Mac OS X version petition

[Flying Pencil]

This is NOT a debate over Win vs. Mac, it is simple petition for 1C to serve an UNDER SERVED market.

MORE players the better, simple enough.

Mac's only have X-Plane and WWII Online/Battleground Europe for good air sim/combat, so a very good potential for market.
Mac sales are almost 10% of the market for home computers, and with the success of iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch and MacBook Air, it is likely to continue.


How?
1C should find a 2ed party willing to do the conversion so they are not directly involved themselves.

Side benefit:
Linux and OS X share a common Unix base so a Linux version is possible with only a little more effort.


Again, this is ONLY a marketing suggestion, not a debate over platforms.

S!

[recoilfx]

I don't think there will be a return of investment for the development costs. I am a Mac user myself, but I don't see CloD making money on the Mac currently.

Besides, Mac users won't tolerate the kind of user interface and tweaking required by CloD.

[Oktoberfest]

OK, not a bad idea, but I think the first & urgent need is to have a complete software with promised features integrated and working at decent framerates. Then we can see if it's worth the effort of a conversion.

[Winger]

Just buy a PC and youre fine. Macs are good for work. Not more not less:)

Winger

[Flying Pencil]

OK, not a bad idea, but I think the first & urgent need is to have a complete software with promised features integrated and working at decent framerates. Then we can see if it's worth the effort of a conversion.

It will take months to do the conversion.
By the time its done, all the performance issues will be smoothed out and applied to Mac.

Besides, it will be ANOTHER company doing the work, not 1C

[Positronic]

I am a mac user myself also, the extra load of running a transgaming layer like cider (what most devs use to port games to mac) would grind just about every mac to a halt, I have a 27 inch i7 imac here and I wouldnt even like to try and run it on that.

if you into gaming better to suck it up and bootcamp or build a gaming rig :(

[Oktoberfest]

It will take months to do the conversion.
By the time its done, all the performance issues will be smoothed out and applied to Mac.

Besides, it will be ANOTHER company doing the work, not 1C

Well, where do you start your conversion then ? After patch 20 ? Or 40 ?

[gflinch]

I am a mac user myself also, the extra load of running a transgaming layer like cider (what most devs use to port games to mac) would grind just about every mac to a halt, I have a 27 inch i7 imac here and I wouldnt even like to try and run it on that.

if you into gaming better to suck it up and bootcamp or build a gaming rig :(


Not to hijack the thread, but just since there is a common thread here (no pun) what Macs do we all have here? I have the same or similar setup to you Positronic, iMac i7 27in and 1gig ati card. What settings are you able to run COD at/with? Any optimized drivers etc? Windows version? etc...

Greg

[swiss]

Cool idea.

Now we're in very small niche already - but hey, let's do a conversion for 10% of it.

Good luck.

[TwistedAdonis]

Why not just run a dual boot system?

[addman]

I'm all for CoD on different platforms but if you think about it, CoD is a niché game on the PC platform which most likely means small sales. Now imagine this niché game on a platform that is roughly 90% smaller than the PC market and you have very little to almost non-existing profitability chances. If other platforms are profitable CoD will probably make it there so hold your thumbs but just don't hold them too hard;).

P.S Imagine the price tag on the Mac hardware that is needed to run this game, probably get 2 high-end PC's for the same price. Just saying....

[Victory205]

I'd rather see Apple proffer more upgrade paths to cheaper graphics cards than pleading for Mac ports for games. The market isn't there to justify the cost of OSX games.

Same phenomenon that makes Mac viruses rare- small market share is not worth the trouble!

[KoD DEAD ON!]

I´m a Flight SIM FANATIC!, and I have MAC´s at work and at home .... for years I´ve been waiting for a decent WW2 flight SIM to come along, and to my regret .... NO MAC capability!!!!!

I have also been reading a the hustle and arguments about either PLATFORM on other threads and forums....

Goes to show the interest (and maybe envy) there is from one side .... to the other ..... be it ... as you may like to see it!!!!

I agree with FLYING PENCIL ..... as a MAC user ...... THERE´s HUGE POTENTIAL in a under developed market .... especially in the leisure and recreation sector.

13% of something is better than NONE AT ALL!

we NEED games!!!!!!!!! DON´T LET AN OPPORTUNITY GO BY!!!!

( Loved the quote about being surrounded....ROFL! ....must have been CUSTER who said that!!!!!..... lotta foresight .... that one!!!! )

[ATAG_Doc]

Might consider virtual machine. Probably wont run well though unless you have a really killer machine.

[swiss]

Currently the most powerful Mac has a 6970Mobile card inside. Not enough for CloD, at least not for a flight nerd.
I also dont believe the devs will ever be capable to tweak that game to a point where you can run it with high settings on that card.
Maybe a 2014 Mac can handle it. (haha)


If a Sim nerd buys a mac as his only system, he may not be the smartest.
And what's with all the other peripherals, wouldn't they need mac drivers too?
Are they available - and if not, why would you think that is?
Why do Mac lovers love their machine? Do you think you can appeal them with a super complex game like Clod(or worse: A10).

Economically this makes as much sense as offering for sand traction optimized tires for a Ferrari - you may find a few customers out there but never enough to justify the investment.

[AWL_Spinner]

As the game is built around DirectX renderers, and not something like OpenGL which might conceivably be portable, I think such admirable dreams will remain just that, dreams.

Plus the hardware points are valid. I am Mac aficionado, I use one at home, but I also have a home-built PC as a gaming rig.

[tintifaxl]

No fun flying without TrackIR, a HOTAS and rudder pedals. No need for a port then unless we have these on MacOS. YMMV of course.

[csThor]

The only other flight sim team I know of that tried (or still is trying) to support Mac and Win systems was Warbirds. And that double-system policy basically ground any development to a halt years ago.

I do agree that a MacOS version is economically not viable and would divert resources away from core development and bugfixing.

[Vengeanze]

Currently the most powerful Mac has a 6970Mobile card inside. Not enough for CloD, at least not for a flight nerd.
I also dont believe the devs will ever be capable to tweak that game to a point where you can run it with high settings on that card.
Maybe a 2014 Mac can handle it. (haha)


If a Sim nerd buys a mac as his only system, he may not be the smartest.
And what's with all the other peripherals, wouldn't they need mac drivers too?
Are they available - and if not, why would you think that is?
Why do Mac lovers love their machine? Do you think you can appeal them with a super complex game like Clod(or worse: A10).

HEY!!!:evil: Wait just a minute.

I can run CloD on MAX SETTINGS with my iMac. But that's at 1920x1280. If I wanna run it at native 2560 then I have to go with medium/high mix.
Ok, I've overclocked the vidcard just a tad. :-)

So with the i5/i7 and 6970M and bootcamp I can have both a beautiful computer AND my sims. Now ain't that smart!!!!

[addman]

HEY!!!:evil: Wait just a minute.

I can run CloD on MAX SETTINGS with my iMac. But that's at 1920x1280. If I wanna run it at native 2560 then I have to go with medium/high mix.
Ok, I've overclocked the vidcard just a tad. :-)

So with the i5/i7 and 6970M and bootcamp I can have both a beautiful computer AND my sims. Now ain't that smart!!!!

Exactly! Bootcamp is where it's at.

[robtek]

Wouldn't a Mac-version also run, with minor modifications, under Linux?
Afaik the actual Mac-OS is based on unix/linux.

[ZaltysZ]

CoD has dependencies on DirectX and .NET. Porting it to other OSes would require lots of changes, and size of non Windows market segment won't justify that.

[tintifaxl]

HEY!!!:evil: Wait just a minute.
... snip ...

So with the i5/i7 and 6970M and bootcamp I can have both a beautiful computer AND my sims. Now ain't that smart!!!!

GPU drivers for MacOSX don't deliver as much gaming performance as the Windows/Bootcamp drivers do. This is my experience with Snow Leo and an ATI 4850 in a 27" i5 iMac. Apples biggest priority for MacOSX is stability, not gaming performance.

[gflinch]

HEY!!!:evil: Wait just a minute.

I can run CloD on MAX SETTINGS with my iMac. But that's at 1920x1280. If I wanna run it at native 2560 then I have to go with medium/high mix.
Ok, I've overclocked the vidcard just a tad. :-)

So with the i5/i7 and 6970M and bootcamp I can have both a beautiful computer AND my sims. Now ain't that smart!!!!

What drivers/oc software are you using? I would like to OC my video too, just not sure how.

[pupo162]

well, even tough 10% of market is (according to OP) mac OS, from experience, people who buy Mac's are not into pc gaming, so if in regular windows we have 0,01% users intersted in clod, we would have something like 0,001% mac users interested in playing COD.

[MACADEMIC]

I'm all for it. Mac users are a small percentage of PC users but those with buying power and who traditionally are used to pay for their media. Just saying, World of Planes will be for the Mac as well.

