Mac Gaming

So it seems Valve has helped widen the Mac gaming market a bit, by announcing Steam for OS X, along with all their Source based games (Half Life 2, Team Fortress, Portal, and Left for Dead). They are also doing the right thing by porting the games over instead of using a windows emulation layer, along with allowing users to buy one copy and use the game on either platform. This brings them up to the level of Blizzard, and it should be interesting to see the impact it has on the rest of the industry. Already, many other developers are talking about Mac development at GDC, with future ports planned of Civilization V, Fallen Earth, the Battlefield series and future strategy games from Gas Powered Games.

Glad to finally see the tide turn, and developers at least considering the platform. For many, the effort isn't much more then existing investments across PC and console development. Game engines are becoming much more portable, and less tied to specific features of each platform.

It's a great move, and these days I've decided I'm only buying PC games that are on Steam.

But aren't MacBook Pros still a little light on the graphics acceleration?

The baseline Mac (a $599 Mini or $999 Macbook) come with a Geforce 9400m. While not an amazing 3D chip, it's much better then the typical Intel Integrated graphics chips on entry level machines from most PC vendors. Portal or Team Fortress 2 would play just fine on them, and it's been a standard graphics chip in Macs since late 2008.

MacBook Pros at the mid 15 inch level and up also have a 9600GT dedicated chip, along with the 9400m. They are due for a bump here soon, and will likely have comparable graphics options to similar PCs. Apple has on their mid and high range kept up with PC graphics options for the most part for well over 7 years now. Back when the ATI 9800 was a great card, Macs had compatible versions for the G4 systems.

*edit* One big thing Steam does is provide a digital distribution channel to the Mac, something that will likely be used for many casual games as well. Peggle and other PopCap games are already available on Steam for Windows, so I assume they will be out on the OS X Steam too. The casual market is one that will continue to grow, and now Valve will be earning a portion of that spending on the Mac side.

And the iMac, the most popular system Apple sells by a wide margin apparently, currently ships with Nvidia 9400M or ATI HD4670 or ATI HD 4850. For the 21" screen you can pick the first two, for the 27" screen you can pick the last two.

I would have thought popcap would have all their stuff on mac now but I looked and they do not. Kinda weird since they seem to be willing to port to just about anything.

While PopCap does have many of their games out for OS X, Steam will help provide an "App Store" like buying experience on the Mac. Currently you have to know about PopCap and go to their site to buy. With Steam, people are far more likely to just browse and find their games.

Meh, I don't think they do an exceptional job at it, but I guess it depends on the platforms you're using. They've done a miserable job on Android, for instance, Bejeweled is the only game they have on there. It's not a huge deal, as one of my favorite Popcap games, Zuma, has a decent (if not better) substitute in Bonsai Blast.

And it's true, Macs have much better graphics cards these days. And once again, the fewer options might appeal to developers.

I'm just saying I was surprised to see the couple games I checked were not available on mac. Considering they have game on pc, xbox, ps3, ds, iphone, world of warcraft, online ......

I would have thought if they port to all those platforms they would have stuff on mac already. Maybe they do and just the ones I checked were not ?

One of the nice things about their Source engine is that it's got a pretty wide scaling range.

Except for the fact that the different colors are too similar and the game is impossible for me to play.

I'm all fail tonight; that's not available yet, right?

OS X in April. Announced at GDC last week, and the beta of the WebKit powered Steam Client went live on the Windows side a few weeks ago.

Being that Valve has their own time, late April really meant today.

Seems to work just like Steam on Windows. I've added non Steam games to the list, and the overlay works in them as well. Looks to be 60ish titles on the store already, though the only Valve made game is Portal.

Also, Portal is free until May 24th, for Mac or Windows users.
http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/

I knew my procrastination would pay off eventually.

Downloading now.... Finally, something to really tax the Mac Pro I inherited at work.

My first Steam purchase

Won't let me download it now though I keep getting told the servers are too busy.

For the first time, in a long time, my favored user name is unavailable.

Portal for free? Damn, that's seriously tempting. Too bad that would give me more motion sickness than any other game in existence. I'd love to play it, but I'd spend the entire day on the couch with a cold washcloth on my forehead

Take some anti nausea drugs. Portal's a quick play, just a few hours. Worth it. Turn up the sound.

Don't do it all in one go. Each level is self contained and there are plenty of places you're completely safe and can take a break.

