5 ms·

Friendly reminder that support != able to run. This seems totally reasonable to me. Are there many games played today which are A) 32-bit only and B) still nee

by nick_ 3y ago

Friendly reminder that support != able to run. This seems totally reasonable to me. Are there many games played today which are A) 32-bit only and B) still need fixes/patch/update support?

duskwuff 3y ago
> Are there many games played today Most of Valve's own games are (still!) 32-bit only on macOS, including all of the Half-Life games, both Portals, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress 2. The only major game of theirs which is available for 64-bit macOS is Dota 2. (Underlords and Artifact were both market failures, so I'm ignoring them.) Really, the way Valve has handled the 64-bit transition on macOS has been pretty terrible. Up until today, their recommended "solution" for running 32-bit games was for users to downgrade to Mojave or install Windows through Boot Camp. (Never mind that neither of these is an option for users with newer computers.)
- sosodev 3y ago
  Right? I know Mac users are a fraction of the market but recompiling nothing almost seems petty.
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    They even did a bunch of work on Half-Life recently for its 25th anniversary [1], including adding Steam Deck support and fixing long-standing bugs -- but that didn't extend to making it run on any modern macOS system. [1]: https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife25/ https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife25/
- appplication 3y ago
  I’ve been wanting to play portal 2 for years but I’m astounded Valve is unwilling to prioritize the relatively low amount of work it would take to compile to 64-bit.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - MindSpunk 3y ago
    It's really not as simple as recompiling with 64bit. There are likely numerous assumptions of a 32 bit system all over the codebase that would take weeks of engineer time to attempt to understand the scope of let alone fix. Casting pointers through int, tightly bit packed structs or a number of other little things. The work has been done on newer versions of source sure, but that leaves you with two bad options. Spend lots of man hours back porting to a dead engine branch for every single game or port those old games on to new engine versions and spend even more man hours trying to update incompatible bits and hope you haven't introduced new bugs everywhere. Not even close to worth the time for a tiny percentage of gamers for games that were released 10+ years ago.
belthesar 3y ago
Something key to this is that games released on Steam typically (though not always) include a Steam-provided library to handle things like achievements, networking, VoIP, and potentially also the overlay (definitely not 100% on this, especially in the context of a macOS target). If the methods this library uses fail due to a lack of 32-bit support for the libraries on their side, the game could fail to run properly. In addition to this, when Steam detects that a game in your library is not supported on the target platform, the UI prevents you from downloading it. It's certainly possible to use steamcmd, Steam's CLI client to download an entitlement regardless of whether the platform supports it or not, but the game will certainly not be easily accessible even if it would run unmodified. This effectively relegates the access and hopeful functional use of these classic Mac OS X games to digital archivists, developers and/or publishers willing and capable of re-releasing the game for the new target, and/or a third party providing compatibility shims to allow the game to work, whether official or third party. macOS's player base has always been in the basement. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Apple hasn't made a particular welcoming environment for games on their hardware save for mobile, and that has more to do with the proliferation of smartphones being the new hot place to release software than game developers working hard to make games available. So, the likelihood of there being a plethora of titles released on Steam for macOS that will become unplayable is low, since I have to imagine most of these releases are available for other platforms. However, because of the lack of attention, there's also a fair likelihood that many titles that were released for Mac on Steam probably will be forgotten. As it stands today, 87% of classic video games just aren't available at all any more[0], based on a study by the Video Games History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network. [0] https://gamehistory.org/87percent/ https://gamehistory.org/87percent/
- lxgr 3y ago
  > As it stands today, 87% of classic video games just aren't available at all any more[0], based on a study by the Video Games History Foundation Isn't emulation a much better approach for that purpose? It's always been unrealistic keeping functional native systems around forever, whether that's game consoles or computer platforms including OSes and drivers etc. > macOS's player base has always been in the basement. Unfortunately I agree. There seems to be a recent initiative by Apple to promote macOS gaming (most notably through the game porting kit, but also via pretty good native gamepad support, and I've recently noticed a "game performance mode" – very unlike Apple!). That said, I'm not counting on Apple's commitment regarding long-term binary compatibility – it's clearly not a priority for iOS either.

by nick_ 3y ago

Friendly reminder that support != able to run. This seems totally reasonable to me. Are there many games played today which are A) 32-bit only and B) still need fixes/patch/update support?

duskwuff 3y ago

> Are there many games played today Most of Valve's own games are (still!) 32-bit only on macOS, including all of the Half-Life games, both Portals, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress 2. The only major game of theirs which is available for 64-bit macOS is Dota 2. (Underlords and Artifact were both market failures, so I'm ignoring them.) Really, the way Valve has handled the 64-bit transition on macOS has been pretty terrible. Up until today, their recommended "solution" for running 32-bit games was for users to downgrade to Mojave or install Windows through Boot Camp. (Never mind that neither of these is an option for users with newer computers.)

sosodev 3y ago
Right? I know Mac users are a fraction of the market but recompiling nothing almost seems petty.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  They even did a bunch of work on Half-Life recently for its 25th anniversary [1], including adding Steam Deck support and fixing long-standing bugs -- but that didn't extend to making it run on any modern macOS system. [1]: https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife25/ https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife25/
appplication 3y ago
I’ve been wanting to play portal 2 for years but I’m astounded Valve is unwilling to prioritize the relatively low amount of work it would take to compile to 64-bit.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- MindSpunk 3y ago
  It's really not as simple as recompiling with 64bit. There are likely numerous assumptions of a 32 bit system all over the codebase that would take weeks of engineer time to attempt to understand the scope of let alone fix. Casting pointers through int, tightly bit packed structs or a number of other little things. The work has been done on newer versions of source sure, but that leaves you with two bad options. Spend lots of man hours back porting to a dead engine branch for every single game or port those old games on to new engine versions and spend even more man hours trying to update incompatible bits and hope you haven't introduced new bugs everywhere. Not even close to worth the time for a tiny percentage of gamers for games that were released 10+ years ago.

belthesar 3y ago

Something key to this is that games released on Steam typically (though not always) include a Steam-provided library to handle things like achievements, networking, VoIP, and potentially also the overlay (definitely not 100% on this, especially in the context of a macOS target). If the methods this library uses fail due to a lack of 32-bit support for the libraries on their side, the game could fail to run properly. In addition to this, when Steam detects that a game in your library is not supported on the target platform, the UI prevents you from downloading it. It's certainly possible to use steamcmd, Steam's CLI client to download an entitlement regardless of whether the platform supports it or not, but the game will certainly not be easily accessible even if it would run unmodified. This effectively relegates the access and hopeful functional use of these classic Mac OS X games to digital archivists, developers and/or publishers willing and capable of re-releasing the game for the new target, and/or a third party providing compatibility shims to allow the game to work, whether official or third party. macOS's player base has always been in the basement. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Apple hasn't made a particular welcoming environment for games on their hardware save for mobile, and that has more to do with the proliferation of smartphones being the new hot place to release software than game developers working hard to make games available. So, the likelihood of there being a plethora of titles released on Steam for macOS that will become unplayable is low, since I have to imagine most of these releases are available for other platforms. However, because of the lack of attention, there's also a fair likelihood that many titles that were released for Mac on Steam probably will be forgotten. As it stands today, 87% of classic video games just aren't available at all any more[0], based on a study by the Video Games History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network. [0] https://gamehistory.org/87percent/ https://gamehistory.org/87percent/

lxgr 3y ago
> As it stands today, 87% of classic video games just aren't available at all any more[0], based on a study by the Video Games History Foundation Isn't emulation a much better approach for that purpose? It's always been unrealistic keeping functional native systems around forever, whether that's game consoles or computer platforms including OSes and drivers etc. > macOS's player base has always been in the basement. Unfortunately I agree. There seems to be a recent initiative by Apple to promote macOS gaming (most notably through the game porting kit, but also via pretty good native gamepad support, and I've recently noticed a "game performance mode" – very unlike Apple!). That said, I'm not counting on Apple's commitment regarding long-term binary compatibility – it's clearly not a priority for iOS either.