Transgaming Technologies and Mac Developers 141
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.""
First to post (Score:3, Funny)
Re:First to post (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. Need Mid range mac. (Score:2)
I want one graphics card slot. Room for 2 3.5" HDs. I don't need a whole card cage for a variety of cards. I just need a vid slot.
A Mac Midi...
Warning! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Warning! (Score:2)
Oh, I give up!
Re:Warning! (Score:2)
But if we did that the main reactor could lose containment! I tell you, we're better off with reversing the main deflector's polarity and running a level five diagnosis.
Re:Warning! (Score:2)
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:5, Informative)
There's also Crossover Mac [codeweavers.com] coming, from Codeweavers. Not only is this better because the user can buy it instead of waiting on game makers to port stuff, but it's also better because unlike Transgaming, Codeweavers contributes back to WINE.
Of course, there's also vanilla DarWINE [opendarwin.org], but I haven't had any success with it on my Intel iMac yet.
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:1, Insightful)
This must be some metric of "better" that I, as a software consumer, am unfamiliar. I've heard of better performance, better user experience, better return on investment... but "better because some developer I don't know helps out some other developer I don't know" does not trump the others in my book. As long as everyone's following the rules and licenses they acquired their code under, which they are, this really won't be
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:1)
I know that you're trolling, but for the benefit of those who don't know what we're talking about I'll explain.
The difference is that when one product was acquired under a license that allows them to make a proprietary fork of the project and not contribute back to the community and another product makes contributions back to the parent, the latter project is
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:2, Insightful)
You are not required to submit anything to the original project, but if you distribute binaries you have to make available the source code. The maintainters of the original project are free to choose if they want to incorporate your changes.
If the company closes off a project like Cedega, then they got access to the original source for free and ar
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:2, Informative)
The difference between Cedega from CVS and the commercial package is mainly the copyprotection stuff.
Commercial cedega is able to play games from the original disc using the original binaries with copyprotection.
Transgaming cannot release the code for this because it is the IP from another company, Transganming is licesing the code.
If you use Cedega from CVS, you have to use some hacked binaries from gamecopyworld for most of the games you play.
AFAIK wine does not incorporate C
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:3, Informative)
I assume you're talking about this [transgaming.org], which hasn't been updated since June [transgaming.org], and which barely has any discussion except about internationalization [transgaming.org]. Or maybe you're talking about ReWind, the BSD-licenced fork of WINE, which is even more lifeless [transgaming.org].
Contrast that with WINE, which is actively developed [winehq.org], discussed [winehq.org], and used [winehq.org] enough to justify "weekly" news articles [winehq.com].
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll wager that that's exactly the case.
More importantly, however, paying Codeweavers gets me a better bang-for-my-buck, because the work it funds will improve WINE for my Linux box as well. In contrast, buying a "Cider-ported" game won't do me any good when using WINE because Transgaming forked WINE before it became GPL. Whether they're complying with the legal requirements or not, they're still assholes for closing it and I refuse to support them because of that.
I also don't like Transgaming's business model, both for Cider and Cedega. I don't like Cider because I'd basically be re-buying most of the same technology for every Cider-ported game, and I don't like Cedega because it's a subscription (i.e., also re-buying it over and over again).
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:2)
Stop flaming and trolling. Of course I care about the long term. This code sharing has still not been proven to be the best long-term solution. If it can't produce better products, in which "better" isn't a self-referential value assigned to "open source", then caring about the long term has nothing to do with it. At that point it just becomes a religious argument, analogous to brand
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:1)
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/ [codeweavers.com]
What Applications Will it Run?
List of apps [codeweavers.com].
...
Please mod the parent down
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:2)
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:2)
Codeweavers isn't focused on running games, but that doesn't mean they won't work. From what I hear, vanilla WINE (and therefore Crossover [Office|Mac]) actually supports DirectX 9 pretty well. Depending on the game, it sometimes runs better than Cedega.
Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:2)
I guess it depends on which quirks the particular games you want to play exhibit.
