812 replies to this topic

[edddeduck]

clocknova, on 05 December 2011 - 08:16 AM, said:

I hope that means something.  Thanks, Eddie.

It means from a personal point of view I agree completely that it would be awesome to play those games on the Mac. From a Feral standpoint I have been a good employee and added your comments to the pile of games we should look at licensing on the Mac. As I don't have a magic licensing wand (if only!) I cannot influence much more than that and if I could I could not tell you anyway

So don't take my "no promises" as any kind of "nudge nudge wink wink" admission it's purely me saying I have passed on your suggestion (and in this case I also personally like the suggestion). I also like Gran Turismo & Heavy Rain so me liking something is not a state secret or proof of a Mac port it's just me liking something

Edwin

[Tacohead]

Here's another vote for RPGs.  Bethesda games aren't really my thing but they're so popular that I can't deny what it would mean to Mac users to have these games on our beloved platform. Now the Witcher games on the other hand... Well let's just say I would fly to the UK and give everybody at Feral a big hug!

-PN

[Wumpus]

Tacohead, on 05 December 2011 - 12:22 PM, said:

Well let's just say I would fly to the UK and give everybody at Feral a big hug!

-PN

I'm sure they would like it even better if you gave them your wallet too

[Tacohead]

Wumpus, on 05 December 2011 - 01:22 PM, said:

I'm sure they would like it even better if you gave them your wallet too

Hey whatever it takes!

-PN

[clocknova]

I would play Oblivion and Fallout 3 all over again if you ported them!  Make sure the mods work, though.  Haven't played Fallout: New Vegas or Skyrim, yet, but those are no brainers.  Morrowind's a little long in the tooth now, and there's already an open source rewrite in progress, so not much point in doing that one (but I'd buy it again, if you did).

[Wumpus]

I couldn't stand Oblivion, but I'm having a blast with Skyrim. It has that much needed edge to the game world and atmosphere that I personally need and like. Oblivion was far too typical fantasy world for me to get into, not to mention the scaling enemy problems. I know you could change a lot with mods, but I didn't care enough to bother.

I think I've put like 60 hours into Skyrim in the last 2 weeks Any Mac port would be most welcome

[ltcommander.data]

I'd like to through LA Noire out there. Definitely a unique game that wouldn't find much direct competition on Mac. With a minimum requirement of a 512MB GPU, it doesn't seem very Cider friendly. The game is critically acclaimed and now available in a complete bundle. And Feral and Rockstar Leeds both being in England has to give some friendly advantage? Admittedly Rockstar seems to like to keep their properties close to their chest, so I suppose it isn't very likely unless they ported it themselves.

[tcrown]

I'm not a big fan of Oblivian either, but Skyrim and Fallout franchise, which was originally on the Mac back in the day would be steps in the right direction. The Witcher would also be a good addition and it seems to be Cider friendly so porting shouldn't be to problematic.
Back in the day Apple was the go to platform for RPG's, Wizardry, Ultima, Bards Tale, etc. It would be nice to get some quality RPG's back on the platform. That genre is sorely lacking these days on the Mac.

[tcrown]

ltcommander.data, on 05 December 2011 - 09:56 PM, said:

I'd like to through LA Noire out there. Definitely a unique game that wouldn't find much direct competition on Mac. With a minimum requirement of a 512MB GPU, it doesn't seem very Cider friendly. The game is critically acclaimed and now available in a complete bundle. And Feral and Rockstar Leeds both being in England has to give some friendly advantage? Admittedly Rockstar seems to like to keep their properties close to their chest, so I suppose it isn't very likely unless they ported it themselves.

I suspect Rockstar will release L.A. Noire for the Mac in due course as they have done with the Grand Theft Series, and hopefully they will also do a PC/Mac release for GTA V and Max Payne 3.

[Wumpus]

tcrown, on 06 December 2011 - 09:59 AM, said:

I suspect Rockstar will release L.A. Noire for the Mac in due course as they have done with the Grand Theft Series, and hopefully they will also do a PC/Mac release for GTA V and Max Payne 3.

They never ported GTA IV so I wouldn't get my hopes up that much. Max Payne 2 also never saw a Mac release.

[ltcommander.data]

Wumpus, on 06 December 2011 - 09:11 PM, said:

They never ported GTA IV so I wouldn't get my hopes up that much. Max Payne 2 also never saw a Mac release.

One of the issues with GTA IV is that it requires Games for Windows Live. Given the PC port of GTA IV already doesn't have a good reputation from a performance/optimization standpoint, having to go back in and strip out and replace GFWL might be too painful. Certainly with multiplayer being one of the major new features of GTA IV, with Rockstar constantly running official GTA IV PC multiplayer events, having no multiplayer or Mac only multiplayer probably wouldn't fly, making a Mac port nonviable.

