Nani kure?
Well I already do Deck Compatibility testing for ProtonDB, and being able to have Command & Conquer Remastered and Persona 5 Royal working on macOS would be nice...how do I sign up?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Major gaming news at WWDC: Metal and New games
- Thread starter Homy
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Nani kure?
Well I already do Deck Compatibility testing for ProtonDB, and being able to have Command & Conquer Remastered and Persona 5 Royal working on macOS would be nice...how do I sign up?
An inside look at the CrossOver QA process...and how you can help! | CodeWeavers Blog
By Meredith Johnson | We test CrossOver on all supported macOS versions (both Intel and Silicon machines), all officially supported and popular-but-not-officially-supported Linux distros and ChromeOS
www.codeweavers.com
Yes, they can play games. But in the short terms it's doomed to be a glorious Windows re-implementation. All they can do is re-implement the Windows API now, with no say at all.
Same with Vulkan, they will implement every new DirectX features in the most compatible way. Maybe it would have been better to just implement DirectX directly and call it a day.
And that's a bad thing how? Thanks to Proton and the Steam Deck Linux adoption has skyrocketed. Sony's started using the Steam Deck as a PSP by proxy at this point.
Developers want less work, not more, and Mac ports add more work which is why they don't do them.
Developers want to make money. They will make a Mac port if it makes them money, even if it means more work.
Developers are not making many Mac ports because it is not economical for them most likely, not because it means more work (that too). iOS have many games developed for it, and when developer first started, it means a mountain of work, but they find that the investment is sound, because it makes them money due to the install base of capable devices.
IMHO lazy developers will unlikely make money, no matter what platform they develop for.
The Apple Reality doesn't have touch controllers so how would they do that?
Not to mention RE4R VR is a PSVR 2 exclusive as Sony already locked that in.
Consider Paradox, they have Cities:Skylines for the Mac, yet the new version Cities Skylines is console/PC only. Their response is they didn't want to hire another team of mac developers.
I would even challenge that they can play “most Windows games “.
My point is that a publisher who has Mac experienced chose not too. You can draw your own conclusions, but to me, it implies that they will lose money. That is the overhead (developers, QA, testers, equipment, etc) exceeds the potential for profits
The wording from Paradox is strange. Why would they need to hire "another team of Mac developers" unless they fired their original team?
Then your response to my post is weird to me.
It came across as you disagreeing with me that developers do it for the money, by providing an example of a developer which previously have a Mac game ported but not anymore, without context, thus assuming that your reply is to refute my points. And so the conclusion from your post is that the developer do not like Macs and so not going to do it anymore.
Did you see Mr MacRights video on this game. It feels like the performance is not great for the hardware Apple has, and since it is native. I hope Cyan can improve the performance in the coming months because the game seems interesting (especially if you like Myst or the Witness).
Yes, I saw the Steam reviews before that. The perfromance is not bad like the recent PC releases discussed around here but could be better and it seems it doesn't run great on PC either. He gets around 60 fps at 1440 Epic/High on M1 Max. The game requires Ventura but they didn't use Metal 3 and MetalFX, just 2.1 and AMD FSR. The game appears to be too short too like 5 hours people say. Worth mentioning it was a Kickstarter project so I don't know if they've had financial problems.
On the other hand we got a tease about NMS today. Pretty sure it's for the WWDC.
Hope it has VR support on macOS cause the "year" long delay since announcement isn't cool (for what the game brings to the table, considering there is a switch version). Has the Steam repo been updated? I don't want to buy this game s third time...
Yeah, they'd better have a good presentation after that long delay. No change in the Steam depot, maybe after the announcment.
ELEX II from 2022 comes to MAS next month. Can't find much other info about system requirements. Piranha Bytes first Mac game, meaning Genome Engine is now Mac compatible.
www.gamersheroes.com
www.metacritic.com
ELEX II Coming to Mac App Store This Summer - Gamers Heroes
Previously released on PC and consoles, the team at Piranha Bytes and THQ Nordic will bring their sci-fi fantasy RPG ELEX II to the Mac App Store this summer.
www.gamersheroes.com
ELEX II Reviews
ELEX II is the sequel to ELEX, the vintage open-world role-playing experience from the award-winning creators of the Gothic and Risen series, Piranha Bytes. ELEX II returns to the post-apocalyptic Science Fantasy world of Magalan with massive environments that can be explored with unrivaled...
www.metacritic.com
Last edited:
Very interesting press release! Sounds promising when some developers use Metal and its features to its fullest instead of complaining that no one uses Metal. Any words from @leman on this?
So there you go, it only took about 8 months to port a DX12 open world game to Mac with all the bells and whistles and they worked together with Apple engineers, meaning if you approach Apple like this or like 4A and Larian Apple is happy to help you. So much for Apple not caring and making it difficult for devs.
"Piranha Bytes always strives to deliver more complex and enhanced games, and bringing ELEX II to Mac was no exception. ELEX II takes advantage of the Metal shading language to tap into Apple silicon performance. With Metal's Indirect Command Buffer (ICB) approach on Mac, the game also fully embraces GPU driven pipelines. In a little over eight months, a team specializing in GPU and Metal ported the DX12 version of ELEX II to Mac. ELEX II worked closely with Metal engineers to take full advantage of the many powerful features and tools to deliver a truly wonderful game."
