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Nope most of them use some sort of game Engine, unreal and Unity dominate. MacOS gaming is not only not dead it’s flourishing rapidly. Take a trip to Steam sho

by kilon 8y ago

Nope most of them use some sort of game Engine, unreal and Unity dominate. MacOS gaming is not only not dead it’s flourishing rapidly. Take a trip to Steam shop. You will find a massive amount of games are made for MacOS and the numbers are growing rapidly since Apple lost interest into OpenGL. But then MacOS has reached a 10% of the desktop market making it much harder to ignore than in the past when it barely reached 3%. With iOS dominating mobile revenue , Appple is the undisputed king of gaming for over a decade now.

SwellJoe 8y ago
"Nope most of them use some sort of game Engine, unreal and Unity dominate." But, don't those engines use OpenGL on the backend? They need some sort of interface to the GPU, and AFAIK, OpenGL is it for both Mac OS and Linux. Edit: Yes, at least Unity does. I can't find an authoritative source on Unreal. https://forum.unity.com/threads/opengl-core-backend-default-change-for-osx-and-linux.359225/ https://forum.unity.com/threads/opengl-core-backend-default-... Edit2: Found Unreal info...they switched to Metal in 4.14. So, you're OK if you develop games for Mac with Unreal. I guess it's plausible that Unity will do the same going forward.
- bananaboy 8y ago
  Unity already supports Metal on OSX and iOS. See "Enabling Metal" here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UsingDX11GL3Features.html https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UsingDX11GL3Features.html
- yAak 8y ago
  Unity supports Metal, it was shown on stage during the keynote: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/06/05/wwdc18-book-of-the-dead-debuts-on-macbook-pro-arkit-2-0-available-for-unity-devs/ https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/06/05/wwdc18-book-of-the-dead...
- kilon 8y ago
  The backend plays a minor role, as I repeatedly say and I am repeatedly downvoted by ignorant people. Unreal supports on MacOS not one but 3 technologies. OpenGL, Vulkan and Metal and that is just for graphics. There is also CUDA, OpenCL, PhysicsX and much more that go far beyond the scope of 3d graphics. A well designed graphics engine never ties itself to a platform however popular that platform may be. Whether that platform may be a OS , a graphics API or any kind of SDK. At least Unreal is neither a game engine nor a graphics engine , its an entire ecosystem of tools , APIs. Unreal even extends C++ to facilitate for GC and some rudimentary reflective abilities. So there are a ton of things go on, from low level to very high level. Overall MacOS develpers have been very quick into embracing Metal for new projects and so did Unreal. Which is no big suprise because Metal gives access to both MacOS and iOS which is a variant/fork of MacOS.
bananaboy 8y ago
If you look at the most recent Steam hardware survey though 96.3% of players are on Windows and 3.07% are on macOS. I don't know if that's "flourishing rapidly". It's certainly going up slowly. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
- tormeh 8y ago
  Mac has twice the amount of users on Steam that Linux has. And game studios mostly ignore Linux. Apple making themselves precious is not going to win them any hearts in the game industry.
  - bananaboy 8y ago
    Oh yes, don't get me wrong, I totally agree!
- kilon 8y ago
  Well I will just mention that i am an iMac user since 2007 and I replying to your message with Win 10 via Bootcamp. Mac gamers choose the bootcamp route because its an easy solution and gives access to more games and software. I am willing to bet that Mac gamers are at least 8% if not more. Bootcamp became popular way before Steam did and way before we saw the big switch of big Game studio from pure Windows to Windows/MacOS. Windows also has a notorious reputaiton of being far more stable on bootcamp that a regular pc and and its a reputation that my personal experience confirms it. Because I am a developer I have decided to stick with Win 10 and bootcamp and it has been a smooth ride so far but from time to time I go back to MacOS. Windows 10 also has been the first reliable OS that came from Microsoft. Of course bootcamp is not the only solution, there is also wine like solution and vm solution but Bootcamp is by far the most popular for gaming. Another reason to stick with bootcamp is that games may offer a MacOS support but are not quick to fix bugs and resolve issues usually becayse they develop on windows and use crossplatform APIs to port to MacOS using Windows and not MacOS devs which can cause all sort of issues that can take time to resolve.

