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Steam for Mac Now Live, Portal is Free Until May 24th

wrldwzrd89 said:
I actually like making games. When I do play them, though, I prefer the old-school 2D top-down RPGs (the kind you won't find on Steam) as well as maze-solving games.
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I haven't checked, but I have downloaded Loom and The Dig from Steam, both old graphic adventures from the late 80s (?). So I'd expect that Steam has old school RPGs (although I don't know if any are Mac compatible).
 
kingtj said:
I find that 99% of the people bellyaching about the Mac having "too poor of video and too few options" to be usable as a gaming machine are just hung up on chasing the best performance, regardless of practicality. (EG. What good is being able to render a game at 240fps when the human eye can't even tell the difference between that and HALF as many frames or less? And what good is running a huge LCD at a really high resolution when it's been proven that for gaming, a 22" or smaller LCD is optimal anyway? Your eyes can't take in the whole scene at once, at a normal viewing distance from a monitor when the screen is larger than that.)

The only really legitimate reason a Mac hasn't been a "good gaming machine" so far is due to lack of interest in developing software titles for it. The ONLY way to ever turn that around is to support efforts like this one!
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Just look at the people here telling how they get crappy framerates in their games that run well in bootcamp.

Nobody is talking about 240FPS here. If a Mac can manage a good 30FPS+ then it's very playable, but that isn't necessarily the case for all specs. 60+FPS is smooth as a baby's bottom. The usual definition of a good gaming machine is one that will run 60FPS all details high at 1920*1080. I highly doubt that Macs are going to reach that in anything but the earlier Source games.
 
BeSweeet said:
I gave this one a BIG FAT NEGATIVE. Why? It's quite simple: PERFORMANCE SUCKS!

As I've said before, it's just the freaking Windows version of Steam running natively in Mac OS X. That's why it asks for a .EXE file when changing the icon of a gaming. You can also notice it when you're changing the key combination to bring up the in-game overlay (It'll say Winkey when you press Command).

Mac OS X has very crappy GPU drivers. Portal doesn't play NEARLY as well as the Windows version does AT THE SAME EXACT SETTINGS. I get nearly 90FPS with everything as high as possible (no motion blur, no AA, 16xAF, vertical sync off). Setting Portal to the same exact settings for the Mac version gives me LESS THAN 25FPS!

Very crappy performance.

If you want gaming on your Mac, install Windows via Bootcamp, and game on. Mac OS X is NOT (and NEVER WILL BE) made for gaming.
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Are you comparing the same piece of hardware, IE, your Mac vs your Mac in Windows?
 
Been checking out Steam for the last few minutes while my games are downloading and my first impression is that the browser sucks. Scrolling up and down is extremely choppy.. why can't it be smooth like Safari?
 
Macrumors says "even if you don't consider yourself a gamer" you should give yourself a shot. I say, ESPECIALLY if you don't consider yourself a gamer, try it!

It's an amazing game, unlike anything out there. If you like normal action packed video games, and you have trained yourself into headshots, you might be dissapointed, but if you are disappointed by video games, well... get portal. It's awesome.
 
Random Facts

OK, I have a Steam account that I use for my Boot Camp gaming in Windows. I've downloaded Steam for the Macintosh and logged on to that account. It shows my games. As I click on each game, it either tells me it's not available for the Mac, or gives me a choice to download it.

I'm downloading Portal now. Here's the status of my other games:

THIS GAME IS NOT AVAILABLE ON YOUR PLATFORM:
Assassin's Creed
BioShock
Grand Theft Auto III
Half-Life 2 (and Episode One, Two, and Lost Coast)
Indigo Prophecy
Medieval II: Total War
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

TO INSTALL THE GAME, CLICK THE INSTALL BUTTON ABOVE:
Braid
The Dig
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Loom
Portal
 
bchreng said:
Useless bragging rights aside, the reason why a person would want 240fps in a game is because there are likely several points in said game that would really push the hardware, causing a dramatic dip in frames. When there are tons of things going on, that 240fps may dip down to 60fps or less. As many a gamer can attest to, that makes a difference in first person shooting games like Left 4 Dead and Modern Warfare. As for having a huge screen, that's likely user preference and bragging rights. Seeing as how Apple offers a 27" iMac, there's definitely a market for them. I'd love for Apple to release a Mac Mini with user-upgradable CPU and GPU. It'd definitely attract more gamers to the platform.
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I want Bad Company 2 in 5760 x 1080. :cool:
 
Well, it plays VERY BADLY when maxing out the settings, which means that TF2 will be unplayable at the level of detail I'm used to.

Looks like I'm back to Boot Camp

EDIT: In case anyone cares, that's on the 4850, which I'm sure is able to pull it off quite nicely under Windows with the same settings.
 
ghall said:
Anybody else having problems with Steam not responding when starting it up?

