It probably won't change, no. Those who have done their own ports so far will continue doing it (or not offering a port at all) and those who outsourced the port will do the same. I guess it's safe to say Blizzard left the building when it comes to the Mac.
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Future for Mac games in M1 era
- Thread starter cocoua
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It is a shame Activision doesn't break out Mac/PC sales. But it looks like next quarter mobile revenue will surpass console for them.
Actually what is it interesting and Apple should try to push it more as all of their hardware is more and more similar…
Just get developers to do more games that run on everything.
I think this is a good example.
apps.apple.com
Just get developers to do more games that run on everything.
I think this is a good example.
FANTASIAN
Fantasian by Mistwalker Corp. — From the creator of Final Fantasy, comes the next breathtaking adventure from industry legend Hironobu Sakaguchi. Fantasian is an exciting, new RPG set against a spectacular backdrop made from nearly 160 handmade dioramas that blends physical environments and 3D...
apps.apple.com
Here's what steam reports
I understand that the number of mac games on steam is low, to almost nonexistent, yet its hard to justify that the mac platform is a viable gaming platform.
I don't think I care for any Blizzard games, so I personally don't look for them - I don't think they're steam. I just fired up my client and didn't see any
No one does it, but flat out telling folk how much it cost to make a version for Mac and compare that to sales on Mac would probably be an eye opener for sure.
So I'm sitting here with Unity, trying to get a (existing, older) project going on macOS with reinforcement learning. After wasting about half a day on this, I can safely say that the current version of Unity on macOS is an absolute mess. Bugs everywhere, things not working, freezing, etc. Running in Windows... no problem at all. Most of the issues I ran into are known in the support forums, some dating back 5 years.
Very simple things, such as creating new projects, assets, shaders, basic game logic, etc. all works. But as soon as some complex behavior is required, problems start to show up. Can't really blame game developers not porting things to macOS when it involves fighting existing bugs and problems, which is all very time consuming. I'm not going to waste time on macOS with these problems either when Windows (and Linux) just works.
Very simple things, such as creating new projects, assets, shaders, basic game logic, etc. all works. But as soon as some complex behavior is required, problems start to show up. Can't really blame game developers not porting things to macOS when it involves fighting existing bugs and problems, which is all very time consuming. I'm not going to waste time on macOS with these problems either when Windows (and Linux) just works.
I've used Unreal based projects / simulators in the past, not on ASi though.
Among the ones I've used are CARLA and MS AirSim. Had my share of trouble with these on macOS, always required tinkering with the installation and tools involved for development. macOS build currently fails on AirSim and CARLA pulled support for macOS. Linux just works (anyone see the irony here? ... "it just works").
Vanilla Unreal 4 should work as expected. From what I've seen of Unreal 5, tons of stuff still missing for macOS. I've never used vanilla Unreal much, only in combination with things like mentioned above. Unreal is somewhat complex in comparison to Unity and even writing custom shaders for physically based realistic rendering is drawing away too much effort from the core task.
For other stuff I've used with Unreal involved, such as Nvidia Isaac and Omniverse, it's Linux only. Then again those require Nvidia GPUs, so chances to see this on macOS are slim to none these days.
Looks like we’re in agreement.
I’m curious to this, one of my favorite games is DUSK, which is made in Unity with a lot of texture (and rendering?) modification. It works perfectly well on Mac, so what complex behavior causes problems?
As a complete outsider I’m guessing that rendering is a sticking point because of Metal vs DirectX vs Vulkan issues.
Thx! Very helpful - I believe CARLA is a spin-off from Udacities Self Driving Car nanodegree program?
Soory for O/T: Can you comment on the best sim environment for autonomous vehicles? Thx very much!
Textures are not problematic, it's a task for artists. I'm not sure what you mean by rendering or "modifications". Do you mean shaders? Or the engine?
Shaders were originally in CG, but are now HLSL style. More precisely, CG was pretty much Direct3D 9 style shaders, while currently HLSL is D3d 11 style wrapped in macros. The shaders can be cross-compiled to OpenGL (ES), Metal and Vulkan. Very specific things are hard to do and may require manual tweaking.
Unity is a modular system, it doesn't come with everything pre-installed. Additional packages provided by Unity or 3rd party providers can be installed via Unitys own package manager. Let's say you want to implement AI-agents in your game, to give NPCs specific behavior outside of pre-scripted behavior. You'd use the ml-agents package for this provided by Unity (https://unity.com/products/machine-learning-agents). This allows you to run training, tests and inference of your models in Unity. It's using an internal communications API including a proxy and for some reason, on some machines, it's not working properly. Connecting to other ports won't work. For some, disabling the firewall solved the problem, for others changing the proxy environment configuration did the job, others had to turn off gatekeeper and yet for some it won't work at all. There are more such behaviors and some packages are not available for macOS at all (they don't work), so the "basic" features work, but more advanced ones do not. There used to be a package for baking specific lighting textures, which didn't work on macOS (maybe it does now, not sure). So if you don't need this feature, everything is fine. If you're using it in Windows and then want to port it to Mac, you either simply can't use this feature or you have to work around it (additional effort to port things).
Don't get me wrong, bugs are common and happen everywhere, but why does a macOS user/developer have to work around these issues when Windows gets a mouse click and it works (most of the time)? Again, for very, very simple games, this might not be an issue at all. It all depends on the game.
Yes and no, depends on what you do. The graphically very simple project I've worked on today has no problem with this. Going from Metal to DX is "a click of a button". The focus here wasn't graphics though, it was training some agents.