That's why I'm interested to see what happens with LA Noire. GWFL was not used and a LA Noire port would show that Rockstar is serious about supporting Mac. It would certainly set the stage for the expectation of a Mac GTA V since I don't see Rockstar going back to GFWL given the poor reception it received in GTA IV and that Rockstar Social is already there for player profiles.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

Yeah LA Noire didn't use GFWL... but it also doesn't use Rockstars usual engine (R.A.G.E. Rockstar Advanced Game Engine + Euphoria for the physics).. LA Noire used a proprietary engine by Team Bondi with Havok for the physics. It does use the rockstar social club for profiles and such though. Also it featured steam achievements.

[edddeduck]

ltcommander.data, on 06 December 2011 - 09:43 PM, said:

One of the issues with GTA IV is that it requires Games for Windows Live.

Sure Mac <-> Mac multiplayer would be the order of the day as you cannot use GFWL on the Mac however I don't think removing it is to much of a technical hurdle. We have after all removed GFWL from a bunch of games including ones that use it for networking without it being to much of a problem. GTA is primarily a single player game anyway so I would think it would still be viable on the Mac even if it did not have PC <-> Mac networking. As the GTA3 series is out and available to buy on the Mac there is still some hope for GTA IV at some stage.

Edwin

[tcrown]

Wumpus, on 06 December 2011 - 09:11 PM, said:

They never ported GTA IV so I wouldn't get my hopes up that much. Max Payne 2 also never saw a Mac release.

Max Payne 2 came out at the tail end of the dark days of Apple so I'm not surprised it didn't make it to the Mac, although I wouldn't be surprised if MP 2 shows up on iOS at some point. The GTA trilogy has made it over to the Mac from Rockstar although through Cider and GTA IV works in Cider also but can be hit and miss. Given Apple's resurgence in the market and record breaking Mac sales quarter after quarter I would hope that Rockstar are planning their near future games using engines and tech that are Mac friendly with Mac ports in mind, MP 3 and GTA 5.

The new Intel graphics core on the upcoming Ivy Bridge is DX 11 capable which would mean that theoretically all 2012 Airbooks will be DX 11 capable which should be even more compelling reasons for developers to port games to the Mac.

Certainly Feral must do doing relatively well financially with third party Mac ports to still be in business and I hope that continues and they become even more successful. Hoping to see Mac ports of Arkham City, Borderlands 2, Bioshock 3, Prey 2, Dishonored and many more from Feral.

[edddeduck]

tcrown, on 07 December 2011 - 10:26 AM, said:

The new Intel graphics core on the upcoming Ivy Bridge is DX 11 capable which would mean that theoretically all 2012 Airbooks will be DX 11 capable which should be even more compelling reasons for developers to port games to the Mac.

You are right any improvement is a welcome improvement. Remember the HD 3000 graphics card "Supports DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1 and HDMI 1.4" however that does not mean it runs DX10.1 powered games at decent settings, in fact many games it is just not powerful enough. Lets wait and see if the new card "Supports DX11" in terms of performance or just in terms of driver support. Intel have stated they are not in the business of making gaming graphics hardware more cheap but powerful hardware for regular users who want bluerays, dvds and slick user interfaces while having a low price and low battery demand.

tcrown, on 07 December 2011 - 10:26 AM, said:

Certainly Feral must do doing relatively well financially with third party Mac ports to still be in business and I hope that continues and they become even more successful. Hoping to see Mac ports of Arkham City, Borderlands 2, Bioshock 3, Prey 2, Dishonored and many more from Feral.

We will keep doing out best 2012 should be a good year

Edwin

[Smoke_Tetsu]

tcrown, on 07 December 2011 - 10:26 AM, said:

Max Payne 2 came out at the tail end of the dark days of Apple so I'm not surprised it didn't make it to the Mac, although I wouldn't be surprised if MP 2 shows up on iOS at some point. The GTA trilogy has made it over to the Mac from Rockstar although through Cider and GTA IV works in Cider also but can be hit and miss.

Max Payne 2 was also the first game to feature Havok and at the time licensing costs where probably prohibitive to port it to the Macs of the time which where PowerPC. Has anyone noticed most if not all the Havok powered games came to the Mac after the switch to intel? In my opinion havok games now being on the Mac probably has to do with two things... intel buying havok and making the licensing more reasonable and also the fact that Mac is now on intel so it's easier to port it over.

Before anyone gets the wrong impression from that last bit in the quote above Max Payne 2 not being ciderized likely has nothing to do with compatibility reasons. I have Max Payne 2 wrapped and it works great. Currently I have it in wineskin as later WINE versions enable multisampling in it so I can play Max Payne 2 at 2560x1440 with 8xAA at full speed. Although it's true with any kind of WINE variation be it wineskin or cider things can be hit or miss.

Also they have announced they are going to port Max Payne 1 to mobile devices a few months back.

BTW, Feral likes to bring games from a variety of genres to the Mac but you know which genre is severely lacking? Fighting.. although Batman has brawling elements to it and combos we don't have any proper fighting games on the Mac. The PC has the street fighter series (capcom in the past few years have released SFIV regular and arcade edition and are working on Street Fighter X Tekken for it. and a few others  from other companies. but we have none. I would like the mac to have at least one like perhaps the Unreal Engine 3 powered Mortal Kombat (2011) from Warner Bros.

