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Valve to Expand Steam Store Beyond Games on September 5
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I think Civ5 is generally slow regardless of expansions. I bought the bundle on sale a few months back (via Steam) and once the game gets going it can take 30+ seconds for a turn. Towards the end of the game I'm waiting over a minute! This is on a quad core Mac Pro too! I've seen that others have had the same issue.
It's a great game, just massively flawed by poor planning on the developers side.
Well, then I'm afraid that you are one of those Americans who don't recognize humor, irony and sarcasm when they bite them in the butt.
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There are some really ignorant posts in this thread.
Welcome to the world of Mac users and Apple fanboys.
Being industry leading does not equal a superb product. You only have to look at the Windows/Mac marketshare to see that.
Valve themselves have on a number of times openly said how poorly made and maintained Direct3D is. Obviously if they have access to a fully opensource alternative, THEY get to make it better, hence why they are now shifting a huge focus to Linux, something they would have never dreamt of doing if they didn't feel it would make their products better and their revenue higher.
In either case its spins and roundabouts. Obviously Direct3D serves its purpose, but OpenGL is a much better platform to work on due to the fact that it isn't locked down to one platform.
Obviously you can use Direct3D through the likes of Wine with some success, but it'll never match a native alternative.
The fact that Valve managed to increase a 12% improvement on L4D2 just by switching from Direct3D to OpenGL is enough to warent moving to the platform completely. It makes perfect business sense if they want their products to work cross platform.
Multi-platform support - Windows, OS X and soon Ubuntu Linux. That alone is something you would NEVER get from Apple.
Officially neither are iOS developers. You've got an NDA stating you wont release any details about the program or share revenue details. It's standard practice.
Valve's pricing structure is supposed to be a lot more dev friendly than Apple's, however I guess this depends on how good the developer is at negotiation. With them expanding the store though you'll probably see a flat rate for indi developers.
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I remember this happening a hell of a lot on an old Win XP machine I used to play CS:S on, however have never had it happen on my Mac (touch wood!) Maybe it's been fixed!
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It's also down to the steam server you're connected to. For example if I connect to my local one (London) its slow as hell, but if I connect to Manchester, Steam's a lot faster. Hopefully we'll see a more native-style steam soon with a few improvements. I can tell you now though that 10Mb Fiber optic is not really all that good. I was on the same connection for around 3 years and found steam to be slow, however we moved to 100Mb Fiber a few months ago and its much snappier.
They did not "just" switch from D3D to OpenGL on Linux - they never had a different choice in the first place when they decided to support OS X and now Linux. Because, as you already said, DirectX is only available on the Xbox 360 and Windows.
And the performance boost they talked about had nothing to do with OpenGL per se, but with OpenGL ON LINUX compared to OpenGL on Windows and OS X. Again: OpenGL is faster on Linux than on the other platforms, and a lot of that had to do with the simple fact that they had full access to the source code of the graphics drivers and that they could optimize their own code accordingly.
It's the fact that Linux is Open Source that is giving Windows AND OS X a run for their money.
As a technical side note, it is well known that since Vista OpenGL runs ON TOP of Direct3D on Windows; OpenGL calls are internally translated to Direct3D calls, which, of course, causes an additional overhead and is the reason why OpenGL nowadays by definition sucks on Windows.
Not sure if you're aware but TF2 is one of the most resource intensive games. It will not work on a 2008 MBP, thats for sure. Put it this way. It struggles on my 09 Mac Pro.
Dont blame the developer for your own out of date hardware, in this case
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Works fine for me and hundreds of thousands of other mac users, obviously.
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If Gabe's recent comments are anything to go by, Windows will kill itsself with Windows 8 and he'll be there to pick up the pieces
From what I can tell, he's betting that if Steam is on Linux, those pissed off Windows gamers will move to Linux. I cant see it happening though.
Steam was hacked last year. Initially, it was thought to have just affected the forums, but a few days later, it was confirmed that encrypted personal details (including credit card details). I use Steam heavily, but I prefer to input my payment details every time now.
