.... And it has all the earmarks of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
    Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
  • Sure it's possible to work around problems, but the question is at what time/expense? The game is based on the Quake2 engine, IIRC, which is starting to get a little on the old side. Not onyl that, but there are new cool games coming out (Q3, Unreal Tournament, etc). It's kinda hard to sell a game that has been around for around a year, and by the time the problems were fixed would have been over 2 years old, when your competition is the likes of Q3, UT, and similar titles. Maybe they just decided that they wouldn't be able to get Mac Half-Life out in time to succeed. Let's not get too paranoid about the great anti-Mac conspiracy :)

    Another issue to consider in your comparisons with Quake, Q3, etc is that those games were designed from the beginning to be relatively platform-independent. This makes porting to another OS somewhat trivial. Quake 2 on the other hand, was not (read John Carmack's .plan file for details). Since Half-Life is based on Q2, there are I'm sure many issues with porting to the Mac (or anything else for that matter). The port in this case is NOT easy.

    It seems to me that you're getting upset at the company because after they made an honest effort (as best we know) to make the Mac port, they found it can't be done in a reasonable time schedule (gee, they only have to do a little hacking of the engine, reverse engineer some networking protocols, etc etc.) Give them a break. Things don't always work out how one might want them to. I'm sure they would have loved to ship the Mac version, any company likes to make money. But if they can't do it, they can't. I don't see much point in boycotting Sierra for this, I really don't think it was an attempt to screw over the Mac community. And anyway, I doubt Mac users boycotting the company will have any significant effect, except perhaps to make the PHBs think future Mac ports aren't worth bothering with.

  • and Starcraft still has a very healthy online gaming community based around it even so long after the original release.


    Even if they HAD released halflife, why would we want it NOW?

    You answer your own question. Having been active in it for a good while, I can tell you with certainty that Half-Life does have a strong gaming community based around it. What's more, there are already a dozen mods out for it, some of which are extremely popular (Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike, Action Half-Life, Science and Industry), and more on the way. There's a much-awaited expansion pack, Opposing Force, due out next month.

    Quake3 (like halflife only better) is just around the corner,
    Half-Life is far from dead. Quake III isn't gonna kill it any more than Half-Life killed Unreal. (Well, okay, IMO Half-Life blows Unreal away, but that's just my opinion. :)
    and some form of Tribes (an ORIGINAL game, instead of just more derivitive mindless point-and-shoot..) may be released.

    You've never actually played Half-Life, have you? Well, all right, I'll grant that generic HL multiplay is kind of lacking, but single-play requires a lot of thought rather than just shooting. And the great teamplay mods that have come out (especially Team Fortress Classic and Counterstrike) more than make up for it.

    Of course, according to Gabe's letter, the multiplay feature (and those mods) would have been kind of lacking in Mac Half-Life anyway, which kind of renders the point moot, but still, Half-Life is the best FPS I've yet played, and that includes Q3Atest.
    Having Halflife would have been cool at the time it was released, but now I for one am no longer very interested in it.

    Too bad...you're missing out.
  • To top it off, the same porting house that just brought QUake2 to the Mac is/was porting Half-Life so you KNOW the engine's not the problem.

    if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
  • The state of Mac video cards right now is:

    The original iMac (Rev. A) used an ATI RAGE IIc with 2 MB VRAM, expandable to 6.
    The Rev. B, C, and D (233, 266, 333 MHz - 266 was the beginning of "flavored" iMacs) all use the ATI RAGE Pro, with 6MB VRAM. All A-D iMacs are PCI-based.
    The Blue & White (Yosemite) G3 Macs use ATI RAGE Pro video, but run on a "special" 66 MHz PCI slot.
    The Wall Street and Lombard PowerBooks use the ATI RAGE Pro LT. Lombard may use AGP, I'm not sure. I know that Wall Street is PCI.
    iBook uses the RAGE Mobility video chipset - a tweaked version of the RAGE Pro LT that's supposed to be pin-compatible. It has 4 MB of VRAM (embedded), and the iBook uses a 2X AGP bus for video.
    Finally, the G4 macs all use the ATI RAGE 128 chipset on an AGP 2X bus.

    The ATI RAGE 128-based cards are available as retail cards for the Yosemite G3 Macs, as well as for earlier G3 and PCI PowerMacs. But they're constrained by PCI.

    Virtually all earlier PCI Macs (clones included) use the older ATI Mach64 chipset and it's cousins. The PowerBook 3400 and the original PowerBook G3 (also known as the 3500 or Kanga) use Cirrus Logic video chipsets, with no 3-D acceleration on board.

    I do think that there's OpenGL support for the RAGE IIc and Mach64, but I'm not sure. It wouldn't be too fast, though, given the constraints of both PCI and the earlier ATI chipsets. Fortunately, the Rev. A iMac is the only one that sold in high volume, and it was only on the market for about 2 months (it was announced in May, but it wasn't available until August) before they up-revved it to the B and switched to the RAGE Pro.

    - -Josh Turiel
  • Isn't it funny how people's opinions and motives of something Christian change depending on whether it's expressly produced by evangelical Christians or not? In Nomine, the Steve Jackson Games RPG of demons vs. angels, is simply a game using the war in Heaven as an interesting setting, and I doubt slashdotters would be up in arms over that...but one whiff of serious intent behind it, and boom, it's ridiculous.

    Ummm.. Yes, thank you that's entirely my point.

    I have absolutely no problem with fantasy being used to sell a game. Indeed it's nice to see a scenario that isn't "think of the 10 nastiest knightmare-causers and add guts" and instead makes some use of thousands of years worth of history and mythology in a partially authentic way. But the implication from the website and your own post is that this particular game is in some way morally / spiritually better than normal fantasy / sci-fi first person shooters. This is why I'm "Up in arms"* about this game. It could be released by zen gnostics as far as religious group goes, my problem is I'm being preached to about right and wrong in an internally inconsistent manner.

    henley

    *= actually, I'm still slumped in front of my screen 'n' keyboard trying to keep my eyes open, but please bear with me here.

  • What was wrong with OpenGL, which Apple has implemented under MacOS 8/9? Why couldn't Microsoft used those as a base instead of pushing a totally new and incompatible API, DirectX/3D?
  • As much as GPLing it might result in a finished product, it would still be called "Half-Life" - and Valve would, to some degree, still be seen as being responsible for it.