- GPU driven pipeline with ICB filled at the end of culling process
- There are more than 6+ GPU culling segments (Depth Pre-Pass, Shadows) in the frame with ICB used in every segment
ICB was used with the following parameters
- Inherited pipelines
- Inherited buffers
- Render only (not compute)
- All types of draw + tessellation as well
Shaders
- Slang tool ported to macOS with the source level HLSL->Metal 2.x conversion for:
- Vertex and Fragment shaders
- Geometry shaders
- Tessellation shaders
- On/Off support for argument buffers
- Emulation of DX12 RootSignatures
- Support for most of ‘non-typical’ stuff like atomics, SIMD groups
Metal approaches on macOS
- Utilizing multi-threaded Command Buffer encoding and submission, which means the game can efficiently render the massive open-world in a parallel manner
- The game uses double buffering and not a single ‘wait’, everything is happening without any CPU-GPU synchronization point.
- The game fully embraces Argument buffers for passing textures and samplers inside shaders.
Game Technology used and ported to Metal
- Global Illumination
- Volumetric Fog
- Deferred Clustered Lighting
- Procedural Sky
- GPU driven cloth
- GPU driven particles
- Realistic snow and rain
- Day/night cycles with relit reflection probes
Full compatibility with Metal
Tessellation shaders:
- Conversion of normal HLSL shaders into Metal based approaches
- Massive use of tessellation in effects (fire, water), extremely tessellated objects (alien lifeforms)
- Nothing was compromised, every aspect of tessellation was preserved
DX12 API to Metal:
- Imitation of Root Signatures
- Imitation of Resources allocation/usage/DescriptorTables
- Behind the scenes switching of Render Command Encoder and pipeline states, into a separate library, which Engine just normally uses unaware of Metal API
Game Technologies Ported
- Full controller support with haptic feedback
- On-the-fly keyboard / gamepad switching
- Game ability to choose monitor to render
- Game cooking and packing is fully done on Mac
- ARM and x64 support
- Xcode 13.x used as main build tool
- Xcode 14.x used as main development tool
- GameCenter integration with achievements
- AppStore ready bundle with Sandboxing
So there you go, it only took about 8 months to port a DX12 open world game to Mac with all the bells and whistles and they worked together with Apple engineers, meaning if you approach Apple like this or like 4A and Larian Apple is happy to help you. So much for Apple not caring and making it difficult for devs.
"Piranha Bytes always strives to deliver more complex and enhanced games, and bringing ELEX II to Mac was no exception. ELEX II takes advantage of the Metal shading language to tap into Apple silicon performance. With Metal's Indirect Command Buffer (ICB) approach on Mac, the game also fully embraces GPU driven pipelines. In a little over eight months, a team specializing in GPU and Metal ported the DX12 version of ELEX II to Mac. ELEX II worked closely with Metal engineers to take full advantage of the many powerful features and tools to deliver a truly wonderful game."
- GPU driven pipeline with ICB filled at the end of culling process
- There are more than 6+ GPU culling segments (Depth Pre-Pass, Shadows) in the frame with ICB used in every segment
ICB was used with the following parameters
- Inherited pipelines
- Inherited buffers
- Render only (not compute)
- All types of draw + tessellation as well
Shaders
- Slang tool ported to macOS with the source level HLSL->Metal 2.x conversion for:
- Vertex and Fragment shaders
- Geometry shaders
- Tessellation shaders
- On/Off support for argument buffers
- Emulation of DX12 RootSignatures
- Support for most of ‘non-typical’ stuff like atomics, SIMD groups
Metal approaches on macOS
- Utilizing multi-threaded Command Buffer encoding and submission, which means the game can efficiently render the massive open-world in a parallel manner
- The game uses double buffering and not a single ‘wait’, everything is happening without any CPU-GPU synchronization point.
- The game fully embraces Argument buffers for passing textures and samplers inside shaders.
Game Technology used and ported to Metal
- Global Illumination
- Volumetric Fog
- Deferred Clustered Lighting
- Procedural Sky
- GPU driven cloth
- GPU driven particles
- Realistic snow and rain
- Day/night cycles with relit reflection probes
Full compatibility with Metal
Tessellation shaders:
- Conversion of normal HLSL shaders into Metal based approaches
- Massive use of tessellation in effects (fire, water), extremely tessellated objects (alien lifeforms)
- Nothing was compromised, every aspect of tessellation was preserved
DX12 API to Metal:
- Imitation of Root Signatures
- Imitation of Resources allocation/usage/DescriptorTables
- Behind the scenes switching of Render Command Encoder and pipeline states, into a separate library, which Engine just normally uses unaware of Metal API
Game Technologies Ported
- Full controller support with haptic feedback
- On-the-fly keyboard / gamepad switching
- Game ability to choose monitor to render
- Game cooking and packing is fully done on Mac
- ARM and x64 support
- Xcode 13.x used as main build tool
- Xcode 14.x used as main development tool
- GameCenter integration with achievements
- AppStore ready bundle with Sandboxing
Last edited:
Not much to comment on, to be honest, except that it’s great to see developers slowly embracing Metal to its fullest. Would have probably taken them less than 8 months too if the engine were designed with cross-API considerations previously either. The moral of the story is that Metal is every bit as capable as DX12 or Vulkan, and significantly easier to use. Let’s hope we see more of these efforts going forward.
Regarding ELEX II itself… I would buy it if only it didn’t look so incredibly bland…
Ehh I'm gonna press Doubt on the "significantly easier to use" part. Vulkan is still easier than Metal, as Metal lacks a lot of features Vulkan does.