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Has Turbine actually communicated anything about this Mac client in terms of when it would ship out of beta? It's so cool they're doing this, but I'm not about to download and start playing on Live with these glaring issues (un-rendered environments, key binding, no chat).
Did I miss pertinent details? Or is this just sort of "as they get around to it"?
No date has been given...
Now consider that MyDDO is still in it's beta state...
It's all going to depend on how keen they are to having an officially released client.
There's alot to be done with the beta client, so if you're looking for 100% functionality then stick to the Windows client. And if MyDDO is any way to measure Turbine's beta schedule, the Mac OS X client won't reach production status for a long time.
A bit OT, but I'll definitely perk up when a Linux client is available. 2013 seems to be the year for Linux gamers.
Since the Mac and Linux both use OpenGL, the cross port to Linux should be easier than from Windows to Mac....
Nah. Mac's an easy target: One vendor, very narrow set of machines, little to no worry about driver versions. You can basically solve everything by telling people to stay up to date; at that point, you have to worry about maybe two operating system revisions (10.7.5, 10.8.2 at the moment), each of which has three video drivers; ATI, nVidia, and Intel. And you're done.Quote:
Originally Posted by szalkerous
Linux, you have to deal with two different sets of ATI drivers, two sets of nVidia drivers, Intel drivers, at least two or three different X servers, different and incompatible OpenGL versions, a ridiculously large pool of possible window managers all of which may interfere with you, kernel versions from 2.6.X or so up through 3.2-ish, people runing Gentoo who have a system that you could not recreate under any circumstances because the entire thing was rebuilt with unusual compiler flags, more than five major vendors of distributions, significant disagreements about things like "where are standard system libraries located", unlikely mixes of 32-bit and 64-bit kernels and userspace, people who have both 32-bit and 64-bit userspace, people who have only 32-bit, people who have only 64-bit...
I mean. I work with Linux for a living, and I would be terrified of the suggestion of trying to support a video game on it. And it is very, very, hard from a business standpoint to justify shipping a client you don't "support", because people will demand support for it anyway...
You didn't talk enough of the mess called X. ( xlib, cde, kde, motif, xdmcp, ... )Quote:
Originally Posted by seebs
In itself it's just enough to make Linux support a nightmare. ( for a single version of linux... now consider supporting 6/7 flavor, with different hardware, and so on )
While technically porting from a from the Bastard Child of NextSTEP and BSD that is called Mac OS to Linux seem easy ( after all they are both *NIX flavors ), it's a more than a nightmare to the educated few that know enough of the internals of the various *NIX ( and especially the Window Manager ), and I'm not even talking about the fact that Linux can be put on systems that are not x86 based....
( Now if Turbine really want to waste time porting to *NIX, I want DDO on Solaris 10 for Sparc :D )
I get the variables involved, but limiting down to one distro and one set of architectures will narrow that down enough.
Valve is already making huge strides on this with it's Steam client for Linux, and quite a few developers have jumped on board with full support.
At this time they're only supporting Ubuntu, on x86, version 12.04. That limits their support window to a more manageable size.
Assuming the technology platform (what DDO is written in) was compatible, Turbine could easily follow suit. If small indie developers can do it, Turbine can too. Valve has paved the way, and I know the OpenGL team, and the video card developer teams are working strong with Valve and have made drastic improvements. The few beta games on Linux I've played demonstrates that well.... almost too well.... they outperform their Windows counterparts on Direct X.
Development cost money.Quote:
Originally Posted by szalkerous
A small indie developer for his own project will invest his entire free time to it without pay in the desperate hope to earn money from this.
While a project in a regular 9to5 company is more restricted to available resources and thus often outsourced.
For instance, the Mac client could be the payed work of a third party and not a own in-house developer. The problem regarding the code signing and the massive delays for simple things is an indication for this.
There's also a few major players moving to Linux as well, not including Valve. (Rumor has it the WOW team has a Linux client.)Quote:
Originally Posted by Codebaker
The bottom line is to capture the crowd, however small, that refuses to use either Mac or Windows. I know quite a few. Given the competition on the Linux platform is slim at this point in time, a shoe in would net a larger margin of potential revenue.
If the profit potential wasn't there, nobody would be seriously pursuing it.
The bottom line is to make money. Companies don't do that well by focusing on a tiny market segment.Quote:
Originally Posted by szalkerous
Ok, I'll bite...Quote:
Originally Posted by szalkerous
I'm one of the crowd :
I want to be captured. :DCode:
[root@nexus:Unix]#uname -a
SunOS nexus 5.10 Generic_141444-09 sun4u sparc SUNW,A70
[root@nexus:Unix]#
If this was true, then why is the Linux gaming market exploding right now? The Steam game list on Linux is increasing almost daily, and a lot of them are AAA titles.Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpone
Blizzard just announced they will port one of their titles to Linux this year.
I don't see why this would be the case if the incentive wasn't there. The time of Linux gaming has come.
There used to be Lokigames, making linux clients for popular titles in those days.
They died because of keeping the margin low.
And there is always ID games which gives out free linux clients for their games.
But I doubt there are many game companies out there that actually spend the resources to look into such an alien OS to them.
Which is a shame because it uses the systems processing power so much more efficiently.
Bumping because I'm genuinely getting beyond frustrated with the "little" bugs of the Mac beta client. I do not think any of these errors are particularly hard to fix, which leads me to believe the Mac client was put in the back burner farthest from the front ... like when you're making beef stew from scratch.Quote:
Originally Posted by jakeelala