Doh!!! recon someone will deliver a ppc installer?
My quad G5 has easily got much more than the recommended specs onboard.
My quad G5 has easily got much more than the recommended specs onboard.
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Starcraft 2 no love for PPC
- Thread starter VanneDC
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No chance. The multiplayer code generally needs a lot of tricks to make PowerPC talk to Intel (which is why a lot of Mac games can't play against the PC version.) I very highly doubt Blizzard will put the time in for so few PowerPC Macs, especially given the significant changes they seem to have made since WC3.
Given how better it seems to play on Boot Camp / Win 7, they rather wasted their time making an Intel Mac version 
If I had an Intel Mac, I'd play the Windows version.
However us PPC users don't have a choice, and would most def buy a Mac Only version even if it cost more - I guess there are not enough of us left for it to be worthwhile. A developer for Blizzard said as much on the Apple forums a few years ago.
But can someone explain the logic to me of a software house going to the expense of porting code to the Intel Mac when those machines could just as easily play the Windows version?
If I had an Intel Mac, I'd play the Windows version. However us PPC users don't have a choice, and would most def buy a Mac Only version even if it cost more - I guess there are not enough of us left for it to be worthwhile. A developer for Blizzard said as much on the Apple forums a few years ago.
But can someone explain the logic to me of a software house going to the expense of porting code to the Intel Mac when those machines could just as easily play the Windows version?
Uhhh... cause they will sell more that way? Not everyone uses BootCamp (or wants to).
Which would you rather play... a game that you have to shut down and restart just to play or something you can just open and go?
Amen. There's a reason I don't use windows. Microsoft and I don't get along. I'm sure that's why quite a few of us, if not the majority, switched to OS X anyways. The only way that I'll ever even use Microsoft for personal use is if I need to use it for college. And I don't even think I would call that personal use...lol GO MAC!!!
I was quite surprised at the requirements of SCII. I seem to recall reading a Blizzard release some time ago (a year or more) where they said they were going to incorporate a wide range of graphical customization so that people with older machines could join the fun. When a game recommends half a gigabyte of VIDEO memory, that's not what I call a wide range of customization.
I half-expected the lack of love for PPC. I was surprised G5 owners weren't included, but I don't think there's a G4 out there with the chops for that game. What irked me more than anything else was the OS requirements. The game will run on XP/Vista/7, but on Mac, only 10.5.8 or 10.6.3 and up. Why has the whole world forgotten about Tiger's existence? You wouldn't think it's that difficult to include support for an OS that was released all of five years ago when they can make it run on XP, which is twice Tiger's age.
I half-expected the lack of love for PPC. I was surprised G5 owners weren't included, but I don't think there's a G4 out there with the chops for that game. What irked me more than anything else was the OS requirements. The game will run on XP/Vista/7, but on Mac, only 10.5.8 or 10.6.3 and up. Why has the whole world forgotten about Tiger's existence? You wouldn't think it's that difficult to include support for an OS that was released all of five years ago when they can make it run on XP, which is twice Tiger's age.
I totally agree with the XP vs Tiger thing. XP is freaking ancient!!! Even the last service pack is from 2008. Has anyone tried putting SC2 on a G5 just to see if it will work at all?
It does actually have a farly broad range of graphics. You can turn it down to about WC3 levels.
I really don't think it didn't hit PowerPC because of the graphics. It's the multiplayer code. I remember hearing about all the work they had to go through to make the WC3 and Starcraft 1 networking code work on PPC. That and the random number generation is all different. It was a big mess.
Edit: As far as I remember, Half Life 1 Mac was canned for the same reason, back in the day. That's the main reason it only showed up now that we're on Intel, and the reason it's Intel only.
I don't believe it includes PowerPC code at all, so no, won't work.
SC2 did a great job of supporting old hardware. I have a Windows XP tower that's over two years old. With everything set to Ultra except for textures, set to High since it's only a 512MB video card, the game plays flawlessly (60+ fps). My whole tower could be rebuilt today for less than the cost of an iPad. And it'd end up being faster just because you can't buy a video card that slow any more (unless you count integrated mobile cards).
