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Valve drops VR support for macOS

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Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#41

Post by Taek »

ashtonkem wrote: post #30
Taek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but have you played beat saber? I'm dead serious though the experience you get in a good immersive VR rig is completely unrivaled. Well worth the hassle and overhead. This will get better as costs come down and developers continue to innovate.

Obviously I have not tried beat saber. If it’s that amazing, I wouldn’t be posting cynical takes on VR. I think one of the problems of VR is one of cost and credibility. Even if I knew you personally and trusted you, there is no way in hell I’m going to float thousands of dollars getting a new gaming PC, VR headset, and customizing my room for the full setup just because someone said it’s amazing. The risk/reward rat…

My house is open, any friend who wants to give beat saber (or half life, or space pirate trainer, etc.) a spin is welcome. No need to spend $1000 without getting a proper demo.

I know not everyone has a friend with a high spec rig, but that is improving over time as well.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#42

Post by slavik81 »

sysbin wrote: post #12
Danieru wrote: post #6

Mac is a horrible platform to support for video game developers. Speaking from experience the issues are: 1. No cross platform builds allowed. We can compile to Windows, Linux, Android, Switch, PS4, Xbox One all from one windows build machine. 2. Shifting sand of non-backwards compatibility. Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories. Video games are in development f…

How is using something like unreal engine not able to compile to all operating systems. I'm not a game developer so pardon my ignorance but can you not just run macOS on a VM from Windows to compile? Hardware isn't horrible from Apple. It's just more expensive for macOS and the complete build quality that has been slipping over the years. All Apple users know we're paying more for the hardware than machines preinstal…

> Did Steve Jobs really dislike games?

Dislike may be a bit strong, but John Carmack described him as indifferent:

> Over the years I've been through a number of initiatives where Apple wants to get serious about games, and we've done things with them. The idea way back with Quake 3 on there, that was my deal with Steve Jobs: if Apple adopts OpenGL rather than going off and doing QuickTime3D or something else of their own which was going to be a bad idea, then I'll personally port the Quake 3 stuff rather than working with a partner company on that. And we went through all that. All of our Apple ports have been successful - they've all made money - but it's marginal money, and we have worked with Aspyr usually on all the other ones after that, but I do think it kind of comes from the top.

> The truth is Steve Jobs doesn't care about games. This is going to be one of those things that I say something in an interview and it gets fed back to him and I'm on his shithead list for a while on that, until he needs me to do something else there. But I think that that's my general opinion. He's not a gamer. It's difficult to ask somebody to get behind something they don't really believe in. I mean obviously he believes in the music and the iTunes and that whole side of things, and the media side of things, and he gets it and he pushes it and they do wonderful things with that, but he's not a gamer. That's just the bottom line about it.

> There are people at Apple who want to support all this - and there's no roadblocks for us right now, we're going to support the Mac on Rage, we hope to get a version of Quake Live going up on the Mac there - but it's just that's not what the Mac platform's about, and I don't really expect that to change because it's a tough equation now that you've got everybody dual-booting their Macs and everything: why would you want to go to the extra trouble of [developing games for Mac]?

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/id-softwares-john-carmack...

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#43

Post by jitl »

ashtonkem wrote: post #30
Taek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but have you played beat saber? I'm dead serious though the experience you get in a good immersive VR rig is completely unrivaled. Well worth the hassle and overhead. This will get better as costs come down and developers continue to innovate.

Obviously I have not tried beat saber. If it’s that amazing, I wouldn’t be posting cynical takes on VR. I think one of the problems of VR is one of cost and credibility. Even if I knew you personally and trusted you, there is no way in hell I’m going to float thousands of dollars getting a new gaming PC, VR headset, and customizing my room for the full setup just because someone said it’s amazing. The risk/reward rat…

I spent like $2000 on a VR setup so I could play Half Life Alyx without ever trying VR before. Remember that the gaming PC is very usable without the VR headset! I built a backpack portable mini-itx build with a used NVIDIA 1080Ti. Then 6 months later I got a Valve Index. Didn’t change my room at all other than moving my coffee table when I want to play. My current game is Audica which is such a blast.

But yeah. It was like $3000 in total or something ‘~’

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#44

Post by mhh__ »

ashtonkem wrote: post #30
Taek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but have you played beat saber? I'm dead serious though the experience you get in a good immersive VR rig is completely unrivaled. Well worth the hassle and overhead. This will get better as costs come down and developers continue to innovate.

