Transgaming Technologies and Mac Developers

ZerocarboN writes "With such current Mac publishers as Aspyr and MacSoft typically spending months to bring games to the Mac, Mr. State said: "We imagine that they are re-evaluating their business models. Our technology does revolutionize how games are brought to the Mac, which we believe will result in a paradigm shift in the Mac game publishing landscape." He added that TransGaming has no plans to license Cider to other companies, but "we are always open to discussion.""

Not Good

[spykemail]

Honestly I take the opposite perspective on Cider - I think it's going to be horrible for the Mac gaming community. Now, as Apple's market share grows, instead of publishers beginning to consider making native versions (not crappy ports) of their games we're going to see everyone using technologies like Cider that reduce performance instead. I guess it's fine for older games but its advantage in terms of development time is offset by the fact that the latest games won't have "good enough" performance.

Yes, just what games need...

[Ant P.]

...another layer of indirection. As if they didn't run slow enough on OS X already.

Former Mac Game Developer

[Anonymous Coward]

I use to port games to the Mac. It was a lonely, miserable life. Thankfully those days are behind me.

Apple is to the games market as Microsoft is to security - it is something each company just doesn't have a culture to ever have any competence in.

Just look at Apple's pathetic game development page:

http://developer.apple.com/games/ [apple.com]

Some of the games I ported to the Mac only happened because I was a Mac user and wanted the game on my system. Companies greenlighted ports with the hope that Apple was getting their act together on the games front and my promises that Apple was changing their ways. But there were always big promises with each new cycle of Apple game evangelists followed by decline.

I have a hard time imagining that outside of the usual token Blizzard games and a few others that native Mac gaming is probably dead - for good this time.

Solutions like Transgaming will be bad enough to keep people playing games under Windows, and just good enough that the execs with the power to greenlight Mac ports will claim there is no point risking the expense.

It is really sad to think back after all these years. Apple could have been a fantastic gaming platform. But their outright incompetence in shipping up to date and decently performing OpenGL drivers gave the absolutely fantastic PowerPC systems a bad reputation in the gaming world. And I will skip ragging on the Apple game employees I've worked with over the years.

MMORPGs and piracy are really killing the PC game market - I think it has been in a steady decline for at least five years now. Most pc development houses I know are looking to consoles to save them. If there is any interest in other platforms it is Linux and not Apple that I see companies moving towards.

market drivers

[Gary W. Longsine]

"... it's pretty weird to say that these sorts of API translation technologies will be "the way" to bring games to the Mac when Intel-based Macs are a tiny minority of the total Macintosh user base."

I've been told by those who do market research into such things that the overwhelming majority of game sales are transacted with people who have purchased a new system within the last 12 months. Assuming this is true (and it seems to be) then the relevant segment of the market for Mac OS X hosted game software will be almost entirely on the Intel based Macintosh models by February.

Re:Not Good

[spykemail]

Yeah, if they're not going to code natively for OS X why not just switch to Windows to run games? I know everyone says they don't want to install Windows on their Mac, but I'll have one installed either way for research purposes. I'm not going to go around buying Cider versions of games when I can buy the Windows version and get better performance on the same machine.

As for the market share thing, you kids are living in the 1990s. Apple's sales are exploding, they've got a 12% market share in US labtops alone.

In terms of graphics cards, Mac desktops come with your choice of:

1x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB
2x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB
3x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB
1x ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB
4x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB
1x NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB

Methinks new game performance IS an issue.

Re:bootcamp

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. Boot Camp has been the perfect solution for my sister. Her case may be rather unique, or maybe there are others like her.

My sister likes to play Unreal Tournament (the original from 1999). Her Blue and White G3 just wasn't cutting it any more for playing UT or doing any 'general computing' stuff. She's dead-set against buying/using an windows pc. After Boot Camp came out, she bought an Intel Mac Mini, and I helped her install Boot Camp, Windows XP, and UT on it. Now she uses OS X for all her computing needs and boots into windows and plays UT with us. UT plays *flawlessly* under Boot Camp (with the latest Direct3D8 drivers). UT is basically unplayable with Parallels.

Again, her case may be uncommon, but it works very well and certainly isn't "pointless and stupid."

Re:Not Good

[vhogemann]

About performance,

Games running under Wine on Linux usually have a better performance than running "native" on Windows. I don't know why it happens, pehaps the Wine folks just did a better implementation of the WindowsAPI, pehaps Linux just handles things better, or a combination of these... but Warcraft3 and HalfLife2, in my experience, runs much smoother under wine/cedega than on WindowsXP.

So, I won't be surprized if games using this technology actually perform better on the Mac than on Windows.