    There are things that no matter how good a programmer you are, you can't beat - such as the relatively poor 3D performance of the Macs at the moment, due to the lacklustre card they're running still. Perhaps if the G3/G4 came with a better card (not only is the current one a bit old, but it was slower than the PC equivilent right from the start).

    I think we may see quite a few 3D FPS titles not make it to the Mac, or make it, but not as a full quality product, until Apple decide to do something about the 3D video problem the Mac's are suffering from......

  • Andrew Meggs? That's the same guy who... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Andrew Meggs was the same guy who walked away from the RC5 project back when Steve Jobs cancelled MacOS clones. He made this big political statement by taking his source code for the MacOS RC5 client and saying he was protesting this action by Steve Jobs. Christ! I thought after that stunt, no one would trust that guy enough to involve him in a project. Now I read in the first paragraph of the letter (http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/index.shtml)fr om the guy at Valve, "Andrew Meggs at Logicware has been doing a good job on the port..." What the hell?!?! So he got tasked with the responsibility of a port of another piece of software to the MacOS and this time he screwed up the project by running it over budget. I really wish people would blacklist that guy until he gives up his grudge against Apple. What a jackass. sjohnson|at|smart.net
  • This doesn't cast doubts of the viability of Tribes 2, or any other game, for the Macintosh.

    The original developers of a game very often are not the same ones who do a port. I don't know what the case was with this project, but the original developers usually go on to bigger and better things, while the port is either done by less experienced programmers or is farmed out. Some of these developers can produce quality projects, and some can't.

    I think it speaks volumes of Valves' commitment to gamers that they chose to cut their losses and hold back on what they know is an inferior product rather than push it out the door to make a quick buck. We know there are plenty of companies that wouldn't!
  • I don't buy this, "...we don't treat Mac users like 2nd class citizens" spiel one bit. Here's a little quote from the URL:

    However, as we got closer to shipping the product and reality set in, it was increasingly obvious that in order for us to break even
    on the Mac version, much less be profitable, we were going to have to cut some corners.

    Essentialy, its a profit - cost over market_share equation. I'm sure the modern busines model promptly said 'cut' and there goes HL. The next step is the 'spin.' Here's another little snippet from Valve.

    They are happy because we do our best for them, and that's what they expect from us in the future. -SNIP- I would much rather we just eat the money we've spent so far than take money from Mac customers and short-change them.

    Now they're suggesting that they're a responsible company and trying to keep up a decent reputation by 'eating up' the cost. When in reality the could not sell such a shabby product, if they wanted to or not, without a larger loss of revenue.

    Don't quote me as either good or bad here, this is just business as usual.

    At least spin is portable and multi-platform.

  • Re:So? (Score:1)

    by Maul ( 83993 )
    I hardly believe that MacOS is any worse than Windows. I see that a few developers are dropping Mac support in favor of Linux support. What I really want to see is developers dropping Win32 support in favor of Linux support.

    We all can dream can't we?

  • I think I caught one of those in a pond when I was 7.
  • A lot of companies can't afford to develop for Mac at the same time as for Windows; they need to focus their efforts on bringing in the most money in the shortest amount of time, and that spells Windows. Once the Windows version is out, they have to choose between getting the remaining 10% of the market or preparing the Next Big Thing to battle the next wave of competition -- and that's usually a clear choice. It's only with a very large company making a very popular game that they can afford to release a Mac version. Simultaneous Mac/PC releases are virtually unheard of.

    A game company can't scrimp on Mac ports of their games; they need to be feature-complete with the PC version, or else the Mac faithful will scream and yell and boycott the company. Half-Life's failure makes it clear that this is a very steep cliff to climb for very meager rewards (one tenth of the Windows take, at best), and that there just isn't a good return on the investment. Why put your effort into ten percent of the market when you could be putting it into ninety percent? A port is more than ten percent of the original amount of work...

    So simultaneous releases are rarely feasible, and late ports usually aren't a sensible place for a game company to put their resources. Where's this leave the state of Mac gaming, then? Will we ever see the day when a majority of games are simultaneous Mac/PC releases, or when a hit game comes out first on the Mac?

  • I guess there is another reason they are not telling us is the cost issue. Half Life has been out on the PC for quite some time now and maybe they thought that they might never be able to cover the development costs necessary for porting it because people who really want Half Life already have played it on a PC and wouldn't buy it twice.

    Just a thought of mine, not necessarily true.
  • Uhhh. Let's see.

    Microsoft makes a totally proprietary APIs that in some instances has been designed to make it difficult to port to any other API.

    Now they should open these APIs into shared libaries that can be used across multiple platforms. Without breaking existing apps of course.

    Does this sound like Microsoft? It just isn't going to happen... for all that Microsoft cries "open standards", any time they're in control of a closed standard they refuse to open it.
  • I find it annoying that other users besides Mac dudes don't find this incident disturbing. Game developers are increasingly ignoring markets like Macintosh and Linux because they're "small." It's very insulting to think that countless millions of users are ignored, and their potential revenue dismissed as petty. Some people think that the API that Apple uses is pathetic and we should all bow down to Microsoft's DirecctPlay. What is wrong with Apple's API acceptance of OpenGL? Plainly put, it is a portable, scalable, and industry standard gaming API that runs on any platform. With Half-Life being ditched from the Mac, it sends a heartless message to consumers and developers: You aren't anybody unless you use Windows(TM)... no matter how crappy, proprietary, and ugly the code.. it just makes more money for developers.. period. Bottom line is everything and consumer choice is irrelevant. Things need to change and I'm hoping that you Linux/Unix/whoever guys will realize that when Mac users get shafted by software developers it will eventually or indirectly affect you too! In some ways Mac users and Linux/Unix/other users share the same disadvantage of being underdogs in the marketing/corporate standpoint. Only by resisting such developer prejudice can we make the Windows-diluted press realize that there are "other" people on this planet. It's obvious that the mainstream press doesn't give a damn about Macs/unix.. CNN's online site list of top 10 budget pcs don't even mention the TOP SELLING iMac nor do does their top power PCs include any PowerPCs! They regard Unix and its variants as rogue software only used by hobbyist tinkers and not by people of productivity. We need to gain more public attention... we can't get ahead by just always watching for Microsoft's "daily bug and security flaw" (however it's so invigorating to constantly see this in the news). We need to contact developers and let them know what we think and tell them that dammit... WE DON'T USE WINDOWS AND WE ARE REAL PEOPLE.. AND WE DESERVE SOFTWARE!!
    OpenGL at Apple's site [apple.com]

    -----
    Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
  • There is a world of difference porting a game that was written using the specific advantages of one operating system over to another system, and creatinga game from the ground up with multi-platform interoperability in mind.