Of course, there's also the issue that Crossover or WINE gives you a chance to see if whatever arbitrary game you want to play can be made to work, while this Cider thing relies on the game manufacturer deciding to use it on their own.
bootcamp (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:bootcamp (Score:1)
Re:bootcamp (Score:1)
The trickiest part is actually installing windows, but seriously, anyone who wants to and is willing to drop the cash on windows can do it if they know so much as how to click through an automatic installer. Now, whether a non-geek apple user will -want- to d
Re:bootcamp (Score:1)
No, as the name says, Windows Is Not a (CPU) Emulator. Windows just provides the Windows API. This means that you will need an x86-compatible processor to run an x86 Windows application, for instance from Intel. The advantage is that, unlike solutions that rely on CPU emulation, Windows runs applications at full speed. Sometimes a program run under Windows will be slower than when run on a copy of OS X, but this is more due to the fact that Apple has heavily optim
Re:bootcamp (Score:1)
You're much better off using one of the virtual machine programs, or, better yet, something like wine. Wine is good in that you don't have to buy Windows to run windows things, and the programs run as programs and not within the virtual machine window. Generally interactions betwee
Why game on any other platform? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Why game on any other platform? (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Why game on any other platform? (Score:1)
Not Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not Good (Score:3, Insightful)
At least now MacOS users will have a few extra titles made available that would otherwise remain out of reach.
Re:Not Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
I think it gives game developers a lower risk way of trying the Mac market. If the Mac ports are successful they may do a native ports next time.
Besides, then the developers will have cool new Macs to play with and they may insist on doing a native port to play with all the new developer toys.
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
If it means multiplayer games-- particularly FPS's-- can come to the Mac at the same time as their Windows counterparts I'm all for Cider. In the past most ports were months if not years late. Nothing like learning a new game when everyone else had a year to learn all the tricks.
Often there were also compatibil
Re:Not Good (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
As well as the MacBook Pros.
Re:Not Good (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no gaming scene for Mac. Don't lure yourself, people that want to play games or think game s are even midly important on their home computer already have Windows somewhere. People buying Mac have given up gaming.
Anything that could drive down the cost of development of game for Mac is welcome. Companies don't invest in costly cross platform development if they don't think they could get their money back. And considering what I just said, Mac market is not something appealing ( wasn't Steve Jobs saying that Mac is not and will never be a game platform or is that an urban legend ? ) With this techno, they can try the Mac market for cheap and if they make a few buck out of it, they may consider developing for Mac in the future.
Also throwing more games to the market can only dynamise it, and maybe convince a number of current moderate gamer ( like me ) to switch to Mac ( why dual booting and pay for both Windows and Mac OS ?? )
Note, I'm aware that WoW exists on Mac. But games like WoW are exclusive, it is very likely that because of the subscription involved, playing WoW means not playing anything else for years, so I think the WoW port effect is somehow limited for the Mac Game Market as a whole.
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
This oportunist crap will result in NO GAMES CODED FOR OPENGL, OPENAL.
Steve Jobs? That guy calls peoples machines purchased just 3 days ago "4x slow" "5x slow" by suggesting Intel is 5x faster than G5.
Dell fanboy, he now suggests there are no games for Mac? Not surprised.
Why doesn't he ask his jerk, elitist coders why they give NO CHOICE over OpenGL accuracy and speed? There goes your frame rate
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
On my Linux box, I run World of Warcraft WIN32 using Cedega, and get native (or better than native) performance. Wine, and hence Cedega, a Wine fork, or NOT emulation. They are binary API compatiblity layers. They are an implementation of WIN32 for Linux.
It's a userspace app that runs WIN32 EXEs. That's all.
There's no emulation. It's wicked fast, and there's minimal overhead. The only "real" overhead is that you're paging code to run more types of binaries than are a
Not necessiarly (Score:2)
Developers may well decide that
Re:Not necessiarly (Score:2)
They've currently implemented much of SM 2.0. Adapating to OpenGL 2.0 has allowed them to speed up development substantially, particularly with OpenGL 2.0 being well supported by ATI and Nvidia. SM 3.0 should be along some time after that; before GLSL there was a lot more going on in reinterpresting shaders, but the direction that OpenGL is going has really helped them out.
