Mac Indie Games

[p3ter_st0ry]

Dude, you can't think of any mac specific game worth more than 15 minutes? Sorry man, but you just slapped Ambrosia in the face!

I mean, let me list some:
First of all, the Marathon trilogy.
Secondly, Myst.
And lastly, for some more recent examples, anything from Ambrosia (including Mac specific titles like Redline)

Way I see it is big corporations want to sell the most games, so they port to Windows first. Also, look what happened to Bungie after it was bought out by MS: not Mac specific anymore, eh?

These games are EPIC. Pay them some respect man 
No hard feelings though 

[xvs07]

Dude, you can't think of any mac specific game worth more than 15 minutes? Sorry man, but you just slapped Ambrosia in the face!

Sorry I didn't clarify, but I did specifically refer to OS X games.  I can think of loads of games I've played for months that run just dandy on MacOS 7 or earlier but not on anything else, OS X included.  Taskmaker, Quagmire, and Avara are the ones that leap immediately to mind.  Speaking of Avara, yeah I like a lot of what Ambrosia did back in the day, but I'm also one of those die-hards that's still bitter about some of the bad blood surrounding Avara, and furthermore I don't think their latest creations have as much verve as the classics (Maelstrom, Escape Velocity, Apeiron, et cetera).  ::shrug:: But hey, whatever, right?  Ambrosia's kinda shifted over to being more of a publisher, but they're still good for games and good for gaming, so play ball.

[Kagenoku]

"Taskmaker"
"excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. Get out of the way! Excuse me."
"Danger!"
Ah Taskmaker that ol' game, many hours of my childhood lost to it.
Tomb of the Taskmaker was not as good, way too many things dropped by monsters.

Spiderweb Software is another good place for mac games, but with their bigger games they port them to windows after the mac version is out. Spiderweb Software makes RPG's and Strategy games no action/adventure games like Aquaria is.

[2disbetter]

They're different. Most obviously, OpenGL is more portable. OpenGL is an open standard and offers extensions, which mean it can take advantage of new hardware features faster, while DirectX is not, and can't without Microsoft's say-so. DirectX includes features other than Direct3D for input, networking etc., whereas you have to find other solutions  for those things if you use OpenGL. DirectX expects you to manage hardware, OpenGL implementations do so themselves.  The way you interact with them also differs, predictably enough. In terms of performance the difference isn't obvious, particularly considering issues like poor support for OpenGL by Microsoft supplied drivers and Vista drivers.

So... yeah. Different.

Not rez this thread, but I felt like chiming in here. It should also be noted that OpenGL is all but dead atm compared to DirectX  which is thriving. It's all really about the support structure for both. Whiel Direct x requires more from it's coder, it allows for more.

I've seen a game on both the PC and Mac maxed out, and the PC version blows the mac one out of the water. It's not becuase of hardware, but it;s software. But windows on the mac, and you'll see the same graphics.

So while openGL has potential as it always did, it will never be able to compete with Direct X without the kind of backing Microsoft can provide.

That being said, DirectX is doing some pretty amazing things to advance the gaming graphics side of the house.

2d

[ancestral]

Not rez this thread, but I felt like chiming in here. It should also be noted that OpenGL is all but dead atm compared to DirectX  which is thriving. It's all really about the support structure for both. Whiel Direct x requires more from it's coder, it allows for more.

I've seen a game on both the PC and Mac maxed out, and the PC version blows the mac one out of the water. It's not becuase of hardware, but it[']s software. But windows on the mac, and you'll see the same graphics.

So while openGL has potential as it always did, it will never be able to compete with Direct X without the kind of backing Microsoft can provide.

That being said, DirectX is doing some pretty amazing things to advance the gaming graphics side of the house.

2d

It's really about how optimized the code is to leverage the graphics. OS X on x86 hasn't even been 3 years and it's uses aren't targeted at gaming. But it's also the sheer number of developers. There are more of them on the Windows side, and that's what happens. Where there are more developers, there will usually be more performance.

However, I'd disagree with your statement of OpenGL. If anything, it may be making a quiet comeback. More and more developers are opening to the iPhone and using OpenGL ES.