    Valve couldn't turn Half-Life for the Mac into the same semi-high-quality product it was on the Windows platform. Half-Life is a buggy piece of shit on the PC. Great game though.

    Trust me on this, if the Mac version didn't include TFC, you'd be pissed. If you couldn't connect to the servers that are available, you'd be pissed. The auto-update function is superfluous. If you couldn't use all the mods that are available or all the mapos, you'd be pissed.

    I think it was BS that they announced the port and then backed out of it, but the port wasn't goign to give you the award winning game of Half-Life, it was going to give some half-baked piece of crap that had shitty models (I've seen the screen shots and they sucked bigtime compared to the PC game).

    No Microsoft isn't conspiring against Apple. That is ludicrous in light of the lawsuit against them. They need Apple around to prove that there is viable competetition in the market. If there are "Halloween Papers" outlining MS's strategy against Apple, I'd like you to post them, otherwise, quit trying to blow smoke up everybody's ass. Save it for Art Bell.
  • I posted here yesterday about my disapointment in Half-Life being cancelled. I have been reading everyone's views and I am going to try to do the following: 1. Find 5-10 programmers to finish this, volunteers welcome! (Send cv/portfolio) 2. Go to our bank and BUY the porting contract for $250,000 (preferibly less) to finish and release Half-Life. This is much less risk than what our record label usually takes with product! 3. Form a new Mac Games company. If that is all it requires, which is less risk than the music industry, I see no reason as an avid gamer and business prospector to not do this. If there are any Sierra people reading this, please email me at : Bobbi.Style@LTLrecords.com. Also, any well versed and experienced Mac programmers. Our office's G4's & G3's await you! Yours sincerely Bobbi Style CEO-President LTL Records Ltd - LakesWEB Communications Ltd http://www.LTLrecords.com http://www.LakesWEB.com
  • PS.. whatever happened to ambrosia?

    Ambrosia is very much alive and kicking. As a matter of fact, many, many new games are on the way out, including one really nifty one I can't talk about because of NDA's.

    http://www.ambrosiasw.com/
  • Reading Andrew Meggs's .plan updates, there was never any indication that the game could not run well on the Mac, and given that the game is almost 2 years old anyway, performance should be more than sufficient on the current generation of hardware.

    This decision is political, not technical. Somehow, Valve thought that by cancelling such a hotly-anticipated game they could avert a flood of angry emails. Well, I bet they are getting a flood of angry emails right now.

  • Ambrosia's still around and still making games as well as utilities. http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/ [ambrosiasw.com] has the full scoop. Their games still aren't really up-to-snuff with commercial games, though, if you want my opinion. It would help if Andrew Welch spent less time being a freak and more time coding! (Are you listening, Andrew, you psycho? ;)

  • Hmmm, Q3A for the Mac is looking better by the second - it's a shame that Valve couldn't get a decent port of Half-Life done for the Mac, as it would pretty much have been the only real competition for Q3A in the current generation FPS genre......
  • The PSX2 may be ahead of current game hardware, but remember, it's not even available yet. By the time it's released in Japan, there will be chips well in excess of 1GHz, and at LEAST one new generation of graphics cards. Also, keep in mind that the PSX2 will be on the market for a few years. By the end of that time, it will be a joke compared to PCs, just as the PSX1 is not even comparable to a PIII with a TNT2U. Consoles are always somewhat more advanced when they are released, but the PCs *always* catch up and pass them. ALWAYS.

    -----------------------

  • OK ... lets see

    which settings? (all to maximum?)
    which resolution (1024x768 being minimum, right?)
    how much fps (less than 30 is not playable)

    ... what do you call *great* ?
  • Yep, Wintel is even better than Playstations these days.

    The difference being, DirectX doesn't choke out halfway through a game, and you don't need to download newer drivers. Pure silliness.

    - Scott
    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • Apple should negotiate with Microsoft to include an Apple implementation of the DirectX API.

    Carmack once discussed this possibility in a plan update -- dicussing options for 3D graphics platforms. In essence, he felt that this would be stupid, as Apple would be guaranteed to always get a later release from MS, ala Microsoft Office. In the end, he felt OpenGL was a better choice.


    Additionally, Apple should work on a better gaming API than DirectX, and make it available for Win95/98/NT

    This seems like a suicide mission. There's no way Apple is going to be able to get better performance and functionality out of Windows than Microsoft.

    - Scott

    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • a Quote from Gabe Newell of Valve Software: . . I would much rather we just eat the money we've spent so far than take money from Mac customers and short-change them.

    I'm happy to see someone willing to stand up and take action when a project is all over the floor.

    Hey Gabe! Throw the port source under GPL and let a fresh set of eyes hack a bit.

  • Even though Meggs may be anti-Apple, he works for Logicware. I doubt they hired him for political reasons, just that he can port code. And porting code to MacOS is virtually all that Logicware does. They were the ones that did Quake II for the Mac.

    J.
  • I hear (this is second hand knowlege) that the code for Half Life is really deeply involved with MFC's (Microsoft Foundation Classes) and REALLY hard to port outside of Windows.

    Can I get a comment on this?
  • I'm supprised that it doesnt seem to run well on a Mac. Some of these macs are pumped up higher than my AMD 450 (not sitting in canola oil). Poor poor apple.


    -Tim
  • Am I the only one here who noticed that they refer to "the Fallen path of Knowledge"? Christianity appears to frown upon learning, which is one of the greatest virtues in the world. Learning is not against God!

    -----------------------

  • Ah well. (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    And here I thought the Macintosh had a short Half Life. :)

    At least Carmack (with Quake) and Netscape (from the beginning, but especially with Mozilla) managed to get this one right. Program cross-platform apps from the beginning, use or make standard libraries to simplify your task.

    This is a lesson that I would like to see Microsoft learn. They release software late for the Macintosh all the time. (and some Mac users were happy about this? Anyone who thought Office '98 was better than Office '97 because it had a higher version number deserves to be stuck using it....)
    ---
    pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
  • at least they didn't try and release a shoddy product. This goes to show that game developers have standards when it comes to releasing good products. This is very unlike "business solutions" software being ported to different OSes. The only business software that works on both windows and MAC is sad to say is made by microsoft. They rewrite the code from scratch, and it works great.

