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Wheres our promised mac red orchestra 2?!?!?!?!?

Our build or UE 3 does not support Mac clients and it is a non trivial thing to change the engine build to one that does. It is something we are interested in, but currently don't see the demand for.

As far as upgrading our engine, it remains something we continue to evaluate, but it would roughly mean a downtime of 3 to 6 months with no bug fixes, no content additions or anything of the sort as we got the game online on a new version of the engine and fixed it. They engine has changed massively over the years and upgrading will break many parts of it that will need to be hunted down and fixed. Month to month changes are usually fairly trivial with the engine, but they add up and entire features are ripped out and replaced. For example the UI system, foliage system, terrain system and more that we use are now obsolete in the latest builds of the engine. We would either need to bring the old systems forward, or start from scratch with the new systems (both of these options are not "easy"). As I said, non trivial. But it remains something we continue to evaluate as we move forward.
 
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a Mac / Linux client would gain much support in the gaming community. More than that of what you would think. The average Mac and Linux user pays more for their products than the average windows users. There is test data with hundreds of thousands of purchases which show that Linux users pay more for Linux supported apps than mac and windows users, windows user paying the least.

As for my next statement I don't have a source on hand, but I read a few months back that Windows users are more likely to pirate their software than mac and Linux users combined. I'm sure this is believable for many.

In short, I'm just listing reasons to support these OS's but most indie games that do don't do so regretfully. Many basic games that are supported on these OS's are very popular amongst their communities, especially the Linux communities, and purchased solely because they support the system. Many non gamers do it to support growth on Linux. It's a market with great potential.

And not to be repetitive here's a post from a valve dev blog re: Linux that was posted earlier.

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/steamd-penguins/
 
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Which is irrelevant if Windows users pirate RO.... they won't ever be able to properly play online with their ripped off copy since they need to use Steam... and Steam won't register a pirated copy of RO.... either RO1 or RO2. If you do have a Steam account and try to tweak a ripped off copy of the game into your profile, you'll risk losing your account most likely.

That and you'll never be able to unlock or use the progression system and at best, you'd only be able to play the Single Player Campaign in RO2 or the Practice Mode in RO1.... which would get pretty old quick.
in other words, who cares! :D
 
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I cannot in good conscience recommend Macs.

I worked as system & network administrator for a advertising company that had 50+ high end/priced Macs in the art department alone. The years trying to keep those thrice cursed machines from crashing the have left me with a very bitter memory of Apple hardware. I would sue them for causing me premature grey hair if I could. :rolleyes:

Funny thing was if you stripped off the crappy OS 8 or 9 variant and used a copy of Yellow Dog Linux...the things worked wonderfully and the crashes ceased. So my opinion was good HW...lousy OS.

Tried OSX when it first came out with very high hopes...it was a bit more stable (Still crashed too bloody much) but laggy, had compatibility problems and it didn't fly with other UNIX/LINUX compatible apps...and it was supposed to be based on a unix kernel (openstep)??? :confused:

Anyway, I leave you with the true meaning of MACINTOSH. (Also known as the Smack n' Toss)

Main
Application
Crashes
If
Not
The
Operating
System
Hangs
 
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Which is irrelevant if Windows users pirate RO.... they won't ever be able to properly play online with their ripped off copy since they need to use Steam... and Steam won't register a pirated copy of RO.... either RO1 or RO2. If you do have a Steam account and try to tweak a ripped off copy of the game into your profile, you'll risk losing your account most likely.

That and you'll never be able to unlock or use the progression system and at best, you'd only be able to play the Single Player Campaign in RO2 or the Practice Mode in RO1.... which would get pretty old quick.

Your missing the point. I'm speaking specifically of why a developer would choose to support these platforms in general, and not about multiplayer games that require license keys. This concept doesn't apply to steam or or specifically, but devolving games as a whole, and porting them to these Mac and Linux platforms. I know you probably don't hold as much excitement as I do for the future of game development for open source platforms (I may be wrong though), I would love a world in which I didn't have pirate some proprietary garbage winblows winfail machine in order to play some decent game. I would much rather run an open source free operating system which actually performs more efficiently with the CPU than either windows or osx.
 
