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Aspyr MIA?
- Thread starter MagnusVonMagnum
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Before they were bought out by Bethesda. Since then: (the already existing) Quake Live for Mac discontinued, no Scorchers DLC for Rage, no Doom 3 BFG Edition, none of the by now three new Wolfenstein games, …
Ugh. I didn't know that Quake Live had been discontinued, and I didn't realise that there was a missing Rage DLC (I thought the Mac version had all DLC already included). I also thought that the Wolfenstein games were from a different developer.
In any case, it seems that I was greatly mistaken. It's always a pity when big games don't come across
They were, but so were Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. id did publish them under their label, though.
Most of Id's games have made it to Mac eventually. Admittedly the main showstopper here would probably be video performance rather than licensing, but I still expect that we'll see Doom at some point (hopefully this month's rumoured hardware refresh will be decent). But in any case, unfortunately I wouldn't buy it as I already have it on PS4.
I'd love to see Gears of War 4 but I don't see that happening
The id engine uses very modern OpenGL features, so there's basically no chance of bringing anything recent to macOS. They're also moving to Vulkan, which doesn't even exist on macOS. I'd be very surprised if any of their new games come to macOS any time soon.
Hopefully Deus Ex: Mankind Divided being ported to Metal demonstrates the viability of the API to a broader audience.
If senior management at Bethesda dislike Apple (as you say they do), more modern games being ported to the new API would hopefully change their minds.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgeleynse
One of them.
And if you want to, you can search for Allan Schaffer for example. I do not know if he still is in Apple, but in previous years he was attending WWDC, as Apple engineer.
Metal is a subset of functionality offered by OpenGL 4.5 or Vulkan, so no, they probably can't just port it to Metal.
It's not clear whether anything prevents such port. For instance, I don't think Doom uses tessellation. And they could still disable some advanced features (most of which don't make much difference).
And again, Feral is porting the latest Deus Ex. Not a minor game engine.
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That linkedin profile doesn't mention gaming. Schaffer worked on openCL/openGL, but beyond that, he had little to do with games. Anyway, I don't see either of these guys contacting Bethesda in order to find solutions to help Mac gaming. If they cared, Apple would have updated Metal and given us Macs with better GPUs.
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It does, and many more advanced features.
DXMD runs on a variant of the same engine that was used for Hitman: Absolution. That's a far cry from being a completely new engine designed to make full use of OpenGL 4.5.
I don't know. Eidos say it's a new engine, of course not built from scratch. You could say that id tech 6 is a variant of id tech 5 as well, since it's probably not completely rewritten either. They both use existing code.
And it's hard to compare between the two since they don't use the same APIs. The Dawn engine has advanced feature as well, and some that doom 2016 don't have (parallax occlusion mapping doesn't appear to be in Doom).
A search in google found no convincing result about Doom and tessellation.
Unreal Engine 4 also uses Metal, with almost all its features supported.
And it's hard to compare between the two since they don't use the same APIs. The Dawn engine has advanced feature as well, and some that doom 2016 don't have (parallax occlusion mapping doesn't appear to be in Doom).
A search in google found no convincing result about Doom and tessellation.
Unreal Engine 4 also uses Metal, with almost all its features supported.
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Pretty sure Metal does support tessellation though. If I'm not mistaken, I saw a WWDC talk on it
Apple now realizes how much they should have appreciated John Carmack (when he was still part of id)
If they wanted, Apple could buy id Software, and buy Facebook in order to get Oculus, to get Carmack.
Get the whole gang back together and make Mac-only games.
If they wanted.
Sometimes, I wonder if Steve Jobs was the only exec at Apple who "got" gaming. His background as a game programmer at Atari, experience making Breakout back in the 70s, gave him a unique perspective on the market.
In years and Mac keynotes past, Apple would have Bungie games premiered and showcased, including an early development form of Halo, when it was still a third person game.
They also, under Steve's watch, they featured a cross-platform game called Dark Vengeance, to show better performance of the game on OS X than on Windows.
This video shows the gameplay (and how awful the voice acting was) but isn't the same video from the Apple event.
Also, Apple demo'd an early build of Quake 3 Arena, at Macworld, under Steve's watch.
Also, in the months leading up to shipping OS X, John Carmack demo'd a tech demo for Doom 3,
.
Thoughts?
Get the whole gang back together and make Mac-only games.
If they wanted.
Sometimes, I wonder if Steve Jobs was the only exec at Apple who "got" gaming. His background as a game programmer at Atari, experience making Breakout back in the 70s, gave him a unique perspective on the market.
In years and Mac keynotes past, Apple would have Bungie games premiered and showcased, including an early development form of Halo, when it was still a third person game.