    On the other hand, in the world of design software, Adobe and Macromedia's software is horrible on the windows platform. I hate to say this, but companies should take the microsoft approach and rewrite it from scratch.

    Also, someone should tell the makers of halflife that they should opensource the engine, and let the public port it to any OS they please. They still retain the rights to all the other pieces of software in the package. I don't understand why companies just don't opensource the important parts of the software.
  • This might have been funny except for one thing:

    Half Life is built on the Quake engine.

    Granted, nearly everything except the 3D engine is completely new, but it's still got Quake internals at it's core.

    And Quake, Quake 2, and obviously Quake 3 have been ported to the Mac. The engine isn't the problem. Mac -> PC networking is a reality with them, so networking them isn't an insurmountable problem.

    What is the problem? Valve? Didn't they just have responsibility to "sign off" on releases, not to foot the bill? Sierra, being the publisher, is the one signing the checks, since they're the ones getting the money from distributors and dispersing it to appropriate parties.

    In other words - this smells.
  • I believe that one of the reasons the Mac market is a lot smaller than it could be is the fact that developers release the Mac port of the PC game way too late. Think about it. For instance, the day "SuperDuperGame" comes out to the market, there is a load of fanfare. PC gamers rejoice. The commercials are all over television. PC game websites write their reviews. All of them mention that the game is compatible with Playstation and WINDOWS PCs.. no mention of Mac. INSTANT turn off to normal Mac consumers. These guys will never hear of it again, unless they're the few diehards that dig for info and know the port is coming out "next year" or so. Okay, well the game company just lost out on a few million potential Mac sales. They then port the game a year later and expect Mac people to buy it in droves.. BUT there is no damn fanfare... no commercials, no TV exposure, no more PC game magazines even have it mentioned in their archives anymore.. a typical consumer would have given up long ago and assumed that the title was never for the Mac and think that good games don't exist for the Mac. This is just B-S to put it bluntly. How can you expect millions of people to know about, recognize, go bezerk, and buy this "SuperDuperGame" a year late without alerting the mainstream press, TV, and such. Mac users are consumers too.. most don't go hunting in rumor sites for game info.. they watch TV and read mags to find out what's new. Marathon was a best-selling game for Macintosh.. why? Not only was it a great game, but it was released for the Mac FIRST, with a ton of fanfare. StarCraft sold to Mac users.. but only in disappointing numbers... well hell it shipped a YEAR late and lots of people assumed a Mac version didn't exist. Heck, do you think gaming magazines would start reprinting StarCraft ads in 1999 (and for that matter, mentioning it was for Mac)? I don't buy this smaller market crap. I would bet money that a company which released a great PC title along with the Mac version simultaneously AND advertised it as such (Mac and PC compatible! WOW!) would have Mac sales tremendously higher than if they ported it later.

    -----
    Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }

  • Re:So? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The funny thing about comments like "the Mac has the worst OS on the planet," is that if (and it's a big "if") there had been decent GL and Glide support a few years back, and decent drivers -- which are not part of the OS -- the MacOS would actually be the best gaming OS on the planet. The reason is the same reason that most people say the MacOS sucks (and why it usually does): A single process can starve the entire processor. (Pro audio and video editing software has been taking advantage of this fact on the Mac for years.) In other words, a game could get every single cycle....

    (Insert obligatory disclaimer about memory protection, multi-user support, security and the rest being missing in the MacOS.)

  • Misinformed as usual (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20, 1999 @12:09AM (#1600025)

    Half-Life for the Mac is not being cancelled because of DirectX, or poor performance on a crappy OS, or because it's based on the LithTech engine, or because it's impossible to make a decent first-person shooter on the Mac.

    Half-Life is based on the Q2 engine. Folks, Q2 is available for the Mac right now, and it plays well. Unreal runs well, and you can expect Unreal Tournament and Q3A to run well, too.

    Half-Life for the Mac used OpenGL, and was working great. DirectX is not part of the equation.

    Valve (the developer) made the decision to cancel the port, not Sierra, the publisher. Note that this is a little unusual as the publisher generally pays a fee to the developer in exchange for the right to license their material to a different firm to actually handle the port, so ordinarily Sierra would be the ones cancelling it.

    The reasons that Half-Life for the Mac was cancelled had mainly to do with networking issues. I'm going to take a wild, uninformed leap and suggest that the reason for this is that Half-Life for the PC was written to use DirectPlay, Microsoft's extremely proprietary networking protocol. DirectPlay cannot and will not be ported to any platform other than Windows, as Microsoft won't license it, and most likely sees DirectPlay as a competitive advantage to keep the best games on Windows. Half-Life for the Mac may indeed have been a victim of this strategy.

    I'm not that worried about game support on the Mac. It's getting better:

    Apple did have a proprietary gaming API (gamesprockets). And a proprietary 3-D api (qd3d/rave). And a proprietary game networking api(netsprockets). And according to developers who have used them, every one of those api's was vastly superior to the then-current standards. And guess what? Not many games. Now that Apple's pretty much killed all those in favor of cross-platform standards like OpenGL, we're getting some pretty good games. And the current generation of Mac hardware, while a little behind current Wintel standards, is still pretty darn cross-platform as well: PCI, AGP, USB, etc. (You can take a 3dfx card out of your PC and plug it right into a Mac. Not too shabby. And there are two independent programmers working on TNT2 drivers, too, so Mac users won't be stuck with *cough* ATI forever.)

    I still would like to see Valve change their minds, and release Half-Life for the Mac even if it is crippled. Sure, there's a vibrant online community surrounding Half-Life, but the single-player game is what really turned the PC gaming world on its head last year. Here's hoping Valve revisits their decision soon (and here's hoping the Mac zealots don't knee-jerk themselves into doing something stupid like mailbombing Valve).

    --
    Anonymous cowards are working on a massively multiplayer shared first-person persistent virtual reality that's cross-platform, open source and hosted on thousands of independent servers.

  • Re:So? (Score:1)

    by Xenny ( 88535 )
    Oh great, another "Mine's bigger than yours" type argument.

    So you run a dualboot system. You are obviously soooo much more skilled than all those dumb lusers out there who don't know how, especially the Mac users. Do you ever write any Perl scripts? Are you familiar with "There's more than one way to do it"???