AFAIK, most games that pick between SM 2.0 and 3.0 don't experience significant visual deg
Re:Not Good (Score:1)
It is not an emulator. You only need to emulate when you are translating the intsruction set of one chip to a chip with a different instruction set.
Does software under Cider take a performance hit? Yes, sometimes. Sometimes it won't even run at all. This isn't because of an emulation layer, it is because Cider is incomplete.
KFG
Re:Not Good (Score:3, Informative)
A software emulator allows computer programs to run on a platform (computer architecture and/or operating system) other than the one for which they were originally written.
Note the part about "operating system" emulation. Just like Gnu's Not Unix, Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are just names, Wine most certainly is an Emulator, and Gnu's Not Unix when they can't pay for the name, but it sure is Unix otherwise.
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
Wine is as much an emulator as Firefox is a Mosaic Emulator.
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
Blizzard releases it's games nowadays for both Windows and Mac simultaneously (e.g. WoW). Does that make the Mac WoW client an emulation of the Windows one? No, it's a different implementation of the same thing.
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
Of course it is. It was just an extreme example meant to show that just because two peices of software targeted at two different platforms perform the same function that does not make one an emulator of the other.
Indeed, and WINE is compiled as a native library for whatever platform it's running on. So when I play a game or use a p
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
Even saying it's a simulator goes WAY too far.
Wine = reimplementation of Win32. It's an "emulator" in the same way that Compaq's reverse engineered PC BIOS was an "emulator" for IBM's BIOS. It's a "simulator" the same way that an airplane "simulates" bird flight.
Functionally, architecturally, an
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
What does "emulated" code mean?
Does Java count as emulated or native? Does
I'm going to look on wikipedia:
Native Code [wikipedia.org]
Jump to: navigation, search
In Computer Science, native code is machine code. However, in the context of an interpreted language, native code is the platform dependent implementation of language features and libraries.
Hmmm... what's emulated code?
I'd argue that emulation means one of three things:
1. Just-in-tim [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
Having an inbetween state, such as cider, no matter how efficient can lead to two problems. 1.) Developers not designing for the mac by default, instead only as an after thought. 2.) Slower performance on the same hardware.
There is one up shot of all of this
Re:Not Good (Score:3, Interesting)
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 alo
Re:Not Good (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
Re:Not Good (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Not Good (Score:4, Informative)
Where do you get yours? Are you reading financial reports from 6 years ago? Apple has been in steady growth cycle for the last several years. They have consistently reported that 50% of thier sales or more were not previous Mac owners.
Apple Financial Results [apple.com]
Here's some more links on the subject
http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/12/02/safari.popu larity.growing/ [macnn.com]
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun 2006/tc20060615_080175.htm [businessweek.com]
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2006/07/19.18.s html [macobserver.com]
Explaination of the Myth of Market Share (Google Cache) [66.102.7.104]
Re:Not Good (Score:2)
Yes, just what games need... (Score:2, Interesting)
Cider (Score:5, Informative)
Since the summary didn't explain what Cider [transgaming.com] is:
Re:Cider (Score:2)
Intel Macs market size? (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand it's a lot less effort for the game developer to utilize something like this technology rather than porting the game to native MacOS X. But to the extent that game publishers claim that the Mac market is "too small" to justify porting games, I can't see how a small fraction of that too-small market is going to look any better.
I'm sure they'll claim that this is a zero-effort solution to supporting th Mac, and it's therefore 100% upside to add this in and get a few hundred sales to Intel-based Mac users. I'm sceptical that's really going to work out.
-Mark
market drivers (Score:3, Interesting)
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 softw
Re:market drivers (Score:2)
I did think about the "early adopter==gamer" thing (Score:2)
Do you happen t
Re:I did think about the "early adopter==gamer" th (Score:2)
Re:I did think about the "early adopter==gamer" th (Score:2)
Of course, by the time that actually happens, I'm quite likely going to have an Intel Mac anyway - they're awfully tempting.