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I don't know how hard it is to port a game to Linux but when only 1.4% of Desktops are Linux and maybe not even half of them play videogames and then take 0.1% of those guys who would play RO2 it's not worth it.
I'm sure there's lots of PC gamers that only use Windows to game. Otherwise, they would much prefer to use Linux. I'm sure that there's plenty of die-hard Linux fans out there, that if this were one of the few games to support their OS, they would immediately throw their money at it to prove that there is a big enough market for more games to support Linux. I believe that Valve porting Steam and L4D2 is a step in the right direction, and that other devs follow suit.
 
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ak™;1108032 said:
Your missing the point. I'm speaking specifically of why a developer would choose to support these platforms in general, and not about multiplayer games that require license keys. This concept doesn't apply to steam or or specifically, but devolving games as a whole, and porting them to these Mac and Linux platforms. I know you probably don't hold as much excitement as I do for the future of game development for open source platforms (I may be wrong though), I would love a world in which I didn't have pirate some proprietary garbage winblows winfail machine in order to play some decent game. I would much rather run an open source free operating system which actually performs more efficiently with the CPU than either windows or osx.

Buy a new computer and the OS comes included... why you'd feel you need to pirate something rather than actually pay for it is beyond me.

In regards to why more game developers make games more for Windows than Mac, it's simply more to do with the fact that the market is much larger for Windows based computers than Mac computers.... ie: there's more customers in one group than the other.

Making a video game just for Mac.... even if it's the best game out there today, that won't be enough to entice people to go out and purchase an expensive Mac to play that game.

Even if they were going to make the game for both Mac and PC, they need to look at the overall cost to them and whether or not they can actually make a profit or at the very least, break even based on the amount of resources and man hours they'd need to spend working on it.

Why spend a lot of your own money, man power and resources on something that may never get you back the return you need to justify it all?

That's bad business and as unfortunate as it may be, the game industry is a business.

I'll just say what a few reading are already thinking:

Tripwire already spent pretty much a year on RO2 with patches, bug fixes and performance boosts on all the various PC systems & their specs that were not originally found prior to being released due to the larger variety of hardware configurations present...... I doubt they'll work on a Mac version any time soon as they'll just be right back to square one again with more bug fixes, patches and performance boosts based on all the various Mac hardware setups available.... further spreading their man power and resources than what's currently being done. (Keep in mind that Macs and PC's handle graphics processing in different ways.... just for starters)

Not only that, but they'll also end up having a slew of Mac users coming into the forums trashing them out for a buggy game that doesn't work on their Macs..... and they're already getting enough sh*t tossed at them from PC users..... I sure as hell wouldn't want to even touch another completely different platform until I fixed the majority of problems existing in the current platform.

So they'd be getting crap from both sides.... Mac users b*tching at them for all the glitches and bugs they have to put up with, PC users b*tching at them for some of the existing problems they're still facing..... and both sets of users b*tching at them for it taking them even longer to fix those issues due to being spread out between the two.

With that kind of environment, I simply wouldn't want to wake up the next day and go to work.... I'd load up my back pack and head out into the forest before I'd end up with a stroke.
 
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I'm sure there's lots of PC gamers that only use Windows to game. Otherwise, they would much prefer to use Linux. I'm sure that there's plenty of die-hard Linux fans out there, that if this were one of the few games to support their OS, they would immediately throw their money at it to prove that there is a big enough market for more games to support Linux. I believe that Valve porting Steam and L4D2 is a step in the right direction, and that other devs follow suit.

You see it. I am so glad!

As for this:
Buy a new computer and the OS comes included... why you'd feel you need to pirate something rather than actually pay for it is beyond me.

In regards to why more game developers make games more for Windows than Mac, it's simply more to do with the fact that the market is much larger for Windows based computers than Mac computers.... ie: there's more customers in one group than the other.

Making a video game just for Mac.... even if it's the best game out there today, that won't be enough to entice people to go out and purchase an expensive Mac to play that game.

Even if they were going to make the game for both Mac and PC, they need to look at the overall cost to them and whether or not they can actually make a profit or at the very least, break even based on the amount of resources and man hours they'd need to spend working on it.

