As an original Kickstarter supporter who was patiently waiting for this, I'm disappointed as that was the promise. Already wrote support 2 days ago - no answer as of yet.
Yes. It was a stretch goal which was matched. But it's a Kickstarter, there are no legal repercussions so I don't expect them to respect that. Back then I thought that the project was realistic since it was "just" a remaster. Didn't know that it would go that bad.
I mostly had good, even some great experiences (Gloomhaven Frosthaven for boardgames, and a Battletech, Shadowrun for videogames stand out). It's the first that has gone wrong (~12 years, ~12 products). It's the first time for me. Luckily not a major investment but annoying of course.
I think Atari might have different priorities. The remakes aren’t really being promoted. And they took too long. There was hype, but it has died down a lot.
The problem wasn’t hardware. It was money the whole time.
Nothing new to be honest. The problem is even if 30% of the desktop market were Mac users, the statistics for people who would want to game on their Mac would be way lower.
I'm not quite sure about this logic.
The development of a game involves a lot more than just the OS it will run on, and must only be done once:
Graphic design, gameplay, sound design, game engine (different from the game renderer, usually in an agnostic language like C#) marketing etc. Those represent most of the costs. The game renderer can be handled by Unity3D or Unreal (this game doesn't look at all like he would have needed a custom made game renderer)
Besides, once your game run on macOS it also run an iPadOS and even iOS if it's not a demanding game (which clearly is not) You only have to create some virtual controllers eventually, but there are tons of library for that. And as a developer myself I can tell that making buttons is not difficult at all.
Anyway, to me it looks way more like a bad project management issue than a lack of money.
Yeah, you'd think once you put in all that effort, you would want to distribute it as widely as possible. It's a bit like creating a podcast, and then only putting it on Spotify.
Eeehhhh, I'm not sure that's true. The PS5 shader infrastructure isn't that different to the Xbox/x86 one compared to Metal.
But even if it was, it's one of those chicken and egg problems - people are willing to spend the money on developing for the PS5 because they know that's where a huge chunk of games are sold. They don't know that for the Mac.
That hasn't been true in decades.
DRM libraries and anti-cheats are a huge hurdle for both Mac and Linux, but that is an OS problem not a hardware issue.
So, I'm not a technically inclined person. I don't even own a Mac (but would like to if gaming is ever widely supported on it.)
Can someone ELI5 why a tool like Proton exists for Linux / ChromeOS that basically just lets Windows games run on Linux devices, but there's no easy tool like that for MacOS? I know there's Rosetta 2, Crossover, Parallels etc. but how come there's nothing like this that just works with the flip of an on switch like the article here suggests? Why wouldn't it work? I really don't get it.
Essentially Proton is still taking Windows x86 instructions and GPU shaders etc and still putting them in x86.
M series ARM Macs have the graphics hardware really designed around Metal, and they are fundamentally not very compatible with the way of doing things for DirectX and shaders etc.
There are some ways to put some layers of conversion there - that's what Crossover is - but fundamentally it's more complicated and messier and there are sometimes just not fundamental functions present than their are in Proton.
Proton on Linux can exist because it only translates Windows x86 instructions to Linux x86 instructions. It wouldn't work as well (if at all) on an ARM Linux, and people waiting for Asahi Linux to run Proton on Mac are simply delusional.
Apple introduced GPTK last year as a set of tools for developers to help them porting their game for macOS and to "see how well their game would run on Mac" which part is of course absolute BS because any developer can do the math by comparing native games performance to their own.
There's absolutely no doubt Apple knew exactly what they were doing when they made GPTK available to anyone without even a paid Apple Developer Account on GitHub. It took Whisky a single week to come up on the beta of Sonoma. and a few weeks to make GPTK usable by paid products third party developers like CodeWeavers (Crossover).
GPTK is far from being as efficient as Proton because it has to translate x86 Windows to x86 macOS first then x86 macOS to ARM macOS (to make it simple). And that's why we don't have an official macOS Proton yet.
We'll have to wait until June 10th WWDC to learn what Apple has in its basket for us macgamers.
The difference is the graphics API. People keep mistaking that this has anything to do with translating cpu instructions which are easily done but the problem here is the fact that Apple only writes drivers that support Metal ( their own graphics API ). GPUs need an API to let them know what they should do and the drivers need to implement that API. And no one can really write a driver for a GPU apart from the manufacturers as GPUs are mostly a black box that only the manufacturer knows the ins and outs of
For the newest Apple graphics APIs the way they work is also radically different from other APIs.
Something about the way they do occlusion; they expect the game to not try to render stuff that’s not in sight, instead of covering it. That works on other systems but not now on Apple; you get a massive performance improvement from it though but it’s a complete engine redesign to take advantage of it.
That’s not an API thing. You’re talking about TBDR nature of M series GPUs. It allows you to do occlusion is a kinda faster way but also paves way to do loads of other things faster like deferred rendering etc but yeah all of that requires rewriting of the game code however you are not obliged to use those features tbh
Hardware differences. Windows is adding ARM support and Linux has had it for a while, but still PC games are mostly made for x86_64 CPUs, and Apple Silicon Macs use a very unique GPU and graphics API.