One could say they don't think there's a market for them but if no games ever come out representing that genre it's kind of hard to have a market. Also since gamepads are readily available to hook up and they support almost 30 different kinds now is an ideal time to bring a fighting game franchise to the Mac.

[ltcommander.data]

Smoke_Tetsu, on 07 December 2011 - 03:44 PM, said:

Has anyone noticed most if not all the Havok powered games came to the Mac after the switch to intel? In my opinion havok games now being on the Mac probably has to do with two things... intel buying havok and making the licensing more reasonable and also the fact that Mac is now on intel so it's easier to port it over.

Given nVidia offers the binary PhysX SDK for free for both commercial and non-commercial use, Havok no doubt had to be more generous with their licensing to stay competitive.

I'm still wondering whatever happened to the OpenCL accelerated Havok that they demoed? Now that Ivy Bridge has an on-die IGP capable of OpenCL with a shared L3 cache with the CPU could make using the IGP as a physics accelerator with a dedicated GPU for the graphics off an on-die PCIe 3.0 controller very useful. I imagine the latency and bandwidth concerns on achieving good data sharing between the CPU, IGP, and dedicated GPU to make GPGPU useful are greatly reduced.

http://www.touchgen....-coming-to-ipad

On LA Noire, Rockstar may not feel like investing much effort in a Mac version, but they are investing in a customized OnLive iPad version with a new tablet friendly multitouch UI. Sigh.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

Last I heard they where making a GPU specific hardware acceleration function but that was shelved when intel bought them as they have (had?) more of an incentive to make it multi-core CPU accelerated. I've never heard of them pushing OpenCL or anything like that.

Conversely nvidia has more incentive to push something more GPU oriented and I've read it's possible for them to make better more multi-core aware code for PhysX but haven't. They've even written code into their drivers to disable PhysX if an ATI card is present which a third party has made a patch to work around.

Much of this is a game of politics and what a certain vendor wants to push. Sometimes a solution may sound like a good one and makes sense for the consumer but isn't in the best interest of the companies owning the middleware in question. Which is why in a way it's not such a good idea for hardware vendors to own physics middleware.

It seems ATI is now trying to push a more open standard however. But one may note they are like the odd man out as they don't own a physics middle-ware package of their own.

Again this is a good read about the PhysX situation:

Anyway, this is treading much if the ground that has been covered elsewhere here when it comes to PhysX. But to me it seems the situation with Havok\Intel is the inverse of the situation with PhysX\Nvidia.

BTW, I wouldn't want to play LA Noire without some kind of proper physical controls be it keyboard and mouse or gamepad. Plus I'm too used to playing it on bigger screens.. 27 inches and above (I have my PC hooked up to a 32 inch HDTV and that's where I played it).

[ltcommander.data]

Smoke_Tetsu, on 07 December 2011 - 10:34 PM, said:

Last I heard they where making a GPU specific hardware acceleration function but that was shelved when intel bought them as they have (had?) more of an incentive to make it multi-core CPU accelerated. I've never heard of them pushing OpenCL or anything like that.

Pre-Intel acquisition Havok had strategy to calculate physics on SM3.0 class shaders. This was before direct GPGPU interfaces were common. This was separate from the OpenCL initiative.

http://www.pcper.com...lerated-physics

OpenCL Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction was demoed in March 2009, which is post Intel acquisition. It was actually done in co-operation with AMD, so this is really a united front between AMD and Intel for accelerated physics, at the same time they note use of OpenCL means nVidia is supported as well. Truly a vendor agnostic physics solution supporting both CPUs and GPUs. Sadly it seems nothing came of it, although I'm hoping it was just Intel stalling until they got their OpenCL CPU drivers out, accomplished earlier this year, and OpenCL IGP available, just waiting on Ivy Bridge.

[mattw]

edddeduck, on 05 December 2011 - 11:58 AM, said:

It means from a personal point of view I agree completely that it would be awesome to play those games on the Mac. From a Feral standpoint I have been a good employee and added your comments to the pile of games we should look at licensing on the Mac. As I don't have a magic licensing wand (if only!) I cannot influence much more than that and if I could I could not tell you anyway

So don't take my "no promises" as any kind of "nudge nudge wink wink" admission it's purely me saying I have passed on your suggestion (and in this case I also personally like the suggestion). I also like Gran Turismo & Heavy Rain so me liking something is not a state secret or proof of a Mac port it's just me liking something

Edwin

Well Mafia 2 is fantastic - the little details in the world and period music etc make it great fun. If you are taking requests and suggestions how about rFactor 2 if ISI would allow it? The first one work pretty well in WINE and I believe F1 CS2000 used an earlier version of their engine. The latest "Grand Prix" trailer for the upcoming game is something else.