With the first two, the Mac Store price is roughly the same the price that GameAgent (the online distribution service owned by Aspyr) charges the prices for the latter havent changed since the Mac Store launched.
I do agree that games are cheaper on Steam (and the sales better), but if you take games out of the equation, software generally is cheaper via the Mac Store.
Aperture costs a heck of lot less now as does Adobe Lightroom. Although I try to buy direct from developers, I often find its cheaper to go via the App Store.
Achievement: KEYBOARD MASTER
Crop, resize, make the background transparent, and export as a png using only the keyboard. You may make your own keyboard shortcuts.
Achievement: STEADY HAND
Draw a straight line with the brush tool without using shift.
Achievement: EMERGENCY STOP
Start a CPU-heavy filter, realize it's going to take hours, then remember the keyboard shortcut to stop it.
Achievement: WHO NEEDS INSTAGRAM?
Recreate the effects of 10 Instagram filters.
Achievement: MODERN ART
Create a piece of abstract art using only the gradient tool and the polar coordinates filter.
Achievement: KING OF LAYERS
Create a layer that is automatically named 'Layer 200'.
The Mac App store has always been rock solid and problem free for me.
But Apple could be a 100 times more innovative in the cloud space. Their offerings are just anaemic compared to the best of what's out there. They need to up their game or make some clever acquisitions soon.
But Apple could be a 100 times more innovative in the cloud space. Their offerings are just anaemic compared to the best of what's out there. They need to up their game or make some clever acquisitions soon.
I'm gonna call bs on the wizard doing it. But the cosmic rays sounds MUCH more likely.
Steam is a pain sometimes. Just earlier I noticed it was utilising 1GB of RAM sitting there on the store front page!
Good news from Steam.
Nevertheless, it infuriates me to watch this trend of moving all software to these stores, and DRM the software so it can only be accessed if the store's application has been launched.
Nevertheless, it infuriates me to watch this trend of moving all software to these stores, and DRM the software so it can only be accessed if the store's application has been launched.
Unfortunately Steam is completely broke in Mountain Lion.
Causes the OS to become unresponsive when attempting to put the Mac to sleep or when using hot corners, as well as various other glitches.
First, are you reading the virtual size of the process or the resident set size ?
Code:
$ ps -p 416 -o rss,vsz,command
RSS VSZ COMMAND
230584 1086360 /Applications/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/osx32/steam -psn_0_28269Notice here, Steam is using 230584 KB of memory, as reported by the Resident Set Size (RSS) but 1086360 KB for the Virtual Set Size (VSZ). The virtual set is more than just the memory usage though, it's everything the application has opened, including any mmap'ed files in the cache, etc.. The actual memory used by the application is the RSS. So Steam is using about 230 MB of memory.
That's still alot. Second thing to understand is that Steam is basically a Cocoa application wrapped around a WebView. Yes, it's just a big old Safari browser essentially, as far as the storefront is concerned and probably quite a few other parts that access your Steam account.
Web browsers these days tend to be quite the memory hogs unfortunately so that might explain it.
Third... ugh... Steam uses Flash. Notice how sometimes opening Steam prompts you to update your system's Flash to a new version ? Maybe not if you use Safari and keep it up to date through there, but I use Chrome, so the system's version of Flash never gets updated, except when I open Steam.
Two years ago, five percent of steam users were Mac Based... If that figure hasn't changed (doubtful considering the number of Mac games has increased considerably since then), then going by the number of total mac users in the past 48 hours there are 209, 482 people using Steam on OSX.
Doh!
The ignorance is strong in this Mac Fan Boi.
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/26/july-study-shows-5-of-steam-users-are-on-mac-os/
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
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All I know is that Activity Monitor showed 1.03GB for Steam, I had about 30mb free memory available and experienced major slowdowns due to paging. Quit steam, 1GB extra free and happy days again. And yeah, Flash on steam is a nightmare.
I don't know about you, but my Mac has a cash hole.
Anyone who knows what computers are, sure.
It may be harder to sway the masses...without a Global Offensive.