Obviously I have not tried beat saber. If it’s that amazing, I wouldn’t be posting cynical takes on VR. I think one of the problems of VR is one of cost and credibility. Even if I knew you personally and trusted you, there is no way in hell I’m going to float thousands of dollars getting a new gaming PC, VR headset, and customizing my room for the full setup just because someone said it’s amazing. The risk/reward rat…

> If it was $200, I’d consider it.

Wait 10 years and then ask.

It's brand new, genuinely computationally intensive, tech - it's going to be expensive. The Original PlayStation cost more in today's money than I bought my Vive for.

Also, if you can get a used Vive or similar there is almost no risk. If you genuinely don't like VR then maybe its not for you but I've played a lot different games and I can't think of anything that remotely compares with VR. Super Hot with a mouse is brilliant, Super Hot in VR makes me genuinely excited that I'm going to be around to see the near future. Beat Saber is very good fun, too (quite hard to describe but even in a vive the graphics are very crisp and smooth).

> If it was $200, I’d consider it.

Apparently half life alyx is enjoyable in a windows mixed reality headset. There is also the Oculus Go at that price point although I've never touched one because I have a proper VR headset.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#45

Post by deadbunny »

sysbin wrote: post #16
tonygrue wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article alludes, lack of a build your own, flexible yet affordable desktop option seems to be a pretty deadly aspect. Pretty much Mac owners are on laptops. Even in the PC world few laptops can power VR. Those that do tend to be bulky for cooling and have nVidia GPUs; both things which MacBooks seem unwilling to have. Having a extensible desktop at 1k that supports nVidia would probably go a long way.

As a gamer with a macbook pro. I just use shadow to play games over the cloud. Otherwise I would invest in a eGPU. So it's not like apple gamers are missing out if they want to game with good graphics.

> Otherwise I would invest in a eGPU. So it's not like apple gamers are missing out if they want to game with good graphics.

You're not going to get very far without drivers an you'll be stuck on OpenGL 4.1 and Metal. That and you'll have the problem that there are less games built for MacOS than Windows an Linux + Proton.

Investing in a GPU for MacOS for gaming would be a huge waste of money IMO.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#46

Post by tracerbulletx »

ashtonkem wrote: post #19

I remain skeptical of the long term viability of VR; I’m old enough to remember when 3D TVs and monitors were going to change the face of both TV and video games, and yet here we are. I priced out VR recently and I was unimpressed with the price per value available, with most systems adding $500-$1,000 to my gaming system’s cost, and some requiring that I modify my room to work properly. And that’s not even accountin…

Come back after you played HL: Alyx, Beat Saber, and No Man's Sky VR. Any one of these experiences is proof that VR is a huge deal.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#48

Post by fortran77 »

sysbin wrote: post #16
tonygrue wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article alludes, lack of a build your own, flexible yet affordable desktop option seems to be a pretty deadly aspect. Pretty much Mac owners are on laptops. Even in the PC world few laptops can power VR. Those that do tend to be bulky for cooling and have nVidia GPUs; both things which MacBooks seem unwilling to have. Having a extensible desktop at 1k that supports nVidia would probably go a long way.

As a gamer with a macbook pro. I just use shadow to play games over the cloud. Otherwise I would invest in a eGPU. So it's not like apple gamers are missing out if they want to game with good graphics.

What? You'll run an unsupported card over 4 slow PCIe lanes over thunderbolt in some third party box? That's a terrible experience.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#49

Post by olliej »

Danieru wrote: post #6

Mac is a horrible platform to support for video game developers. Speaking from experience the issues are: 1. No cross platform builds allowed. We can compile to Windows, Linux, Android, Switch, PS4, Xbox One all from one windows build machine. 2. Shifting sand of non-backwards compatibility. Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories. Video games are in development f…

What things have have Macs had in terms on non-backwards compatibility? Genuinely curious here - don’t say 32 bit, they released the last desktop Mac OS that ran on 32bit hardware more than a decade ago.

(I’m not saying that I disagree with some of the other issues)

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#50

Post by olliej »

est31 wrote: post #32
Danieru wrote: post #6

Mac is a horrible platform to support for video game developers. Speaking from experience the issues are: 1. No cross platform builds allowed. We can compile to Windows, Linux, Android, Switch, PS4, Xbox One all from one windows build machine. 2. Shifting sand of non-backwards compatibility. Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories. Video games are in development f…

> 1. No cross platform builds allowed. This is SO annoying. I can cross compile to Windows from GNU/Linux quite easily. In fact with Wine I can even get MSVC running. But Apple, even though they employ many of the Clang/LLVM developers, believes that you must use their OS to target any Apple product. Your only reprieve outside of buying their extremely expensive hardware is using CI services like Travis or Github act…

Sorry, since when is a few hundred dollars “extremely expensive”?
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