Having sufficient hardware with an incompatible OS does suck though. But Blizzard can't factor that in cost-effectively. Windows has been backwards compatible for the last 15 years. Mac OS shifted dramatically when they moved off PPC.
Having sufficient hardware with an incompatible OS does suck though. But Blizzard can't factor that in cost-effectively. Windows has been backwards compatible for the last 15 years. Mac OS shifted dramatically when they moved off PPC.
I believe the blame needs to be placed on Apple as much as Blizzard here. Tiger, while still a great OS, isn't updated anymore by apple except for the occasional security patch. Since Apple provides the graphics drivers in their OS wide updates, there is no way to upgrade the video drivers. This is vastly different from Windows, where ATI and Nvidia still write weekly drivers updates for windows XP.
Of course, MS could technically be blamed too for not supplying Windows XP with Direct X 10 and above support. Its somewhat of a blessing (and a curse) that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are running on DX9 level hardware, thus preventing DX9 from becoming obsolete since many many games these days are console ports to PC's. Otherwise, XP would be all but extinct when it comes to gaming.
While I'll grant you that being able to muster that kind of performance from a two year old machine is nice, perhaps we differ on our definition of "old". To me old is still 5+ years for a computer. A two year old computer is just getting it's sea legs.
Perhaps I was little harsh on that call. Interesting about the multiplayer PPC code. As SCII multiplayer is probably the biggest selling feature, that makes sense. I wonder why they couldn't utilize the code base they created for WC3? Or World Of Warcraft for that matter, which still supports PowerPC systems as of the latest expansion?
Like Apple's push to rid the world of Tiger, it just seems a bit arbitrary. Whatever sells more new Macs, right?
It's not like I'm asking to be able to play it on my Clamshell (that's what the original game is for), but certainly for machines under five years old that sufficient graphics power this is a let down.I thought the multiplayer issue was only for LAN play, where one computer was the host and the others clients - a mix of PPC and X86 could be problematic. However the same shouldn't be the case over battle.net, and SC2 is battle.net only for multiplayer.
The rationale as I believe it was that it would only work on G5s, the number of whom in the wild when SC2 is released wouldn't be enough to justify the resources put into writing code for PPC architecture.
See this thread from this very site:
https://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-306762.html
The rationale as I believe it was that it would only work on G5s, the number of whom in the wild when SC2 is released wouldn't be enough to justify the resources put into writing code for PPC architecture.
See this thread from this very site:
https://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-306762.html
Nope, that's actually not the case. It affects all multiplayer. LAN, BNet, anything...
One big issue is that when you play a strategy game, the only thing sent across the network is other people's direct commands. This saves network bandwidth. Stuff like what the computer player does is run across all clients individually. In theory, stuff like that should exactly match on all clients without them sharing data, because you're starting everyone with the same settings, same random number generators, etc, so that any AI controlled stuff should happen in the exact same order and work exactly the same on all machines.
The breakdown begins to happen because PPC and Intel behave different in generating random numbers, which is an important part of AI, and games in general. Because of this, PPC and Intel clients can drift wildly out of sync with each other as they start generating different random numbers.
As far as I know (and I don't work for Blizzard or anything), Blizzard had to work hard on the last games to make sure that the PowerPC processors behaved exactly like the Intel processors. Random number generation, mathematical work, etc. Slight differences can cause huge multiplayer issues.
They probably just gave up maintaining that code. G5 owners are in a slim slim majority (I'd guess only a few thousand sales, maybe less), and the code probably requires lots of time to test or maintain.
The same thing sunk Half Life on Mac (I've heard something along the lines of they didn't want to maintain it), and is the reason most Mac games before Intel could not play against the Windows versions.
Yeah, stuck it in my G5 quad and comes up with a nice little window saying. "PPC mac is not supported"
doh!
doh!