Valve bringing steam and source (engine) to the MAC(intosh)

[KBZ]

Didn't find this anywhere else.... I think..

Valve takes a bite out of the apple

Sort of felt this was happening after seeing Orange Box hit the PS3 in its opengl glory.

Not sure if they'll get much out of it but it's good to see. Also keeps me hopeful for a linux client, but it's been 2 years since that rumour was announced.

[Sparky]

I'm looking forward to this. I bought the Orange Box for PC in December and finished Portal and Half Life 2 but had to reduce a lot of my settings since I played through Crossover.

I will replay Half Life 2 once this comes out and see some of the detail that I missed the first time around. I won't have to wait for Portal 2 either!

[Elixir]

Sort of felt this was happening after seeing Orange Box hit the PS3 in it's opengl glory.

Yeah and what a success that was. Absolutely no updates at all, people still playing TF2 like it's 2007.

[MR_Soren]

It will probably be profitable for them, as the extra work required is even smaller than the Macintosh user base. Blizzard, for example, only has two Mac developers (at least this was true not too long ago) and they manage to keep all of Blizzard's games current with the Windows versions.

I plan to try them out, and I'm glad to see a big developer aside from Blizzard writing native Mac games. (As opposed to running them through Cider)

[Ed Oscuro]

Sort of felt this was happening after seeing Orange Box hit the PS3 in it's opengl glory.

Yeah and what a success that was. Absolutely no updates at all, people still playing TF2 like it's 2007.

Not exactly - Valve did not want to charge people full price for DLC until they had enough content to roll together into something they'd feel comfortable selling. My understanding (from having read some articles on the subject) is that this is essentially Microsoft's doing, and that won't be the norm on the Mac.

My thought is that this gives Valve game owners more choice, and that is a good thing.

Unfortunately, I can't envision them spending time working to make the original Half-Life compatible, and even if it were, many mods won't work since a large number of them are Win32 executables, even if they simply add batch functionality to the usual simple structure of a mod, which will affect Source as well. On the plus side this will hopefully encourage more modders to make multiplatform-friendly simple archive files available.

[MR_Soren]

Sort of felt this was happening after seeing Orange Box hit the PS3 in it's opengl glory.

Yeah and what a success that was. Absolutely no updates at all, people still playing TF2 like it's 2007.

Not exactly - Valve did not want to charge people full price for DLC until they had enough content to roll together into something they'd feel comfortable selling. My understanding (from having read some articles on the subject) is that this is essentially Microsoft's doing, and that won't be the norm on the Mac.

My thought is that this gives Valve game owners more choice, and that is a good thing.

Unfortunately, I can't envision them spending time working to make the original Half-Life compatible, and even if it were, many mods won't work since a large number of them are Win32 executables, even if they simply add batch functionality to the usual simple structure of a mod, which will affect Source as well. On the plus side this will hopefully encourage more modders to make multiplatform-friendly simple archive files available.

Oddly enough, the original Half-Life was ported to the Mac years ago (the classic Mac OS, not OS X), but Sierra decided to not release it because there was a huge internet uproar when they announced that they were not going to devote the resources to maintain compatibility between the Mac and Windows versions, (The Mac version would need to be patched every time the Windows version received a patch) so Sierra decided to not offer Mac/Windows compatibility at all because they didn't want to offer a feature that would later break and stay broken.

Thus everybody on various forums said, "we're not going to buy it" and Sierra said, "Okay, we won't sell it."

Anyway, the original Half-Life uses a modified version of the Quake 2 engine, and the Quake 2 engine does run on Mac OS X. However, I'm not sure how much that reduces the difficulty of porting Half-Life. Valve has announced no such plans, but I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility that they might port it later if Half Life 2 and other games sell well.

[Stormwatch]

Anyway, the original Half-Life uses a modified version of the Quake 2 engine, and the Quake 2 engine does run on Mac OS X. However, I'm not sure how much that reduces the difficulty of porting Half-Life. Valve has announced no such plans, but I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility that they might port it later if Half Life 2 and other games sell well.

They could just port Half- Life: Source. Sadly, that leaves out Blue Shift, Opposing Force, and Decay.

Hmm, now I wonder if Black Mesa will work... (if it ever gets completed in the first place)

[KBZ]

Well its been out for a little bit now. Has anyone tried it out? Didn't realize that they weren't supporting PPC macs so the one we have here is out of luck =/



Also, a inux clielnt exists! I don't know how I missed this but I'm pretty damn happy about it!

I once thought that Ireland would de-partition before my hard drive does. I think I might be eating my words!

[Stormwatch]

Tried. Sluggish. Crashes often. Fugly non-Mac interface. I am disappoint.

[StarCreator]

Hmm, now I wonder if Black Mesa will work... (if it ever gets completed in the first place)

I actually -just- read this thread on the Black Mesa forum saying a Mac port probably isn't happening.

[Ed Oscuro]

I like the part where they say one of the Goldeneye lead programmers wanted to take AI over to the Goldeneye program

fun times