MAC

[swiss]

Mac users are a small percentage of PC users but those with buying power and who traditionally are used to pay for their media. Just saying, World of Planes will be for the Mac as well.

MAC

Buying power doesn't matter if you look at their market share.
With the same argument you could as well justify a special homoversion of this game as they have incredibly buying power too... ;)

And honestly, I dont think the imac user has pumped more money into his system than the nerd with all his peripherals.

[Madfish]

While Steam runs on a mac it doesn't run on Linux. So the Linux argument falls flat from the beginning.

Also the game uses dx and .net as someone already mentioned. The performance after a port would be miserable at best.

Also while apple prevents it's OS from being used on real computer hardware (or even within VM's) this is not so for Windows. Just buy a copy and install it.

Mac is a very limited ecosystem and, aside from other things, absolutely not made for gaming. At this point it doesn't make sense to port the game to mac, especially since many of the peripherals aren't compatible either.


If the publisher thinks it will repay itself then it would've been done already. So it's pointless to discuss it here.

[MBF]

While Steam runs on a mac it doesn't run on Linux. So the Linux argument falls flat from the beginning.

Also the game uses dx and .net as someone already mentioned. The performance after a port would be miserable at best.

Also while apple prevents it's OS from being used on real computer hardware (or even within VM's) this is not so for Windows. Just buy a copy and install it.

Mac is a very limited ecosystem and, aside from other things, absolutely not made for gaming. At this point it doesn't make sense to port the game to mac, especially since many of the peripherals aren't compatible either.


If the publisher thinks it will repay itself then it would've been done already. So it's pointless to discuss it here.
I was wondering about this (bolded part), are there any decent joysticks for mac? Track-IR? Throttles? Pedals?

Why not simply install Windows and run it in Windows?

Also to the OP: even if macs were 10% of the global pc market (which I highly doubt, no hate involved, I just doubt it is that high), let's not forget that flight sim enthusiasts represent a very small fraction of the overall "gaming market", which is also a fraction of the total pc market. So a small % of a slightly bigger % of one tenth of of the global market is just too small. Not worth it.

[speculum jockey]

The number of people who are actually playing CloD is quite low. So low that the three main forums dedicated to CloD have the same 15 people posting in all of them, and little else.

Converting to Mac would take time and money. Even if they paid some other company to do it, there is still the money issue.

The number of Mac owners who would play this are probably countable on one hand.

It's just not worth it, hence there being almost no games for Mac.

[Blackdog_kt]

GPU drivers for MacOSX don't deliver as much gaming performance as the Windows/Bootcamp drivers do. This is my experience with Snow Leo and an ATI 4850 in a 27" i5 iMac. Apples biggest priority for MacOSX is stability, not gaming performance.

I can confirm this from personal experience. A buddy has an iMac and plays Starcraft 2 which does support MacOS. Well, there's a tremendous amount of change in performance on the exact same system between MacOS and Windows.

The guy absolutely loves his Mac but reboots into windows to play games, even those that would run under MacOS.

That and the aforementioned dependencies of CoD's core engine and features on .Net and DirectX, as well as the lack of drivers for most of the essential flight simming peripherals make it a bit over-ambitious to expect a MacOS capable version of CoD.

Don't get me wrong, i'm a PC user but i have no axe to grind. I would love it if Mac users could play CoD with us without having to reboot into windows, since whatever makes it easier for someone to get into a game also makes it easier to grow the number of people involved in the community.

However, before something like that happens there's an underlying foundation that needs to be there and it's currently missing, so it doesn't make sense in terms of time spent vs money gained for 1c to port CoD over to Mac just yet.

[yakaddict]

Are we just going to ignore the fact that currently there exists no mac actually capable of running cliffs of dover at anything resembling good framerates?

[yakaddict]

GPU drivers for MacOSX don't deliver as much gaming performance as the Windows/Bootcamp drivers do. This is my experience with Snow Leo and an ATI 4850 in a 27" i5 iMac. Apples biggest priority for MacOSX is stability, not gaming performance.

The main reason for this is that windows games run on Direct X and mac and linux both run on OpenGl. It has been confirmed through extensive testing that currently, Direct X is the faster API, so at the moment, windows games will ALWAYS run faster than mac or linux games. This may change if OpenGl begins to overtake DirectX sometime in the future, but its the state of affairs for now. I use both linux, mac and windows, but I would never even contemplate gaming on linux or mac...not at the present at least. I wish there was more development on mac and linux though, it might make the industry push the technological and competitive sectors farther, away from those stupid consoles and to better games and performance on all computer platforms.