They also, under Steve's watch, they featured a cross-platform game called Dark Vengeance, to show better performance of the game on OS X than on Windows.
Also, Apple demo'd an early build of Quake 3 Arena, at Macworld, under Steve's watch.
Also, in the months leading up to shipping OS X, John Carmack demo'd a tech demo for Doom 3,
Thoughts?
All true, but did you really feel like gaming on the Mac was that much better back then? It's still not like there were very many Mac games, and being behind on OpenGL isn't something that came after Steve either. And at Atari he didn't really work on making games, just making the machines more effective
If you believe Steve Jobs actually gave a crap about gaming, you're kidding yourself. Apple never kept up with OpenGL, rarely if ever listened to game developers and never put out Macs with gaming level graphics cards (only getting worse, IMO as they go ever "thinner" and no Mac has standard PCI expansion anymore. The primary difference I see between my Commodore Amigas and my Macs is that Commodore understood the importance of gaming (C64/Amiga). Apple never did. Just look at the games for the Mac during the 1980s and 1990s. The Apple II was the last Apple that had a lot of gaming support and it was inferior in almost every way to the lowly C64 for gaming.
What is your view on Apple's decision to license Mac OS system software back in the 90s?
Good idea? Bad idea? Why or why not?
I used to think like you, but not after having seen what happens after big companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google) acquire smallfish companies.
Buy Oculus to get Carmack? After the company is acquired and Carmack cashes in his millions (from the Apple acquisition), he will simply leave and move to a different startup.
That's exactly what happened after Apple acquired the Siri software. After a year, the original Siri developers left Apple, and then started a different company…. that promises to make something Better-than-Siri.
You cannot buy companies in order to "buy people". Companies are just shells. The talented employees in those companies can come and go. They are free to move on. There are other things Apple can do to convince them to stay, to convince them work on behalf of Apple, to keep them motivated. But handing them out cash from an acquisition is not the way to do it.
Too little too late. By the time they came around to the idea of licensing the OS, Microsoft already had a huge market. The consumer probably benefited (lower cost 'Macs') but they were undercutting Apple's profits, which then as today are based on hardware sales, not billions of copies of OS X. Microsoft made their money not only selling Ms-Dos (and then "plus" Windows 3.x and then Windows 95/NT and beyond) but also had a bevy of other software products like Office). Apple really only had MacOS.
I think Apple could benefit from limited licensing now. Clearly, they have zero interest in Mac gaming hardware and Mac professional (true professional not pretend) hardware like server (XServe is long gone) and the new Mac Pro was a joke on day one (no internal expansion, not even a standard GPU slot to upgrade graphics which was literally unforgivable and not one single hardware update in over three years which means the product isn't even being taken seriously by Apple). They totally bumbled the rewrite of Final Cut Pro, releasing it way too soon and killing off most of their true Pro market as a result as the new product was totally inferior to the old one when it was released. They killed Aperture (their only answer to Photoshop) in favor of an already HORRIBLE "Photos" program that never did work well (yes, combine all your photos into one easily corruptible file by default that loads slower than molasses; GREAT JOB Apple!). They turned Server OS X into a side program that had loads of bugs and dumped click-support for things like NFS (what good is a "it just works" GUI if you have to use a command shell to get standard networking protocols to function?) They even screwed the pooch to this very day with the token-based "sleep" functions in OS X that DOES NOT RECOGNIZE NFS activity as a reason to keep the OS awake! I've personally written Apple over three times on this matter as it's a SIMPLE FIX to add a token for NFS activity on their part (they only recognize SMB and AFP the latter which is now defunct anyway when NFS is still a standard Linux network sharing protocol!) For years, I could not let my Mac sleep or my network nodes around the house running Kodi via NFS (because Apple's SMB wasn't 100% compatible with Microsoft's version in terms of SMB 1 support if 2 or 3 failed, making it a joke when connecting to older Microsoft networks and programs using the original SMB code (i.e. most 3rd party 'free' stuff).
Apple does NOT listen to its customers. Apple doesn't not CARE what its customers want (and that was true under Steve as well; some of us had hoped that aspects would actually improve with Steve gone, but it's even worse in some respects, IMO as Steve at least kept people like Jony Ive in line in terms of not overdoing it and telling him when it's less functional. You never had all these GUI standard guidelines shredded while Steve was alive anyway).