Yes, at least that's what they're using or used in the past. They originally provided a simulator before CARLA, maybe that evolved into CARLA or inspired it heavily. I've not had a look at the program since they originally launched it, but still have that original simulator somewhere on a hard disk.
Hard to say what's best. Also depends on the vehicle and what you want to do. I assume you mean cars and not things like a forklift in a warehouse (more robotics). I'd say CARLA is probably the best choice as it's free and works with consumer hardware and provides most of what one can ask for unless you're a car manufacturer.
If you want to go custom sensors and use the results in a production environment (real cars) then Nvidia Drive Sim is your best bet. It's by far the best simulator I've seen so far, but requires two Nvidia boxes to run ($500k each). I wanted to buy it for research and teaching a long time ago, but since I would have needed about 10 to 20 of these I scratched the idea (the $ can buy way more Dell systems with Nvidia GPUs) and we went AirSim/CARLA.
Looking back, a good decision as Nvidia will provide a free version later this year (probably not all features, but the full feature set is probably only interesting for car manufacturers). There's currently early access for those in the Nvidia developer program. While I am in this program, I've not had the time to try it yet. I hope I can have a closer look at it in the next two or three months.
That being said, custom sensors can be integrated in AirSim/CARLA, it's just not very well documented. It's something a colleague is working on right now, but documentation is (as usual) poor. We're using AirSim for anything drone related as it provides hardware-in-the-loop for the autopilot of our choice (PX4). That way our autonomous drones can be fully simulated and we can jump onto the real thing right away.
Also CARLA has that "Apple" feeling. It doesn't eat up too many resources, can be run on laptops, the learning curve isn't too steep and similar to Apple, I enjoy using it.
By now you should see options for games that only existed on the Series X (as in the games were running on a One X before).
xCloud games are finally getting an Xbox Series X-powered upgrade
Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Rainbow Six Siege seem to be upgraded.
www.theverge.com
There's hope?
"Apple sees big things ahead for Apple Silicon, both in terms of achieving new designs and perhaps appealing to the most demanding audience of all — gamers. After all, many of the engineers building Apple’s chips are gamers themselves. Apple is now setting a third goal for its M-series processors: Bringing gaming to the Mac.
“Of course, you can imagine the pride of some of the GPU folks and imagining, ‘Hey, wouldn't it be great if it hits a broader set of those really intense gamers,’” said Milet. “It's a natural place for us to be looking, to be working closely with our Metal team and our Developer team. We love the challenge.”"
www.digitaltrends.com
"Apple sees big things ahead for Apple Silicon, both in terms of achieving new designs and perhaps appealing to the most demanding audience of all — gamers. After all, many of the engineers building Apple’s chips are gamers themselves. Apple is now setting a third goal for its M-series processors: Bringing gaming to the Mac.
“Of course, you can imagine the pride of some of the GPU folks and imagining, ‘Hey, wouldn't it be great if it hits a broader set of those really intense gamers,’” said Milet. “It's a natural place for us to be looking, to be working closely with our Metal team and our Developer team. We love the challenge.”"
Turning future Macs into gaming PCs? Apple says it ‘loves the challenge’
Intel, Nvidia, and AMD should be watching their backs -- Apple is gunning for the PC gaming market with a future M-series processor for the Mac.
www.digitaltrends.com
A couple of years ago I would‘ve agreed. But times change.
Neither Xbox nor PS 5 are user upgradable. Yet those are doing fine as gaming devices, aren’t they?
One of the advantages of consoles is that there is a defined hardware set developers can target. Assuming Apple follows a comparable approach (basic hardware architecture shared across devices, an API both easy to use and performant, game engine vendor support) it could work.
If I remember correctly, you can swap in both consoles the internal storage...
It is hard to compare a console with a standard PC, because the consoles have about 5 to 7 years lifecycle without hardware change. That means, that all new games for the console must run on the same old hardware as the first generation of games, there were published on day one.
That article is just driving traffic. The real issue is not so much the hardware but marketing, audience, and return on investment.
IMO if there was a button that devs can press that would optimize and port everything in 1 click, then that would be a no brainer win. Unfortunately today, porting still probably requires a significant amount of effort.
I think there also needs to be a radical mainstream shift in gamer marketing. For example, today, none of the top streamers are gaming on Macs.
If I see either of those two happen, then maybe I would have hope. Today for me, no hope.
1. I agree. Which won’t happen.
2. Gamers are suckers, they’ll fork over any amount of money if there’s a game they like (or is mediocre but popular). Soldering components won’t bother them.
LOL
First lets compare apples to apples, you're exhibit is showing everything on steam, they don't just sell/host games.
So lets narrow the search down and compare Windows games to macOS games. The numbers are rather dire and is basically proving my point. Adding them up Windows has 216,727 games where as macOS has 59,616 Looks like a quarter of what windows has
Now lets compare your exhibit of macOS software with what windows has (just filtering on operating system and including everything). Windows has 369,617 vs. 88,523 - surprisingly macOS maintains a near 25% of what windows has - it didn't lose any ground, go figure
We can't filter by AAA games AFAIK but if I was a betting man, the ratio would be closer to 90% to 10% or 95% to 5%
Is it non-existent? Well to me it is, since the games I choose to play are not available on macOS but but hey at least you have puzzle games
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I'm only seeing 5 out of 20 and even then as @opeter pointed out, some of them could very well be 32bit
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