I'm on an early 2006 MacBook Pro Core Duo. :(
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Nevermind. After some snooping on the Steam forums I made sure the font Tahoma was in the Fonts folder in the root Library.
Macintosh HD > Library > Fonts
 
Managed to get Portal and the Torchlight demo downloading. I may or may not purchase Torchlight depending on how good it is. I will definately have to get Civ IV though.

I hope the Secret of Monkey Island remake gets ported to Mac. Right now I play it with Crossover using the Windows Steam client, but I'd rather just go native.
 
Plutonius said:
Do you have to be connected to the internet while you are playing the steam games ?
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Can some with the knowledge pls give insight on this question. Do I always have to be connected to internet to play steam games or does no internet connection means single player still works but everything else i.e. community etc are down?
 
Shadez said:
Can some with the knowledge pls give insight on this question. Do I always have to be connected to internet to play steam games or does no internet connection means single player still works but everything else i.e. community etc are down?
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You're able to play without an online connection, you "log into" offline mode.
 
I'm sure Valve will be making performance improvements to the Source engine on OSX as they go. This is a big step for them to move into the Mac platform and so I doubt they are going to just dump it and let it rot. They have been extremely good about continually patching and updating their software through Steam on PC and they will do the same on Mac, I'm sure.

It sounds like ATI & NVIDIA are going to have to step up their game and put some better GPU drivers out for OSX now. I'm positive they will after this.
 
Shorties said:
Disable Anti Aliasing, I have the same 8600GT as you and that fixed the framerate issues for me, I ran it in 1280x800 pretty smoothly on the default (Except for AA) settings. If you mess too much with the video settings it slows it down (Or at least it did for me) I think they have it currently optimized for certain mac setups change too much and you get stuck in bottlenecks (for now).
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Oh crap, this.
I actually forgot how terrible anti-aliasing is.

Still, I won't probably be playing TF2 if performance is not at least acceptable, I'm no 100+FPS man but when a game is as hectic as that you need it to be working at least around 40-60FPS
 
Been playing Portal for a while... Interesting game, thougu I'll never feel comfortable with the keyboard/mouse paradigm of PC FPSs...
 
Shadez said:
Can some with the knowledge pls give insight on this question. Do I always have to be connected to internet to play steam games or does no internet connection means single player still works but everything else i.e. community etc are down?
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Just use offline mode. I think if you're not signed into the Steam Community then you cannot earn achievements (or play online multiplayer of course), but that's it.
 
Copying from Windows works!

I haven't read this whole thread but am going to repost something I posted earlier in the hopes it will save y'all some time:
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/9887316/

You can avoid having to re-download games you've already installed on a Boot Camp or Windows machine by copying the files over. This worked with Portal so I assume it will with most other Valve games also.

I copied the following files from my Windows 7 install:

portal content.gcf
portal english.gcf
source 2007 shared materials.gcf
source 2007 shared models.gcf
source 2007 shared sounds.gcf
source materials.gcf
source models.gcf
source sounds.gcf

Total size 4.71 GB

This left me with only:

source 2007 mac binaries.gcf (128.6 MB)

that I had to download. So about 3 minutes to copy and another 2 to download and Portal fires up just fine. I even ran the "Verify Integrity of Game Cache" option and it reports everything is 100%.

I figured out which files to copy by starting the Portal install to let Steam create the files on my Mac. I then paused the install and quit Steam, copied over the files from Boot Camp and then restarted Steam.

EDIT:
Files on your Mac are installed under: /Users/username/Documents/Steam Content/
or in other words: /~/Documents/Steam Content/

Files on your PC should be installed in: c:/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/

.
 
Can someone tell me where downloaded games get saved to on your HDD? I have Steam.app in my Applications folder and would like my games to go in Applications/Games but I cannot find any option to configure the save location. :confused:
 
thefunkymunky said:
Can someone tell me where downloaded games get saved to on your HDD? I have Steam.app in my Applications folder and would like my games to go in Applications/Games but I cannot find any option to configure the save location. :confused:
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The game files are saved in: "/~/Documents/Steam Content" Not the smartest location. "/Library/Application Support" would be a much better place to allows Macs with multiple users to share the game content.

.
 
Flash SWT said:
The game files are saved in: "/~/Documents/Steam Content" Not the smartest location. "/Library/Application Support" would be a much better place to allows Macs with multiple users to share the game content.

.
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OK thanks. I also have games in ~/Applications

e.g. ~/Applications/Portal.app :confused:

Why under my home directory and not in my main Applications folder?
 
thefunkymunky said:
OK thanks. I also have games in ~/Applications

e.g. ~/Applications/Portal.app :confused:

Why under my home directory and not in my main Applications folder?
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Weird, any chance that is just a shortcut or something? I know I un-checked the options for creating game shortcuts when I installed and don't have anything in that location.

.
 
Flash SWT said:
Weird, any chance that is just a shortcut or something? I know I un-checked the options for creating game shortcuts when I installed and don't have anything in that location.

.
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Ahh that might be it. Portal.app is only 160KB even though I've downloaded the full game.
 
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