370 replies to this topic

[Jan]

I think it would be appropriate to dedicate a thread to our longtime friends from Austin, Texas. A place to discuss the latest rumours, SteamDB entries and announcements regarding the latest and greatest Aspyr games.

Right now, we are aware of the upcoming retro port of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II -- The Sith Lords for Mac, Linux and probably iOS. But what about another AAA title in the Borderlands/BioShock Infinite league? I have a feeling CD Projekt RED might drop Virtual Programming and work with Aspyr instead. First project: The Witcher 3 for Mac and SteamOS. What do you guys think?

[Mr Pink]

'Homeworld Remastered Collection' has some Mac depots in the SteamDB: https://steamdb.info.../244160/depots/
Aspyr already ported Homeworld 2 and seems to have good relations with Gearbox, who now hold the rights to Homeworld.

[Matt Diamond]

Aspyr is also working on Mac & Linux versions of the Rising Tide expansion for Beyond Earth. Due in the fall I believe.

[Janichsan]

Not to forget: KotOR 2.

[MichalM.Mac]

Jan, on 02 June 2015 - 06:37 AM, said:

I think it would be appropriate to dedicate a thread to our longtime friends from Austin, Texas. A place to discuss the latest rumours, SteamDB entries and announcements regarding the latest and greatest Aspyr games.

Better late than never :-)

What about Evolve? (or is that rumored to be transgaming project?)

[Mr Pink]

MichalM.Mac, on 02 June 2015 - 10:22 AM, said:

What about Evolve? (or is that rumored to be transgaming project?)

I thought Evolve is Feral's 'Depth Charge', or is that LEGO Jurassic World.

[ipickert55]

Evolve is probably either Feral or in house, not Aspyr.

[Jan]

If I had one wish, it would be Aspyr announcing a simultaneous PC and Mac release of the upcoming Fallout 4.

I mean, it's an RPG, right? Blair, am I right?

[Matt Diamond]

Here's something interesting: it looks like Glenda Adams is back with Aspyr! According to her LinkedIn profile, she just rejoined as Publishing Manager.

Glenda of course was the Director of Development for some of Aspyr's most prolific years, and before that ported many seminal titles to the Mac (Deus Ex, System Shock, over a dozen others.) Could be a sign of good things to come from Aspyr.

[Jan]

Matt Diamond, on 04 June 2015 - 07:12 AM, said:

Here's something interesting: it looks like Glenda Adams is back with Aspyr! According to her LinkedIn profile, she just rejoined as Publishing Manager.

Glenda of course was the Director of Development for some of Aspyr's most prolific years, and before that ported many seminal titles to the Mac (Deus Ex, System Shock, over a dozen others.) Could be a sign of good things to come from Aspyr.

That's awesome! You gotta love Glenda. She truly knows her stuff. I wonder what her comeback project will be.

[tcrown]

Jez Sherlock Director of Technology from Aspyr talking about Metal for Mac.

"However, we should not forget that Metal’s origin is mostly with gaming in mind, so this is a big thing for Mac gaming in general. It adds considerable fuel to the idea of Macs as serious gaming machines. I would expect this sort of obvious support to make Mac game development more attractive to new players and, in turn, even more competitive. That’ll mean more games on Mac, more of them doing so natively, and the best ones to come through Aspyr of course!"

http://blog.gameagen...for-mac-gaming/

[Jan]

That's a very good read, indeed. He's basically saying there's a good chance we'll see DirectX 11 games performing better on Mac than their Windows counterparts once Aspyr 'metalizes' them. It takes effort, but it's worth it. They might even update some of their more demanding older titles. Borderlands 2 finally running better on OS X than Windows on the same hardware. Who would have thought this even a few days ago?

[Camper-Hunter]

I'll believe it when I see it.

[Cougar]

Camper-Hunter, on 11 June 2015 - 12:16 PM, said:

I'll believe it when I see it.

Indeed. I can sort of imagine a Metal game approaching or reaching a DX11 game, but I will be very, very surprised if it approaches DX12.

[jeannot]

Metal has everything necessary to compete with DX12 in terms of performance.

[Camper-Hunter]

jeannot, maybe. But OpenGL has everything necessary to compete with DX11 in terms of performance too, and in the end game performance on OS X compared to Windows is awful. The graphics cards drivers will still be a bottleneck compared to Windows ones, for instance.

[tcrown]

Camper-Hunter, on 13 June 2015 - 03:25 AM, said:

jeannot, maybe. But OpenGL has everything necessary to compete with DX11 in terms of performance too, and in the end game performance on OS X compared to Windows is awful. The graphics cards drivers will still be a bottleneck compared to Windows ones, for instance.

The entire point of Metal is to completely illiminate the driver overhead, you are writing directly to the Gpu, which takes very skilled programers, also why MS is moving DX12 in the same direction as Metal, access directly to the Gpu but Apple is currently ahead in implementation.

Anandtech has a good prelim write-up here.
http://www.anandtech...pples-metal-api

[ltcommander.data]

jeannot, on 12 June 2015 - 02:59 PM, said:

Metal has everything necessary to compete with DX12 in terms of performance.

Feature-wise Metal is still looking OpenGL ES 3.1 derived + additions. DX11/OGL4/OES3.1+AEP features like geometry shaders and tessellation are not currently supported by Metal. Some developers have questioned the usefulness of geometry shaders so that's probably not a big deal. Tessellation may have performance benefits if it allows developers to start with simpler models and render more details dynamically. DX12 looks to be a superset of existing DX11.2 + additions.

tcrown, on 13 June 2015 - 07:58 AM, said:

The entire point of Metal is to completely illiminate the driver overhead, you are writing directly to the Gpu, which takes very skilled programers, also why MS is moving DX12 in the same direction as Metal, access directly to the Gpu but Apple is currently ahead in implementation.

Anandtech has a good prelim write-up here.
http://www.anandtech...pples-metal-api

DX12 should be launching with Windows 10 next month while Metal for Mac and El Capitan probably won't be out until October. Apple may be ahead in mobile but not on PC/Mac. Metal for Mac is based on Metal for iOS but there are differences like a different memory model necessary to accommodate discrete memory, the textures supported are completely different, etc. So developers supporting Metal on iOS is helpful, but there looks to be some additional work involved to support Metal for Mac.

[Jan]

Macs nowadays are pretty similar to consoles: Apple controls the OS and the hardware. Across the product lineup are Intel integrated and AMD chips. I think there will be customized dual GPUs in both Mac Pros and Retina iMacs and an AMD card in the high-end MacBook Pro. For a developer this seems to be pretty easy to target and optimize because they know exactly on which Macs their game will run. Even though we might not be able to self-upgrade our GPUs in the future, this new situation seems to be very exciting because we have passionate and competent porters like Aspyr and Feral who know what they do and they will use Metal. We've got a new Mac Pro in the office with Dual FirePro D700s. At the moment there's only one OpenCL enabled game: Civ 5. But it runs like a charm and super smooth. Blair mentioned in the MacRumours forum that it was hard work to get everything running on OS X. If Metal works as promised, we might see all future Aspyr and Feral games using Dual GPUs to its full potential.

[MichalM.Mac]

Homeworld remastered hits MAS. Steam release date not specified.
http://blog.gameagen...collection-mac/