Great! If it's just around three hours, then based on my rate of play with Half Life 2 while on Dramamine, I calculate that it will only take me 24 hours to play the game!

My calculations take into account 5 minutes of play time followed by 30 minutes on the couch. That was pretty much par for the course on HL2.

Honestly, I wish I could fix it. I'd love to play these games, and I could once, but now I just get queasy.

Smaller monitor?

You should go ahead and download it while it's free, though.

Well, I played quite a bit of Portal last night. Worked great. I loaded it up again this evening, and after an update, now I can't see through portals any more. They're just black, until I step halfway through, and then I frequently see what's on the other side of the wall, or a synesthestic acid trip, instead of what's on the other side of the portal, until I get almost all the way through. I tried changing the render depth, with no improvement.

I had that problem with Doom (the original) a few times. One of the things that helped me was focusing on the wall behind the monitor every few minutes.

The only real problem I've had since then was with Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii. Of course, all eight people or however many were watching all got naseous also. I guess the TV was too big or something, but it did all of us in after about 10 minutes.

It's funny, I didn't have this problem when playing Galaxy. I love that game, and I played it all the way through. I may have felt a tad queasy a couple times, but it didn't do me in. In general, I have much better luck with 3rd person games.

I once deathmatched against someone at a LAN party who played Quake in a tiny little window on his screen. The window size was about 2 inches square. That was his solution to preventing motion sickness. It worked really well for him, and he was a fantastic player, constantly winning matches. I'm pretty sure you can run those games in a window and set it to any size you like. You might have to fiddle with the game's configuration files to make it smaller than 640x480. But maybe 640x480 in a window, combined with sitting back from the screen pretty far, might help?

That sounds like a driver incompatibility. Was it a game update or a system (video driver) update?

I'll bet there's a ton of posts about it on the Steam forums. I'll bet it will be fixed soon, or there is already some kind of work around listed there.

Warning: The Steam forums are the place where the "Posting and you" video came from, so you'll need to filter the noise.

Game update via Steam. Turns out there's an article on it in the Steam Wiki. Also a thread in the forum.

I find it unnaturally amusing that the solution to both of my unrelated posts in this thread is "run it in a window". :-)

Hmm, never thought of that. I might give it a shot. Of course, it'll make me sad to have my hot new rig and 30" screen wasted on such a thing, but as long as I can play the game...

Also try to do anything you can in the room to increase your awareness of the room around the computer. Positioning the keyboard and mouse back farther from the screen (or moving the screen back farther from the keyboard), adding interestingly distracting posters to the wall behind the screen, increasing the room lighting behind the screen, etc., all of those things will help your brain realize that it's not actually inside that rendered world and not get the cue conflict problem.

And of course see if there's a way to tweak the config files to make the window even smaller.

I'm really interested in knowing how it goes.

I'll let you know as soon as I get up the motivation to tempt nausea

Oh, one thing I noticed in the settings for Portal is the FOV angle. Looks like it defaults to 75, bumping that up may also help.

The window thing worked. Once it's started, I can reenable fullscreen mode, but I do have to start in windowed mode.

I'd try going the other way, too, seeing if a lower FOV helps.

I finished the main part of Portal the other day. I'm surprised that no one I've seen on the Internet has:

Sadly, I don't think I'm even going to try the FOV change. I got through the second training objective in windowed mode and was already feeling nauseous. I guess I'm extremely sensitive to this stuff.

Oh well, at least it was free...

Did you try any of the other things I suggested? Such as tweaking the configuration files to make the window very very small, sitting farther back from the screen, and making the area behind the screen brighter and more interesting so that your eyes have something to focus on besides the screen?

I ask, not because I'm trying to pressure you, but in a genuine interest as to whether or not they worked for you. Scientific data points.

Well there's a few problems.

First off, I do have an interesting background to my monitor, because it's set in front of a corner hutch. And I actually have a light set up directly behind it so that it's backlit. One problem is that my monitor is so large it fills up my FOV even when sitting fairly far back. I'm currently sitting approximately two feet from the screen, but I've played Portal at as much as three.

I haven't made the window any smaller via config files, but I am using the smallest resolution setting, which produces a window 8.5" diagonally. If it were any smaller I simply wouldn't want to play it because I wouldn't be able to see anything.

Even with all this, the very first training exercise that rotated me through a portal really made me queasy. I've been able to play a little more, but I can feel it building...