Valve drops VR support for macOS • Hacker News Board

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#211

Post by rleigh » Sat, May 02, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

sysbin wrote: post #70

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot run macOS virtualized on anything but Apple hardware. It's against the Apple Terms of Service. Is it technically possible to do? Yes. However most companies will not do so because that's ground for getting sued, or having your developer licenses revoked. For the same reason as macOS games must be build on Apple machines, iPhone and iPad applications must also be build on Apple hardware. There is an entire…

Sure, you're right about running macOS on non apple hardware but I know a lot of windows user do that and if you're a serious developer why not just buy an apple computer. I really doubt the cost of the apple computer to then compile isn't going to be paid off from macOS users if the game is any good. Renting out a mac mini isn't raising the cost or complexity to something unreasonable either. It's like people are fo…

There are quite a number of costs here relating to the "why not buy an apple computer" point. I know because I paid them in both previous jobs and as a sole developer.

Firstly, the hardware cost. It's expensive and slow, but for a business it's a justifiable expense. The real cost is in the ongoing hosting and maintenance. Keeping Mac minis or whatever in a datacentre is a costly waste of space. There's zero remote management, and any failure means a trip to visit the system along with a monitor to hook it up to. Then there's the ongoing system administration cost, keeping it updated, keeping the development tools and build dependencies current. This is an ongoing expense.

Typically, if you need to keep clean environments you need to virtualise, and this means using VMware Fusion or similar. It makes a slow Mac mini system even slower. But if you need to support multiple MacOS versions, or multiple environments, what other choice do you have? It's not like there's a containerisation system for MacOS.

Every other platform can be run virtualised on big metal, like VMware and OpenStack clusters. Linux, BSD, Windows, everything we need to care about. MacOS is a special snowflake exception. This nonconformity adds costs.

As for renting. It's bloody expensive for very little in return. That entire market segment exists solely due to how terrible the hardware and software licensing options are. And the hardware and software procurement and management pain is reflected in the uncompetitive pricing. If Apple offered a developers-only generic VM licence for MacOS this market would vanish overnight.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#212

Post by kroltan » Sat, May 02, 2020, 1:05 PM UTC

eschaton wrote: post #99

kroltan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just run macOS on a VM As far as I know it is against the terms of service to run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, so you can't just run a macOS VM. > Hardware isn't horrible from Apple. It's just more expensive for macOS. Is that not the same thing, effectively? For a given buying power, a player that chooses mac will have objectively poorer hardware. Yes, there are a few capable rigs for Apple systems, but they are…

When games are targeted to the Macs potential users have, they have always sold reasonably well. Back when the Mac market was far smaller, and it was much more difficult to develop a game, developers did OK. If you start with the premise that you should just barely achieve 60fps with all effects enabled on this year’s top-of-the-line PC video card you’re artificially constraining your market. Make your game fun and m…

I understand and agree with "make the game fun despite computer power", but you got to understand that at least in the current industry climate it means less games are even viable for porting at all.

Basically every triple-A studio banks on having The Latest Technology for their games, so that is a whole nonviable segment.

Sole developers or small indies often can't bother keeping up with the product lineup (XCode often requires the latest macOS version and that means buying a new machine way more often than for other platforms) just to be able to keep building their game. Remember, these are possibly multi-thousand dollar purchases, not to count the actual porting and testing costs. So, another segment made largely nonviable, at least for initial/planned releases.

This leaves us with what's informally called the "double-A" part of the industry: Studios large enough to have a bunch of cash to spare and one or two people who can work on sussing out the multitude of platform requirements and compatibility/performance issues that arise from the Mac platform.

Not only that, but if you are a "double-A" studio that works with a in-house engine, the costs might be increased still due to the required proprietary Metal graphics API, that must be integrated or at least integrating something like MoltenVK (assuming the engine is new enough to have a Vulkan based renderer already).

The only remaining viable projects are on an exception basis, and that leaves very few candidates for porting.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#213

Post by seba_dos1 » Sat, May 02, 2020, 1:17 PM UTC

llarsson wrote: post #138

rajlego wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could build a hackintosh instead. Pain to get software set up just right but when it is it works great.

