Valve Officially Announces Steam and Game Library Coming to Mac in April

[FischOderAal]

You can't upgrade most Macs. But the iMac's 4850 should run those games decent. Maybe this will give Apple an incentive to upgrade graphics sooner or more often than before as well.

[Jowy Atreides]

This really peeved me off!
For years vALVE have promised to release achievements and Orange Box enhancements for Half-Life 2 and Episode One. Instead they waste their time porting to some minority platform. What about Linux?
Bad move vALVE.
Good News about Portal 2 though.
John

opengl = linux
mac = almost linux

there will be hacks

[Hornet331]

to my knowledge Blizzard doesn't use Java at all. (and I'm pretty sure about that, last time I patched around in Blizzard game executables they were all native x86 code)

And that Valve says DirectX10/11 is a closed platform and they don't like it and port to Mac is understandable. They will use OpenGL on the Mac which is not Microsoft controlled. And yes that makes ports to Linux much much easier. Since all the DirectX to OpenGL translation don't need to happen. That's a huge step forward. I very much welcome this step, should give OpenGL a welcome boost.

What I'm curious about is what has changed over the last year that now Apple is working hard on having good OpenGL 3.x drivers in the next Snow Leopard update and Valve is finishing up their port to Mac. Before Valve was always complaining about Apples stubborness in regard to graphic driver bugfixes and now they seem like best friends. Is the iPhone and iPad the reason? Could be. Or the increasing market share of Apple macbooks on university campuses.

Ironic that source till now was DX exclusively.... its a shame to see them wasting devlopment time to get a foot in the >10% share of gamers that want to use a mac, instead of focusing on other things they have promised. Reintroducing OpenGL support in a engien that was develop purely with DX9 in mind sure was time consuming, no wonder 3 years passed and nothing happened to Hl2...

[Kai Robinson]

I couldn't care less about Mac gaming. Most people i know that own macs are too up their own hole to bother with the frivolities of gaming. Why couldn't they just release...oh...EPISODE BLOODY THREE?

[Hornet331]

I couldn't care less about Mac gaming. Most people i know that own macs are too up their own hole to bother with the frivolities of gaming. Why couldn't they just release...oh...EPISODE BLOODY THREE?

Cause they where busy porting Source to openGL...

[Kai Robinson]

Again, i question the entire point of that effort. Anyone that wants to game on a current mac need do little more than install bootcamp & windows.

[WrigleyVillain]

Again, i question the entire point of that effort. Anyone that wants to game on a current mac need do little more than install bootcamp & windows.

Which is beyond the technical abilities of the average user (much less Mac user) even with non-destructive re-partitioning. And then you also need to own Windows.

[naokaji]

^they don't even have right click

Actually thinking of it, gaming on a mac is a lot like a console, a closed plattform where games need to run on low end hw and severly limited controllers.

[FischOderAal]

Again, i question the entire point of that effort. Anyone that wants to game on a current mac need do little more than install bootcamp & windows.

Agreed

Which is beyond the technical abilities of the average user (much less Mac user) even with non-destructive re-partitioning. And then you also need to own Windows.

Yes, you need to own Windows. But setting up Bootcamp is very very easy. I think my father and my sister would be able to do that and they have basically no knowledge. Most difficult part is installing Windows

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeUMTjSA_XM

^they don't even have right click

Actually thinking of it, gaming on a mac is a lot like a console, a closed plattform where games need to run on low end hw and severly limited controllers.

I don't know where you get that severly limited controllers from. OS-X has right click, it opens the context menu just like in Windows. The magic mouse and the touchpads only have one button but you do the right click via putting two fingers on the device while clicking. Very convenient on a touchpad, believe me.

I'm using my Razer Copperhead and my aluminium Apple keyboard with my MacBook and the PC at the same time via a KVM-switch (Belkin Switch2). No hassle, everything works flawlessly Using the magic mouse for gaming might suck though.

Biggest problem for me is the mouse acceleration under OS-X. When you've used Windows for years it sucks hard, feels like dragging your mouse through dirt, but there's an app for that (pun intended). The acceleration is great for the touchpad though. There's an application to swap the ALT and CMD/windows key under Windows as well.