Steam on the Mac!
Mar. 8th, 2010 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solipsistnationWell, shoot. Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve's gaming service, and Source, Valve's gaming engine, to the Mac.
Also, they ported the Source engine, which is what drives Half-Life 2 and everything based on it. And:
The history behind this is the poorly-kept secret that Half-Life WAS ported to the Mac. Somewhere on a shelf is a working version of the single-player game. It's playable and was ready to publish, but they decided not to for (it is rumored) reasons ranging from the fact that since Macs and PCs used different CPUs at that time and the Half-Life engine used dynamic libraries and were all Intel code (that is, rather than scripted mods that ran entirely within the engine, mods were compiled into binary libraries that were linked at run-time), so third-party mods wouldn't work, to the problems in using Microsoft's network libraries and the inability for Mac and Windows players to share servers, to the problems with using Microsoft's DirectX libraries for graphics and so on, all of which had to be emulated on the Mac, meaning not just a DirectX->OpenGL wrapper but a DirectX->OpenGL wrapper on a different platform with different methods of handling graphics hardware, while still keeping the game itself maintainable for future patches and so on. So, yeah.
The short version seems to be that they decided it wouldn't be a good experience for Mac users-- no online play against their PC friends (and pwning PC users in QuakeWorld and then telling them I was on a Mac was loads of fun back in the old old old days), no patches, no mods, and considering that people are STILL working on Half-Life mods that was a big deal... Ported, ready to go, shelved forever.
Porting Source and definitively and, it sounds, aggressively, supporting the Mac at the same level as Windows is a fantastic move. It turns the Mac into, well, if not a first-tier gaming platform, at least not the kind of system you apologize about while demonstrating that you can play games that were cool six months or a year ago, if you pay full release-date price for them. Steam is a very cool platform, and has given indie developers a leg up into a marketplace with lots of users comfortable with online purchase and download of games, and I know I've bought tons more games I otherwise might not have looked at very closely because it's so easy to check them out and purchase them through Steam. It's even my preferred venue for A-list games. I played Dragon Age: Origins through Steam, and basically everything else-- even weirdo Russian games like The Void have come out on Steam (...a week after my copy arrived from the UK).
This is a huge win for everyone-- publishers, Mac users, and, well, I guess everyone BUT PC users, who now have one less thing to be defensive about when Mac users start getting uppity. If Mac users can natively play now only World of Warcraft and Blizzard games, but ALSO Valve games, well. That makes that whole "Uh, Breakout. Super Breakout." video from a couple of years ago even sillier. This is huge. This is big wins. This is hugs all around. This is no-longer-needing-to-dual-boot on Macs everywhere. This is 50 or so more free gig on my laptop drive. This is the ability to download games to my work Mac and, uh. Well, I won't go into too much detail there. Anyway, yay!
Also:
Also, they ported the Source engine, which is what drives Half-Life 2 and everything based on it. And:
We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth.
The history behind this is the poorly-kept secret that Half-Life WAS ported to the Mac. Somewhere on a shelf is a working version of the single-player game. It's playable and was ready to publish, but they decided not to for (it is rumored) reasons ranging from the fact that since Macs and PCs used different CPUs at that time and the Half-Life engine used dynamic libraries and were all Intel code (that is, rather than scripted mods that ran entirely within the engine, mods were compiled into binary libraries that were linked at run-time), so third-party mods wouldn't work, to the problems in using Microsoft's network libraries and the inability for Mac and Windows players to share servers, to the problems with using Microsoft's DirectX libraries for graphics and so on, all of which had to be emulated on the Mac, meaning not just a DirectX->OpenGL wrapper but a DirectX->OpenGL wrapper on a different platform with different methods of handling graphics hardware, while still keeping the game itself maintainable for future patches and so on. So, yeah.
The short version seems to be that they decided it wouldn't be a good experience for Mac users-- no online play against their PC friends (and pwning PC users in QuakeWorld and then telling them I was on a Mac was loads of fun back in the old old old days), no patches, no mods, and considering that people are STILL working on Half-Life mods that was a big deal... Ported, ready to go, shelved forever.
Porting Source and definitively and, it sounds, aggressively, supporting the Mac at the same level as Windows is a fantastic move. It turns the Mac into, well, if not a first-tier gaming platform, at least not the kind of system you apologize about while demonstrating that you can play games that were cool six months or a year ago, if you pay full release-date price for them. Steam is a very cool platform, and has given indie developers a leg up into a marketplace with lots of users comfortable with online purchase and download of games, and I know I've bought tons more games I otherwise might not have looked at very closely because it's so easy to check them out and purchase them through Steam. It's even my preferred venue for A-list games. I played Dragon Age: Origins through Steam, and basically everything else-- even weirdo Russian games like The Void have come out on Steam (...a week after my copy arrived from the UK).
This is a huge win for everyone-- publishers, Mac users, and, well, I guess everyone BUT PC users, who now have one less thing to be defensive about when Mac users start getting uppity. If Mac users can natively play now only World of Warcraft and Blizzard games, but ALSO Valve games, well. That makes that whole "Uh, Breakout. Super Breakout." video from a couple of years ago even sillier. This is huge. This is big wins. This is hugs all around. This is no-longer-needing-to-dual-boot on Macs everywhere. This is 50 or so more free gig on my laptop drive. This is the ability to download games to my work Mac and, uh. Well, I won't go into too much detail there. Anyway, yay!
Also:
Portal 2 will be Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. "Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step," said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. "We're always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac."