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Valve drops VR support for macOS

techcrunch.com

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Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#111

Post by eschaton »

numpad0 wrote: post #8
baby wrote: post #2

I don't understand why a Mac is such a bad platform for gaming, what is the technical challenge here? Can someone enlighten me?

Mac tends to fail meeting minimum graphics requirements. There’s no practical way around it.

Sure there is: Design your game for the systems the majority of the users who will want to play it—after you’ve marketed it to them to them—will have.

Don’t start with system requirements first and make a game targeting that because you want to show everyone how elite a hacker you are.

If Sony didn’t require games achieve 60FPS at 1080p on PlayStation 4 before they’d allow them on the platform, most of the developers would be targeting PS 4 Pro because they want to show off. I expect that’s mostly the case anyway, and these developers have to be dragged by their corporate masters kicking and screaming back to baseline PS 4 support.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#112

Post by matheusmoreira »

cced wrote: post #10
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…

> Video games are in development for 2-3 years, and stay on the market for 5+ years with no planned recompiles. Do video game makers plan for updates? Am I getting this wrong, or are patches and such deployed without a game recompile?

Games eventually stop getting updates. They're proprietaty software so they're always in danger of becoming incompatible with newer systems. This is true even on Windows: older games regularly fail to work on Windows 10 in my experience and many didn't recover after hunting down the missing DirectX stuff. It's gonna be ironic if Wine becomes the best way to play these games one day.

In a way, this is the whole point of the emulation community. Proprietary software was developed for really old systems and they don't work on modern computers. The old systems had to be emulated as virtual machines on top of which the old software could run.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#113

Post by yellowapple »

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…

> Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories.

Out of curiosity, what exactly were your struggles with Linux/Android backwards compatibility? Considering how many apps I run still on my phone still use Gingerbread-era UIs, and how Linux executables from as far back as the mid-90's are supposed to be able to run on even the absolute latest kernel (Linus Torvalds having publicly chewed people out on the LKML for breaking said backwards-compatibility), it's surprising that these would somehow be classified as not having solid backwards compatibility.

The main thing that comes to mind with non-Android Linux is library versions, since those do occasionally break backwards compatibility, but this shouldn't matter too much if you're compiling static executables, or using some isolated runtime like the one Steam (IIRC) provides.

As a point of comparison here, World of Goo's Linux version came out in 2009, and it still works on my system (Slackware64-current) which - while not at the absolute most bleeding edge - is still using library and driver and kernel versions substantially more recent than most "LTS" distro releases.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#114

Post by battery_cowboy »

smnrchrds wrote: post #40
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.

I haven't played Beat Saber, but I remember Avatar. As beautiful as it was, it remained unique. All new films for the past decade have been released as 3D, but I cannot think of a single one other than Avatar that I would prefer watching in 3D over 2D. Is there reason to believe Beat Saber would not become VR's Avatar?

You're comparing a fixed medium, movies, with a dynamic medium, games. I'm not sure VR will be a long term success, but it will have no relation to 3D TVs failure.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#115

Post by stuart78 »

Danieru wrote: post #17
cced wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Video games are in development for 2-3 years, and stay on the market for 5+ years with no planned recompiles. Do video game makers plan for updates? Am I getting this wrong, or are patches and such deployed without a game recompile?

Updates are planned, and more and more games get longer support periods. Still majority of games stop getting updates within a year. Every game is different, but for every Subnautica with 5+ years of active development post initial sale you'll get a bunch of successful games and only marginal updates for 2 months. For my next game, Railgrade, I am planning a couple years of updates, but even that will be dwarfed by t…

Railgrade looks very cool, look forward to checking it out.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#116

Post by yellowapple »

mekanicalsyncop wrote: post #61

Everyone's talking about the slower hardware. IMO the biggest hurdle to gaming is Mac OS's baked in mouse acceleration and whatever else makes 100% of mice feel absolutely terrible on a Mac. Even the magic mouse feels janky. I followed a bunch of online guides to do everything I can to disable the acceleration and everything else, but for some reason when I try to play a game it still feels terrible. Even when the ga…

What's sad is that once upon a time (back when macOS was called OS X, and when iMacs used PowerPC CPUs) the mouse acceleration was great, and the cursor buttery smooth, at least so I thought.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#117

Post by IntelMiner »

mrtksn wrote: post #110
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…

On the other hand, Apple is a top dog in mobile gaming. Maybe it should not be generalized as "Apple doesn't like games".

That's more a factor of having a large install base than actively courting or targeting "gamers"

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#118

Post by p1necone »

mekanicalsyncop wrote: post #61

Everyone's talking about the slower hardware. IMO the biggest hurdle to gaming is Mac OS's baked in mouse acceleration and whatever else makes 100% of mice feel absolutely terrible on a Mac. Even the magic mouse feels janky. I followed a bunch of online guides to do everything I can to disable the acceleration and everything else, but for some reason when I try to play a game it still feels terrible. Even when the ga…

That's disappointing - I've never used a Mac but the first thing I do on new Windows PCs is turn off "enhance pointer precision" (mouse acceleration) in control panel. It's awful for anything where you have to aim, I can't imagine gaming on a system with mouse acceleration that can't be disabled.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#119

Post by chaostheory »

olliej wrote: post #50
est31 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”?

I've been part of the Apple cult for a while now. I've even started to bulk at the price / benefit ratio ever since 2017.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#120

Post by ac29 »

wpietri wrote: post #106
olliej wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A few? I was just looking at getting MacOS hardware so I could do iPhone builds of a Flutter app. The bottom-end Mac Mini is $800 with 8 GB of RAM, and $1400 with 32 GB, which is what people on forums were recommending for running XCode properly. Is that what you'd call a few? Looking at System76's equivalent mini, it's $555 for the low end, which has the same RAM and a faster, newer processor. Going to 32 GB takes i…

I came here to say more or less the same thing... but for people who aren't native english speakers: a "few hundred" means $300, perhaps $350. Apple doesnt sell anything this cheap, and if you're comparing used Apple hardware to new PC hardware, thats a bit unfair.
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