Why spend a lot of your own money, man power and resources on something that may never get you back the return you need to justify it all?

That's bad business and as unfortunate as it may be, the game industry is a business.

I'll just say what a few reading are already thinking:

Tripwire already spent pretty much a year on RO2 with patches, bug fixes and performance boosts on all the various PC systems & their specs that were not originally found prior to being released due to the larger variety of hardware configurations present...... I doubt they'll work on a Mac version any time soon as they'll just be right back to square one again with more bug fixes, patches and performance boosts based on all the various Mac hardware setups available.... further spreading their man power and resources than what's currently being done. (Keep in mind that Macs and PC's handle graphics processing in different ways.... just for starters)

Not only that, but they'll also end up having a slew of Mac users coming into the forums trashing them out for a buggy game that doesn't work on their Macs..... and they're already getting enough sh*t tossed at them from PC users..... I sure as hell wouldn't want to even touch another completely different platform until I fixed the majority of problems existing in the current platform.

So they'd be getting crap from both sides.... Mac users b*tching at them for all the glitches and bugs they have to put up with, PC users b*tching at them for some of the existing problems they're still facing..... and both sets of users b*tching at them for it taking them even longer to fix those issues due to being spread out between the two.

With that kind of environment, I simply wouldn't want to wake up the next day and go to work.... I'd load up my back pack and head out into the forest before I'd end up with a stroke.

You're talking about overall cost when I can build a high end computer for cheaper and run an open source free operating system (free as in really free, not bound to a single private entity). Believe me, it's not that hard. I am familiar with the Linux gaming community, and a lot of them will buy a top tier game that runs natively on Linux even if they don't plan to run it. As far as the difficulty in doing so - MANY small indie game companies port their games to all operating systems. It's not that hard.

As far as pirating a system - most people who build their own computers pirate Windows. It's fact. They pirate a system, which fails to utilize their hardware to it's fullest potential - ironically. The only thing that Windows (and Xbox) has on anyone (OSX, Linux, and other gaming consoles, is Direct X). Microsoft back in the 90s and all through the 2000s did everything in it's power to undermine and weaken the OpenGL renderer. Whether it was through false advertising or other means we shall not discuss, it gave itself a platform in which it could solidify DirectX as everyone's go to renderer for when they develop games for PC. Even when using OpenGL makes more sense since more systems would be able to take advantage of it, Microsoft only wanted it's own systems being able to run games and other 3D virtualizations. So in short, you're actually limited.

I don't expect to get into all of these reasons but this is what you can expect from a company who's CEO went and called Linux users all communists and the GNU open source a communist plague.

In the end, what I want everyone to take from this is that if more top tier games existed on Linux, (like what Valve is planning to do, which I think will significantly boost it's popularity among the Linux community and Linux's popularity as well), then Linux would be used more often and it would have a huge market share.

The issue is not with performance, as there are numerous benchmarks which show Linux utilizing it's hardware better than both OSX and Winfail. 90% of servers and super computers run Linux. And to top it off, it's in neither Microsoft's or Apple's interests that Linux becomes widely adopted, even though it's so open and free.

There are just a lot of misconceptions which benefit the wrong people and I'd love to get them out of the way. Clearly I run Windows to game, but solely to game. I would love for the day when I can say my favorite games are ported to Linux and that I won't ever have to run that garbage OS on my computer. I know it's not for everyone, but to scrutinize it for being a minority is just a bad argument. There's so much potential for growth.
 
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AKtm:

The whole dilemma boils down to this:

1. Most mainstream games are made for windows (and Xbox only) [well and PS3].
2. Microsoft locked the game section down with Win and Xbox use of DirectX.
3. Alot of Game companies won't build their games for Linux OSes because there are not enough users to make it worth their effort and: Linux OSes have a small user base BECAUSE there are not alot mainstream games for Linux OSes (the Hen/Egg dilemma).

I think, if the Linux OS userbase reaches a critical mass (steam for linux selling 3 million Left4dead 2 games for example) and mainstream game companies notice the opportunity that there is money in the linux gaming market, things will change.

TL;DR: If game industry notices the numbers of linux gamers, more games will be made for Linux.
 
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