Apple has always believed it should dictate what its customers buy rather than incorporating things they want/need and the new Macbook Pro is a direct result of that. Yes, it has some good things in it. Thunderbolt 3 + USB-C is the future. But not including even ONE USB-A port for the interim period between the future and the present was a STUPID idea as that means DONGLE MANIA for every single customer that has something to plug in as almost nothing uses USB-C connectors at present. The one thing that is starting to use USB-C is smart phones. But not Apple! No, they could have moved the iPhone over to USB-C. It's almost as small as the Lightning connector, reversible and more importantly it's the WORLD STANDARD. Why would you want Airports have to choose between Lightning and USB-C to serve its customers when Apple could just get with the program and use the damn standard already!!? They knew it was coming. Lightning should never have existed in the first place. Apple should have moved from the 30-pin connector straight to the USB-C one.
iPhones Lightning connectors aren't even capable of USB 3.x speeds for god's sake and the have the nerve to use the word "lightning" in the name as if it were fast and powerful. The iPad Pro supposedly "can" do USB 3.x speeds, but it seems Apple thought that phone users wanting to do data connections over a nice private cable (no chance of over-the-air spying) would like the data rates to be 2005 standards.... Ridiculous. And for THAT you pay over $700. My cheap $40 Nokia 640 running Windows 10 Mobile can at least eject the 200GB SD Card I have in it and transfer files at USB 3 data rates in my 2012 Mac Mini's SD Card reader to load it up with movies and music, etc. at those USB3 rates. $148 phone (with 200GB card) beats a $700+ iPhone. Ridiculous.
Apple's high (often over) priced hardware should at least attempt to be the BEST there is for those prices. They can't even manage that because they purposely withhold features so that they can offer a reason to upgrade your less than two year old phone to a newer model. It's why Samsung is beating the pants off Apple in terms of raw sales. Yes, Apple is making more profit in the short term, but what about the long run with a dwindling market share? Did Apple learn nothing from the 1990s? Macs did very well in the 1980s and early 1990s. And then Windows 3.1/95/98/ came along and Apple almost went bankrupt! They thought they could just charge whatever they wanted for a GUI based computer and attempted to sue Microsoft into oblivion to prevent them from selling Windows. They lost the lawsuit and frankly, GOOD. Thwarting competition means the consumer is the loser (less choices, less innovation and higher prices are the result).
Steve did a great job bringing Apple back from the brink and he did it by putting a BETTER OS on Macs (OS X in the mid 2000s ran circles around XP/Vista for the most part, save perhaps DirectX/gaming support). Some of the best Macs ever made were released in the first decade (PowerMacs, expandable Mac Pro, the 2008-9 era Macbook Pro, etc.) and they had the iPod invention and later the iPhone to give Apple new avenues of revenue, etc. Now what do we have? We have a company that is absolutely dependent on the iPhone to maintain profit levels. Their weak attempts to expand into new products is not working very well (iPad sold well at first but are dropping now; the iPad Pro is a joke compared to a Surface due to lack of pro software and the iWatch wasn't a good idea to begin with. CarPlay will not make Apple the billions that the iPhone makes them. Google is the new Microsoft when it comes to Mobile. They may be sharing profits with many hardware makers, but their market share is extremely healthy. The iPhone's share keeps dropping. What happens when it goes below 10%? It'll be 1998 all over again! Developers only make software until the profits drop out. I'd get out of Apple stock at this point. The odds of them having another "innovation" to save the company is almost ZERO at this point without Steve. Jony Ive has proven himself inept at creative decisions. He only worked well when Steve was telling him what to do.
It's a shame Scott Forestall is gone. He at least knew how to make an EASY TO USE GUI that looked good. The current controls in iTunes and the iPhone/iPod are just AWFUL by comparison to older software versions. I dread using "Remote" on my iPod Touch Gen5 to control my upstairs home theater. The older software on my iPod Touch Gen 4 works so much easier. Duplicated controls, swipe up just to see album art. They never added 'lyrics' to REMOTE like the iPod Touch always had for its own music player, etc. They keep pushing Apple Music instead of your own libraries. They even advertise in iOS for their own products. It's just god awful anymore. I've switched over to FireTV with voice control, Kodi support and KODI remote apps that work on everything from my iPod Touch models to my Microsoft Phone (and FireTV let's me mirror my Lumia phone, not just "Airplay" which Kodi will also support for music and videos on older i-models).
Frankly, if Microsoft weren't spying on every keystroke, I'd probably move over to Windows 10 instead of OS X at this point for my desktop. Microsoft has become far too instrusive. I don't trust Apple not to follow suit in the long run, though.
Dude, I just asked your thoughts on licensing, not every "bad" decision you think Apple has made.
Jeez, wow.
Silly me, I thought you wanted a detailed answer (why or why not) as to its effects on the company then and supposedly now. I'll just ignore you in the future rather than waste my time (and yours it seems).