4 replies to this topic

[Wumpus]

Hey all,


I have several more interviews as mentioned, but with the help of various people I've got lists compiled for Ambrosia, Soldak and Amanita Design. But I have someone else on the table, Glenda Adams. I'm excited about this, she's really a star in the mac game community for all her past work, and even though she does iOS games now I she has a long and experienced history to draw from personally, and with Aspyr. So if you have anything interesting you want to see asked, please submit it here in a clear manner and I'll be glad to include it.


Thanks!

[Sneaky Snake]

Wumpus, on 17 December 2010 - 08:13 PM, said:

Hey all,


I have several more interviews as mentioned, but with the help of various people I've got lists compiled for Ambrosia, Soldak and Amanita Design. But I have someone else on the table, Glenda Adams. I'm excited about this, she's really a star in the mac game community for all her past work, and even though she does iOS games now I she has a long and experienced history to draw from personally, and with Aspyr. So if you have anything interesting you want to see asked, please submit it here in a clear manner and I'll be glad to include it.


Thanks!

I like to know what she thinks the general future of mac gaming is. It appears to be on the up swing, but an expert's thoughts would be great! Also I'd like to hear what she thinks about OpenGL vs DirectX, and what she thinks of apple's [lack of] implementation for current OpenGL stuff

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Does she prefer to develop for Mac or i OS?

Which game does she think is the best, released for mac the last 5 years (and 10)?

[Wumpus]

Thain Esh Kelch, on 18 December 2010 - 02:02 PM, said:

Does she prefer to develop for Mac or i OS?

That's kind of an lol since she she left Mac development to do iOS. But its a topic I'm going to ask her about.

Otherwise thanks for the questions so far, it helps!

[ltcommander.data]

Steve Jobs has been pretty direct about Apple's support for gaming on iOS, while things on OS X have been less clear. Has she seen definite signs that Apple's newfound love of gaming is carrying over to OS X? There's been the dedicated Snow Leopard Graphics Update for 10.6.4, which is probably the only time Apple went outside the normal point release cycle specifically to improve graphics performance on a wide range of GPUs. But does she feel that's a sign of things to come and will be continued or was it more of a one time damage control measure to mitigate the unfavorable PC vs Mac Source engine performance comparisons that were floating around at that time?

Sneaky Snake has already mentioned Apple's lagging OpenGL implementation, still OpenGL 2.1+extensions, but beyond bringing OpenGL up to date, should how GPU drivers are handled be changed? For example, have more frequent OS point updates in general or uncouple GPU driver updates from point updates so they can be updated more frequently? Should ATI, nVidia, and Intel be encouraged to release their own drivers? Perhaps with Apple's point drivers being offered as now slowly progressing, stable drivers, with OEM drivers being optional, more frequent performance drivers. Is it important that Apple releases GPU drivers for older OS too, ie. so that an upgrade to Lion won't be required to get say OpenGL 4.x while Snow Leopard users are stuck at OpenGL 2.1? I would assume such a big gap in feature-set between the 2 OS makes it very difficult to choose between requiring Lion for a game in order to take advantage of all the new features and performance and dealing with the smaller userbase or supporting Snow Leopard to get more customers but making work more difficult in having to find workarounds for the much older OpenGL implementation.

Apple has said that Game Center is not coming to the Mac App Store, does she feel that is an unfortunate oversight? In terms of integration, I think there is an opportunity here to leverage Game Center as a common gaming profile for people across mobile, Mac, and PC. With many franchise being cross-platform or having tie-in games, it would definitely make things more interesting to have achievements in a mobile game unlock extra features, story-lines, etc of the computer game and vice-versa.

What does she think about Apple being more proactive in ensuring that popular licensed game engines have native OS X support? The Source Engine now has native Mac support which allows Valve to treat OS X as a tier-1 platform with same day releases. Blizzard has long done the same for their games. Certainly native iOS support has been all the news for UE3. The interesting thing about that is that Epic has said that Apple had to actively help them bring UE3 to iOS including granting them exception to the rules to let Epic create their own virtual machine to run Unreal Script unmodified compared to existing platforms. Could/should Apple have used this as leverage to encourage Epic to popularize full native OS X support in UE3? id Tech 5 is supposed to support OS X, but a Mac version of RAGE has since gone quiet. The Unigine engine has very advanced support for OpenGL including OpenGL 4.1 and tessellation, but curiously is available for Linux before OS X, presumably due to lack of comparable features in the OS X OpenGL stack. Should Apple be actively seeking out engine developers and providing assistance in making sure these engines target and run well on OS X kind of like how ATI and nVidia have developer support programs?

And finally, is she able to tell us a bit more about what Graeme Devine's iOS gaming role at Apple was about? Was he focused on working on new features or did he interact with iOS game developers to make sure there concerns were addressed? Is she said to see him leave Apple, ie. gaming progress may slow now that he is gone?

Hopefully my questions are pretty clear, if long winded.