Steam And Source Coming To Mac

[Mana 3,867]

http://kotaku.com/5488375/left-4-dead-2-team-fortress-2-portal-and-steam-coming-to-mac-in-april

As some of you may have heard by now, Valve is porting Steam and their Source games to Mac.

This will probably mean lots of fun new bugs as they try to use a new (different) rendering engine while also trying to maintain cross platform compatibility.

On the bright side if they are truly bringing games like Counter-Strike: Source to Mac then I would assume these games will run on the same source engine. That engine will be Orangebox (LFD/2 excluded).

Perhaps this is the push that will force Valve's lazy asses to get their games on a single engine. Surely it wouldn't make sense to maintain and make 3+ forks of the same engine cross platform compatible?

But best of all, since MacOS is Unix based (a FreeBSD rip off) and usually runs on considerably shittier hardware, then perhaps the server software for their games will gain some improvement too. Especially if they try and make a MacOS X SRCDS. Perhaps we'll even get SSE2 (Introduced by Pentium 4) support on Linux and not just Windows or maybe even some other optimizations.

It's hard to say what it will be at this point, Valve is known to be extra lazy... But we'll see.

What do you guys think of this?

[+Henry Spencer 117]

Woo, no more Crossover BS to deal with.

[Oww My Nose 19]

Mana... that's just awesome how you talk about stuff that no one cares about

Steam coming to mac = awesome

people caring about SSE2 support on linux... unless you're running a lot of servers (and I know at least one person is, but whatever) chances are you won't care about it

[Mana 3,867]

Mana... that's just awesome how you talk about stuff that no one cares about

Steam coming to mac = awesome

people caring about SSE2 support on linux... unless you're running a lot of servers (and I know at least one person is, but whatever) chances are you won't care about it

Nonsense, no one uses Macs.

But there's a bunch of people who'd like to have multicore support for Counter-Strike: Source.

[+Henry Spencer 117]

Ironic, considering I did 99% of the ban work in September/October on my Macbook. Then my life went to shit.

[kuttlewug 28]

It's nice Valve is expanding but personally I hate Macs. Maybe it's the schools whole internet system and how its sets up. They're terrible.

[Oww My Nose 19]

Macs are wonderful if you have $2000 lying around for an operating system. The few friends I have with macs love them (also, the multi-touch touchpad is really awesome, I wish Windows laptops would have that).

Unrelated: Valve can't do multi-threaing, that's crazy talk!

[Mana 3,867]

Alfred Reynolds:

We will be releasing code support for OSX so you can compile your mods for OSX. The timing of that will be shortly after release.

The Orange Box era engine will be supported for mods on OSX.

Interesting. So if they are only releasing OSX source for orangebox. Then unless more of their games use it, making server plugins for OSX servers/clients will be much harder and will require a lot of reverse engineering.

[+Henry Spencer 117]

Macs are wonderful if you have $2000 lying around for an operating system.

I could've picked up Snow Leopard today at Best Buy for 30 bucks. >.>

[Oww My Nose 19]

You've already made the initial hardware investment. Yes, you can hackintosh stuff, and there is a $200-$300 USB device that acts as a macs boot loader which, if paired with supported hardware, will let OSX run on it, but for people who don't know how to do these things, or just can't be bothered, there's no other way to get the operating system without buying a mac

[Peetah 0]

Implying Mac's can play games?

[Mana 3,867]

Implying Mac's can play games?

Not likely.

Not with those dual cores at 2.0ghz and 9400GTs.

Let's see how well Valve makes use of OpenGL though.

[Peetah 0]

Not likely.

Not with those dual cores at 2.0ghz and 9400GTs.

Let's see how well Valve makes use of OpenGL though.

When they are costing £1000 or more you hope that they would.

I doubt they'll change any old games to run on Macs, only new releases

[Mike808 1]

supposed to be out this month right?

i cant wait

[a_puma01 7]

Well, this will be one more box of ammo my mac friends can say to me about PC.

"We can play Steam too!"

"yeah, been doin that for years pal."

[Mana 3,867]

Installing hopefully the OrangeBawks version of CS:S* on THE STEAM on THE MAC:

Spent like 10 hours getting this POS to work on a VM.

*But knowing Gabe, it's probably the Windows version currently.

[Greyjoy 3]

They're a tad late on bringing it to OS X. By that I mean I got so fed up with not being able to play PC games as well on a PC that I sold my piece of shit to build another PC.

[Mana 3,867]

It is out:

[Brokkoly 11]

and so it begins, the wave of gamers, migrating over to macs because they can play games on the mac.

...

just wait, i'm sure it's coming...

anytime now...

[Paul Bunyan 13]

False alarm, that was just Mana.

[Krash 1,040]

I am completely fine with my PC right now, Core 2 [email protected], Nvidia 9800GT. I could build a great one now with $1000 dollars. Or i could buy a mac and spend an extra 1000 for an OS and an emblem.