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Valve Teases Upcoming Mac Game Announcement
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Keep in mind that this isn't just a 'port' of single titles, but moving Valve's engine Source to the Mac platform. This opens up not only the past catalogue of Valve's properties to the Mac, but all future titles.
Steam is technically a separate offering as it deals only with delivery and management of licenses for games which include Valve games, but also other games outside of Valve. With the heavy integration of the Source engine with Steam, Mac development goes hand in hand.
It's highly likely that Valve will co-release new titles to both PC and Mac at the same time once things catch up. It would save a ton of Marketing dollars moving forward. But that's high speculation.
Now that we have a conformation for both Steam/Source on Mac, there are many other things to consider. Valve is now positioning itself to be the App Store for Mac games, just as it is for Windows right now. What other games will we see on the Mac side of Steam? Will publishers of games that have both Mac and Windows offerings share the license between each platform? That question will be a different answer to each publisher.
For any developer who makes Mac games, even titles which are Mac only, this is very interesting news. An "App Store" for Mac OS X games.
Steam is technically a separate offering as it deals only with delivery and management of licenses for games which include Valve games, but also other games outside of Valve. With the heavy integration of the Source engine with Steam, Mac development goes hand in hand.
It's highly likely that Valve will co-release new titles to both PC and Mac at the same time once things catch up. It would save a ton of Marketing dollars moving forward. But that's high speculation.
Now that we have a conformation for both Steam/Source on Mac, there are many other things to consider. Valve is now positioning itself to be the App Store for Mac games, just as it is for Windows right now. What other games will we see on the Mac side of Steam? Will publishers of games that have both Mac and Windows offerings share the license between each platform? That question will be a different answer to each publisher.
For any developer who makes Mac games, even titles which are Mac only, this is very interesting news. An "App Store" for Mac OS X games.
From my (limited) understanding of the current development environments for games, typically Direct3D allows developers to decide how hardware resources are utilized, since Direct3D basically depends upon the application. It means some greater complexity, but also allows developers to more carefully align the application to take advantage of a GPU's feature set.
OpenGL, I believe, is simpler development-wise, but depends considerably more on how it's implemented in regards to hardware access and execution (such as graphics drivers). I believe OpenGL also does not allow as-much control over the hardware featureset, but I could be wrong in that regard.
Ultimately, given that the vast majority of the PC gaming market is based around Windows and thus DirectX/Direct3D, developers have more of an incentive to both program using DirectX as well as to take advantage of available features, and I'm guessing that's why you see your performance disparity: ultimately it's easier/quicker to obtain higher performance from DirectX than OpenGL in a given development time, and so WoW runs better on PCs with DirectX than on Macs with OpenGL.
for gaming? i think the world begs to differ. To me file this under who cares, run it natively on boot camp and you can have it now.
No! Never heard of Boot Camp!? What the hell is that? Is that some sort of new thing that connects the microsoftz to the macz and then the macz to the internets???
Ams.
"Native goodness" = more time and money invested into a game. You had better hope the "Mac gaming community" turns out in large enough quantities and purchases those games in their "native goodness" so that companies can justify continuing to do so.
Otherwise, you will just end up with ports. A lot of them.
Apparently the new gaming "superior world" revolves around outdated graphics technology, lol.
Could this be the end of my BootCamp partition? 
This is the best news ever since I bought my Mac. I ONLY want to play CS on my mac... thats all...
This is the best news ever since I bought my Mac. I ONLY want to play CS on my mac... thats all...
Well, I always wanted to play HL2. I'm sure it will run just fine on my MacBook with its powerhouse GM950 64MB integrated GPU.
*weeps bitter tears*
*weeps bitter tears*
We just got what is presumably the final image at Macworld. Mail caught Valve's message in spam so I didn't see it for an hour or two.
http://www.macworld.com/article/146840/2010/03/valve_mac.html
Image:
http://www.macworld.com/article/146840/2010/03/valve_mac.html
Image: