And that’s not even talking about porting the game to either Metal or an absolutely ancient OpenGL version that could be removed with any upcoming OS version. A significant effort just to address a tiny market.
IIRC developers literally got 15 years of warning about that one.
But it's not possible to keep maintaining 32-bit forever. That's twice the code and it can't support a bunch of important security features, modern ABIs, etc. It would be better to run old programs in a VM of an old OS with no network access.
Apple had the money to support it, we both know that. They just didn't respect their Mac owners enough, Apple saw more value in making them dogfood iOS changes since that's where all the iOS devs are held captive. Security was never a realistic excuse considering how much real zombie code still exists in macOS.
Speaking personally, I just wanted Apple to wait for WoW64 support to hit upstream. Their careless interruption of my Mac experience is why I ditched the ecosystem as a whole. If Apple cannot invest in making it a premium experience, I'll take my money elsewhere.
Not possible without forking the OS. No amount of money can make software development faster forever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
Especially because Apple has a functional design which means there is nearly no redundancy; there's only one expert in any given field and that expert doesn't want to be stuck with old broken stuff. Nor does anyone want software updates to be twice as big as they otherwise would be, etc.
> Security was never a realistic excuse considering how much real zombie code still exists in macOS.
Code doesn't have security problems if nobody uses it. But nothing that's left behind is as bad as, say, QuickTime was.
nb some old parts were replaced over time as the people maintaining them retired. In my experience all of these people were named Jim.
Oh, my apologies to their expert. I had no idea that my workload was making their job harder, how inconsiderate of me. Anyone could make the mistake of assuming that the Mac supported these workloads when they use their Mac to run 32-bit plugins and games.
I still don't get this. Apple is a trillion dollar company. How much does it cost to pay a couple of engineers to maintain an up to date version on top of Metal? Their current implementation is 4.1, it wouldn't cost them much to provide one for 4.6. Even Microsoft collaborated with Mesa to build a translation on top of dx12, Apple could do the same.
Has anyone figured out what exactly the crux of their beef? OpenGL 4.1 came out in 2010, so surely whatever happened is settled by now.
1: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825...
Somehow Atari, EA and PlayStation are here despite this. I don't know how they did it.
Meanwhile, Nintendo is successful because they're in Seattle where it's dark and rains all the time.
It was only the intervention of Microsoft that managed to save Apple from their own tantrum.
As a game developer, I have to literally purchase Apple hardware to test rather than being able to conveniently download a VM
Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation, which is probably running Windows. Especially for consoles like XBOX One or newer, and PS4 or newer, which are essentially PCs. And then builds get passed off to a team that has the hardware.
Is anyone developing games for Windows on Apple hardware? Do they run Parallels and call it a day? How is the gaming performance? If the answers to those 3 questions are "yes, yes, great", then Apple supports PC game development better than they support Apple game development?
I don’t think anybody does this. I haven’t heard about official emulators for any of the mainstream consoles. Emulation would be prohibitively slow.
Developers usually test on dedicated devkits which are a version of the target console (often with slightly better specs as dev builds need more memory and run more slowly). This is annoying, slow and difficult, but at least you can get these dev kits, usually for a decent price, and there’s a point to trying to ship on those platforms. Meanwhile, nobody plays games on macs, and Apple is making zero effort to bring in the developers or the gamers. It’s a no-chicken-and-no-egg situation, really.
For testing, I can do a large amount of testing in a VM for my game. Maybe not 100% and not full user testing but nothing beats running on the native hardware and alpha/beta with real users.
Also, since I can pass through hardware to my VM I can get quite good performance by passing through a physical GPU for example. This is possible and quite straightforward to do on a Linux host. I'm not sure if it's possible using Parallels.
i am obviously misunderstanding something, i mean.
Sure, I'm not doing performance benchmarking and it's just smoke tests and basic user stories, but that's all that 98% of indie developers do for cross platform support.
Apple has been intensely stupid as a platform to launch on, though I did do it eventually. I didn't like Apple before and now I like it even less.
However, these days it's possible pass-through hardware to your VM so I would be able to pass through a 2nd GPU to MacOS...if it would let me run it as a guest.
Apple is actively hostile to how you would build for Linux or PC or console.
If you are building your engine/game from scratch, you absolutely do not need to use Xcode
Nonetheless that’s a small fraction of the time spent actually developing the game.
That makes it a continuous headache to keep your Mac builders up.
It means you need to double dev hardware costs or more as you need a gaming PC to target your core audience and Macs handle the mac bugs.
It means your mac build machines are special snowflakes because you can't just use VMs.
The list goes on and on of Mac being actively hostile to the process.
Just Rider running on a Mac is pleasant sure, but that's not the issue.
Having to use xcode "for the final build" is irrelevant to the game development experience.
Sure you can. And officially, too. Apple still ships a bunch of virtualization drivers in macOS itself. Have a look:
/System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleVmxnet3Ethernet.kext
Whether or not you're using ESXi, or want to, is an entirely different question. But "you're not able to" is simply incorrect. I virtualize several build agents and have for years with no issues.
macOS 26 is the last major version to support Intel, so once macOS 28 is latest this will probably become impossible (macOS 26 should be able to use Xcode 27, but maybe the platform removal will change this previous year's OS support from continuing).
I think OP means virtualizing on something that isn't Apple.
You can get an xcode building for arm Macs on PC hardware with this?
- Linux: windows and Linux vm.
- Apple: windows, Linux, Apple VM.
Seems pretty straightforward.
I am being facetious. You'll have a PC for gamedev because that's your biggest platform unless you are primarily switch or PS5, in which case you'll have a devkit as well as a PC. But the cost of an Apple device is insignificant compared to the cost of developing the software for it.
So it really comes down to the market size and _where they are_. The games I play are either on my PS5, or on my Mac, never both. For any specific game, they are on one or the other. Ghost of Tsushima is on the PS5. Factorio is on my Mac. If I were an indie game developer, I'd likely be developing the kind of game that has a good market on the Mac.
It even has "for this mac" preset which is good enough that you don't need to tinker with settings to have decent experience.
The game is paused, almost like becomes "frozen" if it's not visible on screen which helps with battery (it can be in the background without any noticeable impact on battery and temperature). Overall way better experience than I expected.
Ports to macos have not done well from what I've heard. However you can see ports on PC do really well and have encouraged studios like Sony and SquareEnix to invest more in PC ports. Even much later after the console versions sell well. Just not a lot of reasons to add the tech debt and complexity of supporting mac as well.
Even big publishers like Blizzard who have been mac devs for a long time axed the dedicate mac team and client and moved to a unified client. This has downfalls like mac specific issues. If those are not critical then they get put in the pile with the rest of the bugs.
Open up the YouTube app and try to navigate the UI. It’s okay but not really up to the Apple standard. Now try to enter text in the search bar. A nearby iPhone will helpfully offer to let you use it like a keyboard. You get a text field, and you can type, and keystrokes are slowly and not entirely reliably propagated to the TV, but text does not stay in sync. And after a few seconds, in the middle of typing, the TV will decide you’re done typing and move focus to a search result, and the phone won’t notice, and it gets completely desynchronized.
More importantly for games, though, is the awful storage architecture around the TV boxes. Games have to slice themselves up into 2GB storage chunks, which can be purged from the system whenever the game isn't actively running. The game has to be aware of missing chunks and download them on-demand.
It makes open-world games nearly impossible, and it makes anything with significant storage requirements effectively impossible. As much as Apple likes to push the iOS port of Death Stranding, that game cannot run on tvOS as currently architected for that reason.
Now...something like minecraft or SubNautica? The M4 is fine, especially if you're not pushing 4k 240hz.
Apple has been pushing the gaming experience for years (iPhone 4s?) but it never REALLY seems to land, and when someone has a great gaming seperience in a modern AAA game, they always seem to be using a $4500 Studio or similar.
[1] https://ruoyusun.com/2023/10/12/one-game-six-platforms.html#...
- have to pay Apple to have your executable signed
- poor Vulkan support
The hardware has never been an issue, it's Apple's walled garden ecosystem.
so a mac port, even if simple, is additional cost. there you have the classic chicken and egg problem. the cost doesn't seem to be justified by the number of potential sales, so major studios ignore the platform. and as long as they do, gamers ignore the platform
i've seen it suggested that Apple could solve this standoff by funding the ports, maybe they have done this a few times. but Apple doesn't seem to care much about it
The communication bandwidth you can achieve by putting CPU, CPU, and memory together at the factory is much higher than having these components separate.
Sad for enthusiasts, but practically inevitable
If you identify as a "gamer" and are in those communities, then you'll see communities talking about things you can't natively play
but if you leave niches you already have everything
and with microtransactions, Apple ecosystem users are the whales. again, not something that people who identify as "gamers" wants to admit being actually okay with, but those people are not the revenue of game production.
so I would say it is a missed opportunity for developers that are operating on antiquated calculations of MacOS deployment
It's kinda not. Here's a rough list of the 10 most-played games currently on PC: https://steamdb.info/charts/
macOS is supported by one title (DOTA 2). Windows supports all 10, Linux (the free OS, just so we're clear) runs 7 of the games and has native ports of 5 of them. If you want to go argue to them about missed revenue opportunities then be my guest, but something tells me that DOTA 2 isn't being bankrolled by Mac owners.
If you have any hard figures that demonstrate "antiquated calculations" then now is the time to fetch them for us. I'm somewhat skeptical.
And don’t forget they made an VR headset without controllers.
Apple doesn’t care about games
Kind of? It does support higher refresh rates, but their emphasis on "Retina" resolutions imposes a soft limit because monitors that dense rarely support much more than 60hz, due to the sheer bandwidth requirements.