by kilon 8y ago

SwellJoe 8y ago

"Nope most of them use some sort of game Engine, unreal and Unity dominate." But, don't those engines use OpenGL on the backend? They need some sort of interface to the GPU, and AFAIK, OpenGL is it for both Mac OS and Linux. Edit: Yes, at least Unity does. I can't find an authoritative source on Unreal. https://forum.unity.com/threads/opengl-core-backend-default-change-for-osx-and-linux.359225/ https://forum.unity.com/threads/opengl-core-backend-default-... Edit2: Found Unreal info...they switched to Metal in 4.14. So, you're OK if you develop games for Mac with Unreal. I guess it's plausible that Unity will do the same going forward.

bananaboy 8y ago
Unity already supports Metal on OSX and iOS. See "Enabling Metal" here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UsingDX11GL3Features.html https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UsingDX11GL3Features.html
yAak 8y ago
Unity supports Metal, it was shown on stage during the keynote: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/06/05/wwdc18-book-of-the-dead-debuts-on-macbook-pro-arkit-2-0-available-for-unity-devs/ https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/06/05/wwdc18-book-of-the-dead...
kilon 8y ago
The backend plays a minor role, as I repeatedly say and I am repeatedly downvoted by ignorant people. Unreal supports on MacOS not one but 3 technologies. OpenGL, Vulkan and Metal and that is just for graphics. There is also CUDA, OpenCL, PhysicsX and much more that go far beyond the scope of 3d graphics. A well designed graphics engine never ties itself to a platform however popular that platform may be. Whether that platform may be a OS , a graphics API or any kind of SDK. At least Unreal is neither a game engine nor a graphics engine , its an entire ecosystem of tools , APIs. Unreal even extends C++ to facilitate for GC and some rudimentary reflective abilities. So there are a ton of things go on, from low level to very high level. Overall MacOS develpers have been very quick into embracing Metal for new projects and so did Unreal. Which is no big suprise because Metal gives access to both MacOS and iOS which is a variant/fork of MacOS.

bananaboy 8y ago

If you look at the most recent Steam hardware survey though 96.3% of players are on Windows and 3.07% are on macOS. I don't know if that's "flourishing rapidly". It's certainly going up slowly. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

tormeh 8y ago
Mac has twice the amount of users on Steam that Linux has. And game studios mostly ignore Linux. Apple making themselves precious is not going to win them any hearts in the game industry.
- bananaboy 8y ago
  Oh yes, don't get me wrong, I totally agree!
kilon 8y ago
Well I will just mention that i am an iMac user since 2007 and I replying to your message with Win 10 via Bootcamp. Mac gamers choose the bootcamp route because its an easy solution and gives access to more games and software. I am willing to bet that Mac gamers are at least 8% if not more. Bootcamp became popular way before Steam did and way before we saw the big switch of big Game studio from pure Windows to Windows/MacOS. Windows also has a notorious reputaiton of being far more stable on bootcamp that a regular pc and and its a reputation that my personal experience confirms it. Because I am a developer I have decided to stick with Win 10 and bootcamp and it has been a smooth ride so far but from time to time I go back to MacOS. Windows 10 also has been the first reliable OS that came from Microsoft. Of course bootcamp is not the only solution, there is also wine like solution and vm solution but Bootcamp is by far the most popular for gaming. Another reason to stick with bootcamp is that games may offer a MacOS support but are not quick to fix bugs and resolve issues usually becayse they develop on windows and use crossplatform APIs to port to MacOS using Windows and not MacOS devs which can cause all sort of issues that can take time to resolve.