Games on Mac

T

tuna

Veteran
I do not have any windows system anymore, so I thought we could have a thread with mac games.

I bought Batman Arkham Asylum and it is pretty fun so far. My 360 pad is perfectly supported and you can play it in 5K as well! That gives a pretty shitty frame rate and tearing so I play it in 2.5K instead which feels pretty good.
 
The first game I bought for my 12" PowerBook G4 was Halo. Surprisingly, gaming on the Mac isn't too terrible but you do get the odd terrible port often caused by Cider, which really should die but I still feel like I need to keep a Bootcamp partition with Windows 7 on.
 
tuna said:
Does any recent games actually use cider?
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The last game I bought that did was Settlers VII from 2010.

I was actively playing this game when I upgraded my 2009 iMac (2.4Ghz Core2Duo, 16Gb RAM, Radeon 512mb Radeon 4850) to a 2013 iMac (3.5Ghz i7, 16Gb RAM, 4Gb Geforce 780M) and I'm not exaggerating, the Mac version of the game runs as well under OS X on the new Mac as it did under Windows on the old Mac.

I play most graphically intensive games under Windows still.
 
I had a bit of a Fallout craving this week so decided to revisit New Vegas on PS3. After about 20 minutes I had to give up on that version because it runs at some godawful awful resolution (1024x600) which is beyond my ability to tolerate so I grabbed it on Steam running on my iMac (boot-camped into Windows), hooked up a DualShock 4 and played for a few hours. Perfect.

Then I remembered Steam has native streaming built in, so installed Steam on my MacMini (which along with some server software, runs Kodi, née XBMC) then installed the Steam plugin for Kodi/XBMC, paired my DualShock 4 with my MacMini and fired it off and...

Yes, it works flawlessly. Very impressed. I am tempted to build a Shuttle PC with a i7/GF970 and shove it in a cupboard headless just for streaming.
 
Sorry im confused?
you run the game on one computer stream the game to another computer and play it on that, why would you do such a thing ?
 
tuna said:
Because he would rather play where the other computer is located?
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Exactly. The MacMini and Kodi are my media centre connected to my 49" TV. I'd rather play Fallout on a big TV from my sofa than a 27" iMac at my desk.
 
Davros said:
so why not run the game on the mini ? or move the pc (I suppose you have your reasons)
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On the first point, because the MacMini a) has an Intel HD5000 GPU which would run New Vegas at best on medium settings at a low resolution and b) because it's running OS X and does not have Windows installed. Although I could buy a Windows licence and install it I'd have to completely rebuild the server services because everything is OS X (or UNIX shell) native and there's a bunch of script functions that would be hell to rewrite in Windows because Windows has no OS-wide scripting language.

ps: is streaming basically this ?
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No, that's network shares, Steam's streaming is entirely different. The iMac is running the Steam version of Fallout New Vegas under Windows, the MacMini is running Steam under OS X and is communicating with my DualShock 4, sending that data over the network to the iMac which is receiving the controller data just like it would if I'd connected a controller to the iMac, running the game and sending the video and audio to the MacMini which it's displaying on my TV.

I am just a little surprised it works as well as it does, or indeed at all. The host machine is running Windows, the client machine is running OS X, the fact that the Steam client on the MacMini just recognises the DualShock 4 and abstracts the controller to the host Steam iMac which thinks a 360 controller is connected, is far more than I expected. Everything works in Steam's Big Picture mode too, i.e. the PS button swaps game and Steam UI.

I expect a little bit of a fight at least, but no, it just worked. Crazy times.
 
Grall said:
Isn't this coming in 10, tho? Or did they just re-work the command shell and that's it?
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I'm really not following Windows development - I only use Windows for some games and nothing else. OS-wide scripting is something I got used to on the Amiga (ARexx) and missed when my primary platform was Windows 98/2000/XP then loved again when I switched to the Mac. Of course for Windows users a standard scripting language will be useful not when they add it to Windows but when most apps and utilities and support it. I have entire management and processing workflows that rely on a bunch of applications processing data and communicating using AppleScript.
 
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Tested Diablo 3 on my 2014 5K iMac. It was really jerky with a lot of tearing, but it looked really good when you don't move! Will try Starcraft later....
 
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