    So just why is MacOS the WORST OS on the market? I think you'll probably find if you went out and really asked people what they think, the vast majority of Windows users would say something along the lines of "Huh? OS? What's that?"
    Why are Macs not games machines? I remember showing some friends of mine Marathon Infinity's network gameplay and them being completely blown away by it - and some of them were hardcore Quake players!

    Game developers have better things to do than blow time and money producing a game for a niche product that doesn't have nearly as many gamers as x86 machines do.

    Just like publishers shouldn't publish any books that don't sell in airport bookstalls, TV moguls shouldn't make community TV shows, minority newspapers shouldn't be allowed, expensive sports cars shouldn't be made as only a few people can afford them... the thing is that the Mac is hardly a 'niche' product. Whatever percentage Apple currently have of the market is still pretty damned amazing when you consider just how many computers get sold each year.
    Do us all a favour and go get some perspective before you start shouting your worthless drivel at us.
    And yes, before you shout, I have two Macs. I also have about fifty various Linux/Solaris/HPUX boxes to look after at work, along with a RH6 box on my desk and a W98 laptop. I use them all.

    There's more than one way to do it
  • Apparently, at least Apple has revived its gaming API, Game Sprockets. It is a highly advanced programming standard and is very well documented along with OpenGL. Hopefully some forward-thinking companies will catch on and try it in their next PC-Mac ports. For a cool description of what was shown at a recent Game DevCon...
    take a peek here! [apple.com]

    -----
    Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }

  • Re:So? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Having experience with MacOs, Windows, Linux (Suse) and BeOs, I believe I should set the record straight here. MacOs is NOT the worst system out there. Granted, it has plenty of flaws, and granted again, you shouldn't buy it if you want to play games. However saying that MacOs can only run Adobe software is idiotic. There are a number of things that Macs do better than other platforms. One is recording multitrack direct-to-disk. With its better multitasking, Linux could do that even better, but it lacks the software (VST effects, etc) and support for high-end sound acquisition hardware. Between Mac fans touting the mac as the panacea and those poking fun at it without really knowing much about it, it's amazing how many myths float about this platform. The truth is the Mac is still relevant for a limited market of people with very specific creative needs (Publishing, music recording, etc). This relevance may dwindle if support for BeOs increases, but this battle is not won yet. Also MacOs X, due early next year, may bring considerable improvement to the platform, as it should be Unix technology dressed up with the Mac's superior interface. That is, if Apple doesn't screw up again, something they seem to be as good at as designing good GUIs...
  • >The Blue & White (Yosemite) G3 Macs use ATI RAGE Pro video, but run on a "special" 66 MHz PCI slot.

    Wrong. The Yosemites have and have always had a Rage 128.
  • still, it came out in an odd-numbered year (1999), so they're still going by the original plan.
    maybe they'll continue this pattern and release Office 2001 for the mac in the year 2000, and then Office 2010 for windows in the year 2001, and so on until by 2006 they release "office 4029" for linux and go bankrupt.. [trails off]
  • Half-Life cancelled? That's terrible. I was really looking forward to it. There are many games coming out in the near future for Mac. Some of them may even be playable on my system (150MHz 604 w/ 3Dfx). I may even get a G3 upgrade. But of all the games coming out, I'm very picky...average shooters have long bored me. Although I loved the Marathon series and
    Dark Forces, DOOM & Quake & Duke Nukem & Shadow Warrior etc have always bored me. I pretty much won't buy anything I can't demo 1st to see if I like it. I only am interested in really good
    stuff (it isn't just the $...I simply don't have time to play as much as I'd like, and I don't want a collection of $50 coasters). Of all the stuff coming out that might be playable by me, with or without a demo I only have high hopes of Oni, Heretic II, & Half-Life living up to being something I would want. Things I might well buy even if I couldn't demo 1st. Half-Life has garnered so many awards, it must have something great going for it. And now I won't get that chance. Nothing's going to step in to take it's place. I still have hopes for Oni & Heretic II, but even with Half-Life gone I don't expect to have any interest in Quake III (same-old same-old), Unreal Tournament, Star Wars Racer, or all the other carbon-copy or dull stuff out there.
    Hopefully I'll demo something that will run for me and surprise me as to how good it can be. I guess I'll have to wait & see.
  • My goof. I thought it was Rage Pro. I'm sure I've got the PCI-66 part right, though.

    - -Josh Turiel
  • More accurately, they said they didn't want to spend the money. So in the end, it was a BEAN COUNTER decision.

    Hey Steve Jobs, what ya gonna do about THAT? Mac's a second-rate gaming platform. SO FIX IT!

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
  • Microsoft isn't going to "learn" anything. How the hell are they supposed to learn when the current situation HELPS them? It's in their interest to promote technologies like MFC and DirectX, because it locks developoers into the Microsoft platform, and causes people to say, "hey, I wanna play games like Half-Life, so I'm going to buy a PC, not a Mac".

    By the way, Linux developers do this too, by releasing binary-only x86 software, and pissing on the LinuxPPC and Linux Alpha markets.

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
  • Well, as far as I know, the PSX2 is going to be running on some variant of Linux. So, it makes people wonder how many of those games are going to be ported for desktop Linux systems? Which will be great, because you'd be able to play wicked games on your nice hardware machine. So it looks like the PCs will be able to catch up even more. :)
  • They didn't have to release a shoddy product. All they had to do was to stick it out and finish the damn project, and not be weenies.

    By the way, Photoshop is now built first for Windows, and rewritten for Macintosh. So why does the Windows version still suck?

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
  • put them all to the sword. Every last man, woman, and child. . .

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
  • But Newell didn't dispute the fact that Half-Life would have done well on the Mac. Heck, Duke Nukem 3D/Mac's development paid for itself within hours of going on sale--and one day isn't enough lead time for the Mac gaming market to make an informed purchse, so all of that was based on the strength of DN3D/PC's reputation.

    Newell talks about having happy, satisfied PC customers, versus having ticked-off, short-changed Mac customers. Well, sadly, Mac gamers are used to making compromises on ported apps, so while it would have been a minor irritation, it wouldn't have been enough to keep the game from selling well. Also, the Mac game market is significantly smaller than the PC game market; Half-Life for Mac would have done well simply by virtue of the fact that the competition isn't that strong right now.