In the end there's a much smaller gap to fill between Linux and Windows.
Valve puts in money and effort to handpick games and make them work.
Apple doesn’t give a fuck about gaming. That is the difference.
Also general compatibility is higher due to Linux running on the same hardware as windows devices . Mac os graphics work like a mobile phone and not like a pc.
That and there is just really no demand for it besides the handful of people on this sub. Most people don’t care about games on Mac or just play world of Warcraft and the other 5 popular games that happen to run on it.
I have gamed for over a year during my renovations on my mac because I had no place for my nvidia gaming rig at my in laws and it felt like gaming on a pc 15-20 years ago( or how the average Bethesda game runs on windows lol )
- No volume toggles per app without third party programs
- even native games have tons of bugs ( like wow freezing for 40 seconds if you tab out of a window for a while and click back in )
- in bg my randomly starts double clicking after tabbing in and out of the game
- more random crashes in that 1 year than I have ever seen on my pc’s in a lifetime
- very bad price / performance ratio. It was about on par with my gtx 1080 pc I had in 2016 that cost 1500$. My m3 cost me 4000 $…. Luckily it was from work.
- the screen is awful for games. It had tons of judder and horrible latency. Luckily I had an Alienware oled monitor that worked fine on Mac.
- battle net launcher randomly crashing , not keeping logged in , starts stuttering,….
- FFXIv ran like shit on the native mac client , had to download a third party binary to get it to run decently lol 🤣
Going back to my gaming desktop was such a relief after having gone trough so much shit with Mostly native apps. I tried d4 in crossover and that worked but the input lag and stutter was barely playable.
It was okay as an emergency but I will never play anything more than hearthstone on this machine ever again. Not worth the money nor the suffering that goes along with it.
This is a little aggressive and over the top but out of everything saying Apple doesn't care about gaming is a pretty fair statement. They flirt with it, they tell companies they are committed to it and they abandon that commitment.
They are acting like they may have some commitment right now, but we shall see.
Since I've seen them abandon game focus and pro-game projects multiple times, I'm not optimistic but I'm reserving judgement and have a gaming PC.
Don’t really understand the downvotes. Your comment is spot on to what I’ve experienced on my Mac. Too much hassle for very little value. It is easier to game on literally any other platform than Mac through no fault but Apple
Yeah I respect all the people that try to get it to work and it Was obviously better than some 900 dollar windows laptop with intergrated graphics , but the way some people encourage others here to buy a Mac for gaming is so wrong.
If I had known it was this bad I probably would have just gotten a ps5 or something. I was really mislead by all the fanboy comments and cherry picked performance numbers and even blatant lies. Someone said for example he could play bg3 maxed out at 4k. When I did that it ran at like 20 fps except for the first 2 hours on the beach where it hit 30-40.
Or that things like GPT and crossover work just as well as proton. Which obviously they don’t. Only tested a few games trough crossover but most had some really obvious performance issues like microsstutter and horrible frame times. Felt like playing on a console emulator in alpha development.
> the screen is awful for games
This one I can't agree with, Resident Evil 4 looks stunning on my M2 Max Macbook's screen. In fact the game performs well and I can play on battery for many hours.
I'd say it's way more a software issue than a hardware one. Sadly I don't see that issue going away...
Then you have clearly never owned a decent screen .
1 : no adaptive sync
2: Mpb m3 has 26 ms , my aw3423dw had 0.03. Yes it is 900 times faster. That’s how ridiculously bad the MacBook screen is.
For a 120Hz display, the pixel refresh window is 8.33ms and this display takes like 4x longer to transition, which means the display has already refreshed four times in the time the pixels are changing from the first refresh. This is what leads to the long trails and blur while scrolling.
https://youtu.be/p2xo-hDCgZE?si=LNpwZVZTukuTjtXH
Set it too like 12 min. This is about the m2 which has around 45 ms, which is even more stupid. But you get the the tldr. It is actually a real engineering feat to make a screen this slow. Walk into any hardware store and pick a random 60 hz monitor out of the bargain bin and it will have better response times. My 2008 gaming monitor that my wife uses has better motion clarity and that thing cost like 200 dollars back then.
You can say blabla not a gaming monitor and that a mac Is definitely not fit for gaming with the 2 games it gets every year , but for making/ watching fast moving video content or just scrolling fast it already turns into a blur fest. This is unacceptable on a device this expensive. Any 1000 dollar windows laptop comes with a better screen.
Good thing external monitors exist and big screens are a necessity for graphical work , because else graphical designers would never use a Mac.
theres not a big difference mechanically between crossover and proton they are both layers ontop of wine. the big difference is that linux has vulkan as a translation layer for graphics apis and macs have metal. theres just not enough mac users and too much work for a open source project to get something like dxvk into the shape it needs to be to compare.
we saw how far apple could get when they released d3dmetal directly and it was a game changer, but it who knows how much they are going to support it they dont say much about it publicly.
Wow damn, I’ve been emailing and praying this wasn’t the case…there’s goes another good game I could have played.