It is not a technical problem, but a legal one. It is that they do not want to expose themselves by violating agreements with Apple. Do you want to be the genius that saved a few dollars on hardware with a Hackintosh only to get the company sued?

Exactly. If you don't care about Apple ToS, you can cross-compile on GNU/Linux just fine without ever touching macOS.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#214

Post by rleigh » Sat, May 02, 2020, 1:17 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #160

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.

lack of a build your own, flexible yet affordable desktop option From Apple's perspective, that's a machine with razor-thin margins. Why would they want to sell that when all of their other products have enviable margins? Moreover, such a machine would cannibalize their high-end Mac Pro sales. After all the money they spent to develop it, having your pro customers scoop up the thin margin gaming machines seems like a…

I'm unconvinced that it would cannibalise Mac Pro sales. The Mac Pro is so unnecessarily expensive that it has to exclude all but the richest companies and individuals. It's for people who have money to blow on £600 novelty chrome wheels as an afterthought. Apple have clearly noticed that there's a market for people with more money than sense, but it's a small niche.

The market for mid- to high-end desktops is indeed lower margin, but it's a much bigger market overall. The old Mac Pro was at the high end of this market. Expensive, but justifiable if you needed it. If Apple had the will, they could be profitable in this space. They have chosen to exclude themselves from it.

Back in the mid '00s, I saw Mac Pros in use in scientific research settings, because they allowed use of lots of RAM compared to equivalent PC mainboards of the time, could take lots of storage, and had lots of horsepower to throw at bioinformatics and modelling problems. We had compute clusters as well, but for some problems these were a better fit. Today, Macs are banned. The academic funding bodies don't consider them good value for money. And they are not wrong in that assessment.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#215

Post by rleigh » Sat, May 02, 2020, 1:25 PM UTC

Jasper_ wrote: post #135

wtallis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vulkan is the vendor-independent derivative of AMD's Mantle, which pre-dates Apple's Metal. There were several proposed new 3D APIs around that time, but ISVs quickly converged around Vulkan. Apple's reticence to adopt or even permit it is worse than Microsoft's continued efforts to push Direct3D.

The team that developed Mantle got ignored by AMD management, who then left and subsequently got hired by Apple to develop Metal. Vulkan's release was held up for over a year by AMD management and red tape, which was by then already a year later than Metal's release.

None of that matters one iota.

I'm not going to spend valuable time and resources on a non-standard graphics API for a platform with anaemic graphics hardware. Instead, I'm going to target Windows and Linux with Vulkan or OpenGL. If I do support MacOS, it will be via MoltenVK, and it will be a second tier platform.

From my point of view, by dropping standard OpenGL they have turned their platform into a second-class citizen.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#216

Post by green7ea » Sat, May 02, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

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…

> everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories

Linux is very backwards compatible. I've run an OpenGL application I wrote 10+ years ago without any trouble and have run non 3D applications that were over 20 years old without a need to recompile. This is because the Linux kernel has a very stable ABI.

Unfortunatly, this isn't the case if you ship with dependencies on dynamic libraries but that's pretty easy to avoid. Static link everything and only dynamically depend on SDL or something.

You could also go the windows route and ship all the DLLs. This is what steam does under Linux, they ship their own Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#217

Post by willis936 » Sat, May 02, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

pcr910303 wrote: post #167

willis936 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it really solve the same problem? Can I run metal API on my windows or linux machines? Also, to answer your question: no. Nvidia is in the GPU selling business. They wouldn’t mind having their high priced GPUs in high priced laptops. Apple keeps control of what hardware they sell, which dictates what software gets developed. Why would Nvidia or Apple spend resources to make software for a computer that no one is…

The problem space Vulkan and Metal solves is not high level cross platform graphics (which OpenGL tries to solve), it’s low level control over the GPU. That’s the problem they’re trying to solve, it’s not about cross platform. You might ask, ‘Then why is OpenGL deprecated?’. The answer is that Apple is just deprecating it’s own support since there’s a more low level API, OpenGL should be implemented on top of Metal,…

MoltenVK is an exciting prospect, but until I see games running it I will be skeptical that it exists.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#218

Post by stouset » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #14

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…

* 3. Small market. Mac users make up a share of sales similar to Linux. "What are you talking about! Linux is 1% while Mac is a whole 4%!", nope! Those numbers are the same insignificance per a video game business plan* As a Mac user, I buy other hardware to play games on! Probably the only real Apple game platform is iOS. And even then I’m a bit more careful of what games I buy. The only Mac gaming I do is with emul…

On the flip side, I have and maintain a Windows computer for the sole purpose of gaming. I hate it to the point where I can’t understand why anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to Windows other than sheer ignorance.

You can’t swap sound outputs while an application is running. Fullscreen Direct3D games can freeze in a way that obscures all other windows, including the Task Manager, preventing you from ever killing them. USB device power management is abysmal, and devices often just won’t wake up after sleep. The OS itself is a complete clusterfuck of half-new, half-old, half-ancient things like the Control Panel. Everything prompts constantly—usually with modal windows—for absolutely pointless decisions (and no I’m not talking about UAC).

This is before I even get to what awful citizens of the platform their developers are. Everyone wants to hijack the right-click menu. For all the complaints about the Mac App Store, the Windows Store is—as best I can tell—bordering 100% crapware with no way to find anything of reasonable quality. Everything’s UI seems to have been built with entirely custom components designed by a color-blind child who’s seen too many sci-fi movies.

To top it all off, I am continually just floored whenever I read Raymond Chen’s blog. He often has posts explaining why $thing works some unexpected way or has some sharp edge, and the answer is always because thirty years ago a team at Microsoft built something insane and convoluted (admittedly through the lens of someone watching today), it’s now baked in at the lowest levels of Windows, and it can’t be touched, changed, or removed because of their commitment to backward compatibility.

I struggle to find any redeeming qualities of Windows as a user.

I get that the Mac is a poor platform for gaming development. I really do. But goddamn would I kill for that to change, and for me to be able to run games on my Mac some day.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#219

Post by Zooper » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #102

soneca wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never heard anyone really passionately speak about the 3D experience. It was always marketing speech with movie-goers sometimes buying into the expectation. But after experiencing it, no one ever was really passionate about it. At most they would slightly prefer, and even so I think it was because the confounding factor that 3D sessions are also played in the largest screens and the best sound system. But for VR? I…

From the perspective of everyone not in the niche, the difference between it fading away and being a niche is minimal.

Let me say in no uncertain terms that there will be a time soon when desk monitors and tvs will be present but not the main display, and their sales will drop at that point. To me, it's more "when" than "if." To reach that tipping point two things need to first occur: there needs to be an ~300 USD headset with specs comparable to the current Valve Index, there need to be improvements to hand & finger tracking so existing workflows begin translating directly into the virtual environment. When those two things transpire, give it like 3-5 years tops, and I'll think you'll see a state change.

Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS

#220

Post by aksss » Sat, May 02, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

stouset wrote: post #218

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 3. Small market. Mac users make up a share of sales similar to Linux. "What are you talking about! Linux is 1% while Mac is a whole 4%!", nope! Those numbers are the same insignificance per a video game business plan* As a Mac user, I buy other hardware to play games on! Probably the only real Apple game platform is iOS. And even then I’m a bit more careful of what games I buy. The only Mac gaming I do is with emul…

On the flip side, I have and maintain a Windows computer for the sole purpose of gaming. I hate it to the point where I can’t understand why anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to Windows other than sheer ignorance. You can’t swap sound outputs while an application is running. Fullscreen Direct3D games can freeze in a way that obscures all other windows, including the Task Manager , preventing you from ever k…

I’d be a little more circumspect before accusing others of ignorance and then going on a tirade of declarative statements about an OS you’re obviously not invested in enough to solve the problems you’re experiencing.