8 replies to this topic

[drabyss78]

Just curious--why the lack of love/disdain for Cider/Transgaming here from some?  I know there were some problems with some early ports, but I own at least 7 Cider powered games and they all run great for me.   It seems to me, they're a big part of why Mac gaming has been somewhat resurgent, and the quality of games which are released via TG/Cider is AMAZING.

[The Liberator]

drabyss78, on 13 March 2012 - 11:34 PM, said:

Just curious--why the lack of love/disdain for Cider/Transgaming here from some?  I know there were some problems with some early ports, but I own at least 7 Cider powered games and they all run great for me.   It seems to me, they're a big part of why Mac gaming has been somewhat resurgent, and the quality of games which are released via TG/Cider is AMAZING.

I do not actually know why, and neither can I really comment. I own only a few games; which might not even run on Cider anyway.

Liberator.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

I think it is specifically because they weren't so robust especially at first and had a lot of bugs and first impressions tend to be lasting impressions. They're getting better and better and to be honest even some totally "native" games aren't any better when it comes to the features they support.  Also for some it's kind of a snobbish thing where games that aren't totally hand ported are seen as not native and thus less than.

Ironically, Transgaming has had a hand in porting games to the Mac longer than some realize. Many of Omni groups ports where done with prototype PPC versions of their libraries such as Tron 2.0, NOLF2 and AvP2.

[ikir]

Even now the quality of some ports are bad, like Red Alert 3 is quite buggy. Overall Cider ports quality is good and performance too. Its getting better, anyway i prefer a native port, maybe with Lion fullscreen and other specific Mac features.

[Janichsan]

I have several problems with Cider "ports", which is why I don't buy any of those anymore.

First of all, in my experience, the performance scales very badly. The games might run pretty well on higher end models, but the closer you come to the lower end, the worse it gets – to a far bigger extent than with most native ports. The worst example for this I encountered was Dragon Age: Origins. On my 13" MBP, the game was barely playable under OS X with the lowest possible settings – although that machine was well above the minimum requirements for the "port". (Under Windows, the game ran well even on medium settings, by the way.)

Secondly, Cider "ports" are badly integrated with the operating system. For instance, while you can easily add your own music to the Windows version of GTA III/VC/SA, it's impossible to do so with the ciderised Mac "port".

Third and lastly – and which is the main reason why I completely avoid Cider "ports" –, the support is non-existent. Patches come late or not at all. One of the most egregious examples is Battlefield 2142: more than one year after the release of the 1.51 patch for Windows, there is still no trace of the Mac version, rendering the game unplayable online. Cider "ports" that were broken right from the beginning or broke with one or the other system update and never got patched are numerous.

[ltcommander.data]

Is Cider multithreaded now? I was under the impression, at least in the beginning, the Cider wrapper meant that the resulting game doesn't scale well to multiple cores. I know newer Cider titles use Apple's multithreaded OpenGL driver, but can game logic, physics, audio, etc. spawn their own threads through Cider? Admittedly, not that many games fully take advantage of 4 or more cores regardless, but good dual core utilization would be nice.

The way Transgaming has explained the Cider development process is that Cider is constantly being improved, but each game forks it's own unique branch making it difficult to back-port Cider improvements into older titles. I'd imagine this also means there is little motivation to go back and relearn the quirks of each game's Cider wrapper when a PC patch is released kind of like Apple only developing security updates for the most recent 2 OS.

[Wumpus]

I'm not particularly for or against cider. My only bad experience with it is Ubisofts Prince of Persia, which ran somewhat poorly even on my powerful iMac. It also crashed like a mofo, I had to hard restart 5 times in a row. But maybe that's just me. It ran perfectly in bootcamp and I don't recall it crashing once. Dragon Age & DA2 all ran great for me.

In more recent Cider experience I've tried a Skyrim wrapper and it runs just as good for me in Lion as it does for me in Bootcamp. Pretty impressive really. I think the latest versions of cider are quite good. I don't have that much experience wrapping stuff or porting my own games, but its certainly possible to wrangle with it if you know how. If someone's into that, or into Transgaming, I'm all for it. I'd still prefer a native port, but if its the difference between the game never coming to mac, and coming to mac via Cider, I'll take the Cider option.

[TG_Thakkar]

Janichsan, on 14 March 2012 - 04:08 AM, said:

Secondly, Cider "ports" are badly integrated with the operating system. For instance, while you can easily add your own music to the Windows version of GTA III/VC/SA, it's impossible to do so with the ciderised Mac "port".

Hi Janichsan,

For info on how to add your own music to Mac versions of GTA III/VC/SA, please see :

http://support.rocks...and-san-andreas

Hope this helps

[Smoke_Tetsu]

ltcommander.data, on 14 March 2012 - 11:24 AM, said:

Is Cider multithreaded now?

For what it's worth I've been noticing a multithreaded rendering option in the cider options file for quite some time now.

Anyway, about mods.. which adding music to a game is pretty much modding. I've noticed with certain games it's actually easier to get certain mods to run in a wrapper than with a truly native port. Which ones you ask? The ones that require compilation of a library that does the modding. For example... it's a hell of a lot easier to get the sikkmod for doom 3 to run in a wrapper than to attempt to compile the Doom 3 SDK and troubleshoot that on Lion and get the sikkmod compiled there. But feel free to prove me wrong and compile the sikkmod for Aspyr's Doom III and release it... I dare you! I have UTIII wrapped and I appliled mods there just the same as I would have with a truly native port.

As for Mac specific features there aren't many that anyone uses as far as I know. Pretty much all AAA games use their own full screen UI which is the same whether it's wrapped or not and no native ports integrate with ilife or anything like that. The closest I have seen is the half baked support for playing song out of an itunes playlist in Prey.

Hardly any games use the Lion type of fullscreen except binding of isaac which implements it poorly. Most use the old style fullscreen or valve's style which is not lion's style.