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Warhammer Out For Macs
As someone who has joined the Cult of Jobs wholeheartedly (and is typing this on a 2009 13″ Macbook Pro he takes everywhere) I approve!
This port, like most of EA’s offerings, uses Transgaming’s Cider emulation rather than being developed from the ground up for OSX like the World of Warcraft Mac client. Given that the Warhammer Mac client is 9.6 gigs, it may be a while before I find out how well it performs…
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about 1 year ago
Most of my university faculty and students are the same way. It seems Apple is in, particularly amongst those in creative works development. (I blame native Adobe implementation.)
Of course, if you’re a poor unemployed SOB like myself, you’re probably not in a super big hurry to shell out three times the money for a similarly powered computer.
Anywho: Warhammer Online. Serviceable enough MMO, I don’t think it really deserved to tank, I hope this helps turn things around for them.
about 1 year ago
My Mac Is Fight?
She got a scarf on her hayed, huh?
about 1 year ago
I thought Macs were specifically designed for the unemployed Starbucks dweller?
about 1 year ago
Only if they’re backed by a trust fund. Or parents.
File it under “whatevs”. More support for things is always nice. I can’t poo-poo options. I can point and laugh at OS/platform fundies though.
about 1 year ago
Would be nice if they started porting to linux.
about 1 year ago
grelf, the “port” to MacOS really isn’t much more than running it under a slightly more advanced version of Wine. If you want to run Warhammer on Linux, go to the Warhammer Online – Live page in the winehq appdb and go for it. It requires some work and skill, but people do it– no porting required by EA.
about 1 year ago
Have you hear of Gaikai? If this development team has their way and it’s successful, then hardware and OS will no longer be a barrier when it comes to playing games. Click the link and scroll down to see the video.
http://www.dperry.com/archives/news/dp_blog/gaikai_-_video/
about 1 year ago
Mac. Bleh. Even the logo is broken.
about 1 year ago
Considering how sluggish and unresponsive WAR performs on a PC without emulation, I can’t imagine it’ll play very well.
about 1 year ago
They’re not the only ones, there’s a ton of little cloud gaming outfits sprouting out of the woodwork. The concept is that since PC hardware is so darn restrictive, and the Internet bandwidth seems to be so darn abundant (especially if you have a magic bullet video compression method) why not rent people out a computer over the Internet?
I believe it when I see it. It seems to me that even as little as a 30 ms ping will be sufficient latency to make many games ones games would prefer to play on local hardware.
about 1 year ago
Let the OS WAR commence? no? no? I’ll get my coat.
about 1 year ago
I’m all for WAR coming to the Mac. I’ve been tempted to get a Mac of times but the fact that it can’t play any new MMO is a major no-no for me. Good on Mythic I say.
about 1 year ago
I used to hate Macs, but now I say go for it. The more competition with Windows PC’s the better. Same with X-nix. In fact, I really hope that Macs et al start gaining ground on the Windows PCs at a faster rate because then maybe Microsoft will wake up and actually improve their stuff for a change, rather than just make it even more of a bloated mess.
Yet, bloated mess or not, I’ve used both Mac and PC, and I’m sticking with the more robust and expandable PC platform, than the locked down proprietary and needlessly expensive Mac.
about 1 year ago
Meh. Macs are overexpensive and Apple its not a better company than Microsoft. They are around the same.
about 1 year ago
Around the biggest conflict between Mac vrs PC right now is that one is holding tooth and nail to Quicktime format, while the other is holding tooth and nail to WMV format. “Our video codec shall reign supreme,” they cry.
about 1 year ago
I wish someone would force Microsoft and the industry somehow to offer DirectX for MacOS and Linux or atleast I wish someone would force the industry to develop proper OpenGL drivers for MacOS and Linux.
The only reason I use Windows is for playing games. The world was so much better when game developers used DOS-extenders and Windows 3 was only something to laugh about.
Anyway, I don’t know what Gamebryo costs, but for the prices it costs they could offer a MacOS-target.
I wouldn’t use any game engine that doesn’t support atleast MacOS/OpenGL, just out of principle – no need to strengthen Microsoft’s position.
about 1 year ago
@geldonyetich: Mac’s are a lot more reasonable in price these days, they’ve had to be. You can get the Macbook Pro 13″ for $1200, which compares pretty favorably compared to alternatives.
The thing you have to keep in mind is Apple basically has a monopoly on build quality and product design. Nobody else competes, at all. The new unibody aluminum macbooks are both aesthetically pleasing and very tough. No creaky plastic or loose joints.
@downsj: I don’t know how much experience you have with wine games, but usually it’s pretty much a waste of time. They run terribly, glitches like flies on a corpse, and development support is pretty poor. At least EA has people dedicated to making sure this client works.
Note that I have no particular allegiance to any operating system. I have a Windows PC dual booted with the Suse linux distro, and my laptop is dual booted with OS X and Windows XP (soon to be 7).
Anyway quote-wars aside, I downloaded the beta yesterday and I’m pretty impressed:
I’m running it on the base model MacBook, packing a 2.0 core2duo and nVidia 9400m. I got pretty solid framerate for the couple of hours I played, though I’m sure there are some areas that will make me suffer.
The only glitch I found (which might be a hardware problem at my end) was clicking on loot seemed fairly unresponsive at times. Other than that it was a smooth experience, and I’m seriously considering subbing.
about 1 year ago
Oh how I miss the edit button, Sean. Need more coffee before I try writing anything else.
about 1 year ago
I see I’m not the only one to pine for an edit button.
about 1 year ago
I miss the quote button too. I liked it so much I added one of my own to my site.
about 1 year ago
geldonyetich: What exactly is the advantage to using Adobe software on a Mac these days? My understanding is that virtually all of their apps are available on PC, and that most Mac purists despise modern Adobe software since it disregards half of Apple’s guidelines and botches the other half. Is it just that their software traditionally performs better since it originated on the Mac?
EpicSquirt: DirectX would be pretty much useless on the Mac since you’d never get driver support (Apple basically controls video drivers on the Mac) and you don’t have access to any of the infrastructure it depends on (Win32, DirectShow, etc.), and of course any games/apps would still need to be recompiled since Windows and Mac OS/Mac OS X don’t share an executable format.
On Linux an ‘official’ DirectX implementation might potentially be of use but still would suffer from most of the same issues as a Mac one: Basically no driver support, none of the infrastructure you need, and you’d need to recompile the game/application.
If you really want to be able to play Windows games on a mac or linux machine, the best things would be more commercial support behind efforts like Wine and WineD3D, along with Microsoft providing more detailed specifications for DirectX.
In all honesty though the biggest issue has nothing to do with Microsoft: 3D is pretty damn hard, and DirectX offers 3D plus a bunch of other stuff for games. Companies like NVIDIA and AMD still have trouble delivering rock-solid drivers for OpenGL/Direct3D, despite the fact that their entire business is built around it and they have near-direct control over both specifications. Intel is an even more tragic example since they practically own the consumer 3D market but consistently fail to deliver anything resembling good drivers.
Microsoft could invest dozens of man-years of engineering effort into a mac or linux Direct3D port and you’d probably still be unable to play most unmodified windows games.