    Of course, if Newell really cared about doing right by the Mac community, he would have made Half-Life 2 cross-platform from the start.

  • PCs and Macs are different. I too have never bought a PC, only ever built them. But as Mac people are so fond of pointing out, one of the reasons for the "success" of MacOS in terms or reliability etc is the uniform hardware base. Until very recently hardly anyone ever changed hardware on their Macs. Until a couple of years ago they were all soldered on chipsets anyway. Now the case is (I think) that with PCI you can add Matrox, nVidia etc, provided drivers are available. But the whole culture of component upgrade isn't really there....I guess that will change tho.

    Oh and as I said Rage128 DOES support the API's ... that's not the issue I was discussing.

    I guess it's obvious that IANAMU (I Am Not A Mac User)...I wasn't having a go at anyone, just pointing out what I saw as an error in the previous post.
  • hey, I think Unreal Tournament is going to be out for the mac, as some AC above has noted. It is, in my opinion, a lot more fun than q3 anyhow. I wanted to point out that they are also making a linux version, which should be dandy.
  • But when it comes down to quality, I'd rather wait for a quality product, than have the shelves cluttered with shovelware like we see over at the Windows gaming section. Glad to see that they did the right thing.
  • >What do you think...is Sierra dying? Will they
    >be dead and gone by a couple years from now?

    As far as I'm concerned, when they laid off the entire Yosemite Entertainment group (most of the classic hard working Sierra folk), that was when Sierra slit it's collective wrists.

    Then to see whats left of the company butcher it's product line, (like you said, with some of them EAGERLY awaited and almost completely ready to ship), is like watching watching an old friend on his death bed writhe in agnoy.

    This bit about the Mac Half-Life being cancelled really sucks. I'm not a Mac guy, but I sympathize with them. I had high hopes for a Linux port of the client, also denied.

    If it's as difficult to port as it sounds, then damn. The actual game itself is nice enough, but some of their design decisions leave me a bit mystified: being forced into 640x480x16-bit to access the game menu (even while playing), hiding access to the 'console' behind a command line switch, etc. If that sort of mentality carried though into the source, I'm not suprised.

    (But hey, the game itself is some of the best FPS action I've ever experienced so far. A shame they inadvertently limited that experience to only the Windows 95 crowd.)
  • If there is no Mac port for money/commerce reasons then were's the money for a Linux one? (I do use Linux PPC.)
  • >This might have been funny except for one thing:
    >Half Life is built on the Quake engine.

    You wrote, word for word, exactly what I was thinking while reading that. :)
  • In an IRC chat with some of the Valve guys a while ago, I asked them if they'd allow someone to attempt a Linux port if the person worked signed under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. They said "sure".

    I think now, all it would take is someone with some good Win95 porting skills to give it a shot and ask permission (possibly making it more portable in the process and then be ported to Macs...?)

  • Re:It's a sad day for gaming.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OpenGL is not a "gaming API" among other things. (for instance, it doesn't support sound)

    DirectX is.
  • Well, one option is to turn your threshold to -1. Did you try that?

    Also, while it sucks that HL is not coming to the Mac, I am not too worried. I have three computers: an old Power Mac as a voice controlled MP3 jukebox, a Windowze box for games, and a beige G3 (soon to be a Graphite G4, mwahahhahahaaa...) for everything else.

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack
  • > Until very recently hardly anyone ever changed hardware on their Macs.

    This isn't entirely true. Since about '88 most Macs have had expansion slots (Nubus and/or PDS, later PCI). The main uses have been processor upgrades (in some cases containing almost-complete motherboard rehauls) and fancy 2d graphics accelrators; also some video and sound editing boards. However, consumer 3D cards came late to the Mac.
  • Aren't Apple's gaming APIs now open source as part of the "OpenPlay" portion of Darwin?
  • Agreed. Co-op multitasking looks good on paper and in some cases is very useful (say, when you're sharing computing resources with other users). With a Mac, though, you generally want the front-most process hogging the CPU as much as possible. I'll take preemptive multitasking any day, but not if it slows down my Photoshop filters.

    The REAL problem on the Mac has been, in my opinion, the lack of real good memory protection. In particular, extentions (or for the old school, 'INITs') have been the bane of Mac users wanting stability. I do think though that this has improved quite a bit in the last couple years through, from MacOS 8 and up, and to a very limited degree in MacOS 7.6.1.

    Recent versions of the OS can run a couple weeks straight without a reboot. This is nothing compared to a well-tuned Linux box, but I'm not promoting the MacOS as a server OS either. For a workstation, it's perfectly usable.

    - Darchmare
    - Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
  • I wouldn't take him too seriously. From what I can tell, he has some 'issues' to take care of. Inbreeding may be a distinct possibility. Anyone who uses the term 'Crapple' with a straight face deserves whatever they get.

    As for Perl scripts, well, I'm proof that Mac users can hack Perl.

    Anyhow, thanks for the open mind. :>

    - Darchmare
    - Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
  • Which 3D problem?
    OpenGL is the standard, and most new Mac's support it.
    The only problem is, that some software uses non standard techniques like DirectX.
  • Okay, enough Microsoft Bashing. Microsoft considers their OS code the Crown Jewels, (as does just about everyone) not the API. The API is published. Using the published API, one could write an implementation for DirectX for any platform.

    Also, Microsoft and Apple have a symbiotic relationship. Apple gets Microsoft Apps on their platform, and Microsoft gets to wave Apple around and say (look, we have a competitor, see).

    Furthermore, as Microsoft's "investment" in Apple (non-voting, non-convertable, non-useful preferred stock, gee, Apple drops a lawsuit, and Microsoft pays $150m for a worthless piece of paper and several software pledges) demonstrates, Apple has something on them. Apple probably has enough leverage to get Microsoft to work with them to get the new version specs out earlier.

    If not, Apple could start working with the developer SDKs to know the interface, and start writing their own implementation. Even if the new libraries open up for Apple 6 months after Microsoft, that's about the same time that games come out requiring the new version. With DirectX, porting times could drop from a year to a matter of weeks to a few months, with appropriate beta testing still needed of course.

    Alex
  • They still recieved a large chunk of the Quake II source from ID.. Read the Valve interviews.
    Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
  • A quick hack is not commercial-quality software.
  • "Throw all that hard work down tubes"?

    Do consider what we are talking about here, really. A small group of programmers working for 3-4 months. This is probably somewhere around $40-60 thousand dollars.

    Those are the sunk costs. Any economic analysis starts by discarding sunk costs because in the end, they don't matter. Psychologicaly they do, but when you are looking at profitability, they don't matter.

    Now, we need to add the costs of finishing the project (another month? Who knows?), beta testing, marketing, distribution, etc. Then we need to come up with a figure to represent the "bad feelings" that the game may generate, as well as the support costs that come up afterwards (patches, tech support, etc.)

    I don't know these numbers, chances are nobody outside the developers do. But it's not as simple as saying that the game was almost finished therefore they should have released it.

    Personally, I think that ports are a bad idea. Getting a game that was a hit a year ago and then porting it to another platform invariably ends up with discrepancies in the support, having the game really be treated as a second class citizen.

    Now, there's a difference with games that weren't ports, but were coded that way. For example, the games by Bungie and Blizzard. There's also Imperialism II, by SSI. Those were good cross-platform games, and didn't feel like ports.

    r.
  • It's great you enjoy playing Quake3 Arena under 640x480 at 30fps. However, the standard for demanding gamers dictate that 30fps is barely adequate. In order to get really smooth action, you need 40+ fps.

    Also, you didn't mentiont the color depth you were running at.

    Half-Life is a great game. Fantastic detail as well as good game play. But you lose a lot of the fun if you can't see the game the way it was intended to be seen. Imagine admiring a Monet painting through a telescope or through a TV broadcase. Just not the same thing.
  • If i remember correctly, the NetSprocket part of the latest GameSprockets was actually partly written by the almighty Bungie, to be used with Myth: The Fallen Lords (and Myth II). It was seamlessly cross-platform.
  • then those laid off developers should sit
    down and start programming for Linux. A
    huge gaming market is emerging there, crying
    for products and competition.

    Fire them, and they will come. ;-)

    Uwe
  • dude, it's a lot easier when you wrote the engine rather than build from it. q2 was made and optimized for q2, it's hard to make the quake engine into a non quake game becuase of it. Value modified 90% of the code to do it.

    Be happy they at least tried the port. Not too many publishers or devlopers are interested in mac games becuase they don't beleive they will profit from them. Sometimes they don't even beak even for pc games.

    rob seres
    dreamforge intertainment

  • modified or not, they have no right to publically release the code if even ONE LINE was written by john carmac
  • I suppose you could do a port of Half-Life between April and September of the same year? Regardless of Meggs 'political statement' or personal reasons, the man knows his stuff. Is your name listed in the credits for the RC5 project?
    Check out his information on one of his previous projects [antennahead.com] which includes some notes on working on the Half-Life port. Also check his .plan (andrew@logicware.com) for some of his comments.
    Just because the port was canceled doesn't mean the team (or person) doing the port is incapable of producing a good product.
  • Doesn't option 1 basically invalidate the trend toward microkernels and preventing direct hardware writes? The whole point of the NT kernel was to prevent programs from accessing the hardware directly, potentially crashing the entire system.
  • With the Tribes Killer, Halo, by bungie.com, I can hardly think that the platform isn't performing, just the portability. People who plan too much with the DirectSDK are just getting themselves locked into a titantic.

    -Malachi

  • The guy in charge of development now is from NeXT, which bodes well for the OS...
  • This is a load of bollocks. MS do not rewrite for Mac, they use Windows-API-emulating wrappers, thereby making painfully slow Mac stuff. Adobe has been increasing their Intel optimization over the board.
  • There WAS a superior cross-platform 3d API than DirectX. It was called QuickDraw3D.

    It was "Steved" in favor of OpenGL.

    Ask anyone who used it, it was a great high-level 3d API. It lives on in an Open Source project called QUESA (they're trying to make it live on top of the Mesa OpenGL implimentation).

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
  • Which 3D problem?
    OpenGL is the standard, and most new Mac's support it.
    The only problem is, that some software uses non standard techniques like DirectX.

    Windows has OpenGL too, and has had it for years. The problem is the second thing you mentioned. the "non standard" technique of DirectX. Unfortunately (and much to my disappointment) DirectX is the De Facto standard for game development these days. You can't go into Comp-USA and find any games just written for DOS with a company's own library set. DirectX and Direct3D (which is what I think you meant to say) are easy to code for abstractions that make life easier for developers to develop their games. I'm not saying this is a good thing (I know quite a few games that kick modern FPS games in quality -- like ultima 7) but it is definitely the thing du jour.
  • I dont see valve liscencing the q3 engine,consider ing it' multiplayer only and valve is allready programming thinks like parametric animation into tf2. It seems like getting the q3 liscence would be a step backwards.(oooh but look at the pretty not so curved surfaces!)

  • In reference to Eternal Warriors [eternalwarriors.com].

    I've had many emotions and thoughts in the 5 minutes since I made the mistake of following the link.

    Mostly, I think I've been spoofed. On the offchance that this IS real, then what's the message?

    "Death, killing, blood and war is bad, mmkay? You shouldn't play Quake" But: "Death, war, blood is good as long as it's Angels vs Demons" ?

    No, I can't believe it. This is a spoof, right?

    Please?

    henley

  • Actually, testing on a Mac is a b*tch. One bad pointer and your machine is toast, due to no memory protection. Forget to relinquish control of the program and the OS never saves you, you have to reboot. Best to do lots of debugging on the Windows machine and then struggle through the macintosh development afterwards. But if Macintosh had some level of security in the operating system, you could probably get done testing a lot faster than on a PC. Then again, I've never tried to collect 'one of everything' for PCs before I released a program. If you are releasing an OpenGL game, you are pretty much limited to three machines - G3, G4, and third rev iMac (they changed the video card when they started making them in other colors). Now the iBook and the new version of the iMac. That is still a lot of hardware to test on. I usually just test it on the PC by swapping out video cards. Hardware is abstracted for most things besides 3d video, so if there is a problem it is more likely a system issue than an appication issue. So if issues like that come up after release, I just work with the person (sometimes even having them send me their computer for testing!) to get it fixed for them. So far, it has always been the user messing with the registry settings or bad hardware/ram.

  • Disappointing... (Score:4)

    by Robotech_Master ( 14247 ) on Tuesday October 19, 1999 @09:59PM (#1600117) Homepage Journal
    ...here I'd been telling all my Macophile friends about how good Half-Life was, and some were even looking forward to playing it. I'd been hoping I would be able to gib them on my favorite 3D-shooter game, but alas...and if Gabe's note is to be believed, I wouldn't have been able to anyway.