Re:Intel Macs market size? (Score:2)
No doubt, the balance will shift... (Score:2)
I think the folks porting games to Mac OS X will still be around for a while.
Re:No doubt, the balance will shift... (Score:2)
Re:Intel Macs market size? (Score:2)
PowerPC, it's over (Score:2)
Earlier this week Apple updated the last last two PowerPC product families, upgradable tower and server, to Intel Xeons. The only PowerPC based systems on Apple's online store are old systems that were returned and are now in the refurbished section, "special limited time offers". It's over, PowerPC is officially history.
Re:PowerPC, it's over (Score:2)
People don't buy software after one year ... (Score:2)
Actually the marketing types have figured out that 90-something percent of software is sold within the first year of a machine's life. So while PowerPC based Macs may be running and useful (running the software they already have) for many more years they will be dead to developers (who want to sell software) in less than a year. Why less than? The towers are far less popular that iMacs, Minis, and notebooks. All of which hav
Former Mac Game Developer (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Kevin Cloud -- Is that you? (Score:1)
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/08
Hiding behind Anonymous Coward, eh?
They have it backwards (Score:1)
Re:They have it backwards (Score:1)
Re:They have it backwards (Score:2, Funny)
If you wrote a game for the mac, then there would be no competition at all. Every single Mac gamer in the world would buy it. You'd sell dozens!
Transgaming? There will be some very shocked guys (Score:4, Funny)
No plans to license? (Score:2)
That might be a fair enough move at first, while they're still developing and stabilizing the technology. After all, if he already has the deepest pockets, he shouldn't be wasting his time (or rather, developers) for spare change (even if that measures in the millions). (I like parentheticals.)
doomed (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:doomed (Score:2)
my *7* year old desktop can play a lot of games ok, and if I got a simple video card upgrade, almost all.
You could also be one of the many people that picked an enhanced video card for their laptop--ATI and Nvidia both make mobile chipsets.
re: Doomed? That's crazy.... (Score:2)
Just because Intel includes cheap, low-end video on their motherboards doesn't mean the majority of folks are "perfe
Good riddence (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Good riddence (Score:2)
OTOH, Inside Mac Games was where I found out about Escape Velocity Nova (which I bought) and the Mac port of Jets'n'Guns (which is next on my list).
Cross platform gaming technology (Score:1)
Re:Cross platform gaming technology (Score:2)
Breaking down the article section-by-section:
please go away (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, people have fallen for you once. I doubt they'll do it a second time. Your scam is over, no pick up your toys and get the hell out of here.
No, you please go away (Score:2)
"Wine is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."
The LGPL (and the GPL), make no references to contributing patches to upstream, they only cover redistribution and the like. Nothing has been stolen, nothing has been wiped out. Yo
Re:No, you please go away (Score:2)
I wasn't talking about obligation, I was talking about promises - they have promised to give back to the Wine project several times. They haven't. Why should I give more credit to any of their other promises, like that their product is any good?
not the silver bullet (Score:5, Informative)
It looks like transgaming needs to tweak its engine for every video games. When the game receives a patch, some of them stop to work and gamers have to wait another tweak from transgaming. It looks like a lot of users are frustrated.
Transgaming may dramatically reduce the time you need to port a Windows based video game to Linux and MacOSX but it isn't such a clean way yet. They do not provide a 100% compatible DirectX 9.0 framework.
I both agree and disagree (Score:2)
I spend about a day trying to get "Warcraft III" - a game that previously worked without issues - on my fresh install of wine. The thing consistently segfaulted near the end of installation. Thinking it might be a scratched CD issu
Same old argument (Score:2)
misread. . . (Score:2)
Paradigm shift? (Score:2)
Re:WoW (Score:3, Funny)
It's about Mac gaming, it's a succinct point about.... something
Re:Missing the point (Score:2)