    I posted about this to the Half-Life newsgroup, and thus far every one of the 10 or so responses has been resoundingly antiMac ("Great! Now they need to cancel the Macintosh!"). Losers

    When I mentioned this to some of my chatroom friends, they wondered if Gabe's note might not be the whole story. Sierra, it seems, is being gutted from the inside out, with even some of the more popular games being pulled for no apparent reason (such as the B5 flightsim, which was essentially ready for release when it was canned...what sense does that make?). They seem, my friend suggested, to be staking their life on "Deer Hunter".

    What do you think...is Sierra dying? Will they be dead and gone by a couple years from now?

    I'm glad that Half-Life: Opposing Force is being made by another company...means there's much more chance we'll actually get to see it.

    In related news, has anyone heard about the Christian first-person-shooter game [eternalwarriors.com] that's hitting stores this week? There was a story in the NY Times about it the other day. It sounds like a dumb idea, but then, so did "Deer Hunter" and look at how well that's done.
  • An engine isn't 'Multiplayer only' by design.

    Anyway, the q3a is already being used for Star Trek : Voyager 3l33t SomethingOrOther and Heavy Metal : FAKK2, neither of which look like intense multiplayer games.
  • You're completely misinformed yourself.
    It has nothing to do with DirectPlay. The IP networking code is based on Quakeworld.
    I love this...something happens that is Not Good, and everyone does their damndest to blame it on Microsoft.
    Grow up.
  • That's what this is. Logicware could easily have made Half-Life for the Mac have total feature-parity with the PC version, or even have added features (as evidence, I give you Westlake Interactive, who has done this with Quake, Unreal, the Tomb Raider series, Shadow Warrior, Unreal Tournament, Total Annhilation, Railroad Tycoon 2, Alpha Centauri, Madden NFL 2000, and others). The fact is, they chose not to.

    Why? I don't know for certain, though I have a few suspicions. I do know that Logicware's Andrew Meggs, head of the Half-life project, is very anti-Mac, and has been since his shareware company fell flat after releasing one game. He even says as much if you read the original press release; he's happy to not be working on a Mac project anymore. But hey, why was Sierra dumb enough to put a well-known Mac-loather on the Half-Life team, anyway? That would be like putting John Dvorak on the design team for the next generation of iMac.

    Look. None of the reasons Sierra cancelled the project were actually valid, because all of them could have been worked around. Quake/MacOS is compatible with PC mods, so Half-Life (which, last I checked, was based on Quake) has no excuse not to be. Quake/MacOS's networking code works perfectly with its PC counterparts, so Half-life has no excuse there, even with this DirectPlay stuff (if worse comes to worst, networking protocols aren't that tough to decode, especially when you're paid to do it, and since reverse-engineering to achieve compatibility is known to fall under the fair use clause there's no problem there).

    Whatever. I won't be buying Sierra or Logicware stuff for a long time because of this. Even though it probably won't happen, I hope that Sierra takes their code to Westlake and pays them to finish it; they'll do it right.
  • Hurry, go quickly to the WAR IN HEAVEN homepage! Go to the characters page! Go see THE BEST VIDEO GAME EVIL EVER: UNCLEAN!!! Here's a direct link to UNCLEAN: War in Heaven Characters [eternalwarriors.com].

    I know what I'm going as for Halloween! (hint: it's UNCLEAN!!!!)

  • Hey guys. I'm just attaching this here since it's near the top. There's a petition going on to save Half Life at Demand Mac. [demandmac.com]
  • The problem with game programming, is that much of the code is related to grpahics and sound. This is not possible to do universally. There are two ways to do this.

    1. Program to the metal
    This way, you write code the directly manipulates the hardware and provides the fastest possible speed. The drawback is that you now have code that is specific to one video card/sound card. Basically, you write your own procedures for sending the assembly code via interupts. This is the old way. Remember DOS games where you would select your sound card from a list? The list was REALLY small until manufacturers released useful APIs for programming to their cards.
    2. Use an API that encapsulates the hardware
    This is the DirectX/OpenGL/Glide approach. (Yes Glide is 3dfx specific, but it still abstracts the hardware, and you could write a glide driver for anything, and I believe that there is one for the TNT2).
    This requires that manufacturers provide the implementation for the API for their hardware. i.e. you decide what to do, the implementation deals with the hardware side.
    This is how modern games are made.
    The problem with a unidersal code approach to games is the API. Without a standard API, you need to write all the graphics and sound code specific to the machine. Because of different capabilities between platforms, attempting to use universal approaches won't yield optimum performance.
    In Computer Science, we worry about the Theta or Big-O running time, and ignore the constants. This is fine for scientific algorithms, but not for games. In games, a Theta(n) game will be much better than a Theta(2n) game, and therefore, the hardware must be used to the max. In a scientific algorithm, we don't care. We worry if processing more elements increases exponentially (i.e. 1 year for X, 10 years for X+1!!!), not if it increases the time from 1 year to 2, because we just buy multiple machines and divide up the task until we are satisfied with the time requirements.

    Games are a different breed of applications, with a different set of rules than traditional programming.

    Alex M. Hochberger
    Computer Science and Engineering
    MIT '01
  • With my physic abilities I look into the Valve's meetings with the dev team

    OoooOoooOoOOoooo OoooOoooOoOOoooo OoooOoooOoOOoooo

    Marketing guy: we need the Macintosh market, if we can get Half Life on those cute little iMac's well sell millions

    Dev dude: ya, but iMac's only have a rage 128 (I think). It's no game card. We might be able to get the performance out of a G4, with a snazzy new card

    Marketing guy: video what?

    Dev dude: also we build the game on top of Monolith's engine, which is build on DirectX.

    Marketing guy: and.....

    Dev dude: well how are we going to re-write Monolith's engine to work with OpenGL or a 3D API that works with mac's

    Marketing guy: ya... sounds great. Write up a spec and when you think we can start shipping beta' we need this in time for Christmas.

    Dev dude: excuse me.... BUT ARE YOU NUTS? This will take at least a year! We don't have anything to work with!

    Marketing guys: [blank stare] ok well, who feels like lunch?

    OoooOoooOoOOoooo OoooOoooOoOOoooo OoooOoooOoOOoooo OoooOoooOoOOoooo

    -Jon

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