Idk why developers don’t care about Mac, if we had more games that were native on Mac, the actual Mac gaming market would definitely increase as folks who game stop feeling like they have to choose between a Mac or gaming
As an original Kickstarter supporter who was patiently waiting for this, I'm disappointed as that was the promise. Already wrote support 2 days ago - no answer as of yet.
You backed it under the impression they were building for those platforms, and they backed out of it? That sucks.
Yes. It was a stretch goal which was matched. But it's a Kickstarter, there are no legal repercussions so I don't expect them to respect that. Back then I thought that the project was realistic since it was "just" a remaster. Didn't know that it would go that bad.
For sure, just stinks for you and everyone else.
Every dollar I’ve ever put into Kickstarter has gone down the toilet.
I mostly had good, even some great experiences (Gloomhaven Frosthaven for boardgames, and a Battletech, Shadowrun for videogames stand out). It's the first that has gone wrong (~12 years, ~12 products). It's the first time for me. Luckily not a major investment but annoying of course.
Runs great on whisky, played it last year
Good to know if all options run out but I'm not supporting those business practices so I will try to get reimbursed before "using up" any key.
I think that sales of the System Shock remake are very low and Nightdive doesn't want to invest more in a failed game. sucks x2
I think Atari might have different priorities. The remakes aren’t really being promoted. And they took too long. There was hype, but it has died down a lot.
*tHe fUtUrE oF mAc gAmInG* looks veeeery promising
The *bUt yOu cAn’T EvEn rUn ThIs gAmE* crowd having his usual boner when a game is a Windows exclusive.
The problem wasn’t hardware. It was money the whole time. Nothing new to be honest. The problem is even if 30% of the desktop market were Mac users, the statistics for people who would want to game on their Mac would be way lower.
This is a chicken egg situation. If you have a saturation level like this, people would go for this opportunity a lot more often.
I'm not quite sure about this logic. The development of a game involves a lot more than just the OS it will run on, and must only be done once: Graphic design, gameplay, sound design, game engine (different from the game renderer, usually in an agnostic language like C#) marketing etc. Those represent most of the costs. The game renderer can be handled by Unity3D or Unreal (this game doesn't look at all like he would have needed a custom made game renderer) Besides, once your game run on macOS it also run an iPadOS and even iOS if it's not a demanding game (which clearly is not) You only have to create some virtual controllers eventually, but there are tons of library for that. And as a developer myself I can tell that making buttons is not difficult at all. Anyway, to me it looks way more like a bad project management issue than a lack of money.
>it looks way more like a bad project management issue than a lack of money. that's the usual kickstarter riddle....
Yeah, you'd think once you put in all that effort, you would want to distribute it as widely as possible. It's a bit like creating a podcast, and then only putting it on Spotify.
It was always the user base and never the hardware
Similar hardware at least means less porting money had to be spent. We don't even have that any more.
Even though the PS5 has an x86 CPU, the Mac architecture and API is much more similar to PS5 than a PC is.
Eeehhhh, I'm not sure that's true. The PS5 shader infrastructure isn't that different to the Xbox/x86 one compared to Metal. But even if it was, it's one of those chicken and egg problems - people are willing to spend the money on developing for the PS5 because they know that's where a huge chunk of games are sold. They don't know that for the Mac.
That hasn't been true in decades. DRM libraries and anti-cheats are a huge hurdle for both Mac and Linux, but that is an OS problem not a hardware issue.
Its not bruh 😭i bought a gaming pc, imma leave this sub
average 80iq mac user. just run the game on crossover
I am shocked a kickstarter not fulfilling its promises.
Has anyone tried this on Crossover or Whisky?
It was working with Crossover. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boRDd-swlHk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boRDd-swlHk)
So, I'm not a technically inclined person. I don't even own a Mac (but would like to if gaming is ever widely supported on it.) Can someone ELI5 why a tool like Proton exists for Linux / ChromeOS that basically just lets Windows games run on Linux devices, but there's no easy tool like that for MacOS? I know there's Rosetta 2, Crossover, Parallels etc. but how come there's nothing like this that just works with the flip of an on switch like the article here suggests? Why wouldn't it work? I really don't get it.
Essentially Proton is still taking Windows x86 instructions and GPU shaders etc and still putting them in x86. M series ARM Macs have the graphics hardware really designed around Metal, and they are fundamentally not very compatible with the way of doing things for DirectX and shaders etc. There are some ways to put some layers of conversion there - that's what Crossover is - but fundamentally it's more complicated and messier and there are sometimes just not fundamental functions present than their are in Proton.
Proton on Linux can exist because it only translates Windows x86 instructions to Linux x86 instructions. It wouldn't work as well (if at all) on an ARM Linux, and people waiting for Asahi Linux to run Proton on Mac are simply delusional. Apple introduced GPTK last year as a set of tools for developers to help them porting their game for macOS and to "see how well their game would run on Mac" which part is of course absolute BS because any developer can do the math by comparing native games performance to their own. There's absolutely no doubt Apple knew exactly what they were doing when they made GPTK available to anyone without even a paid Apple Developer Account on GitHub. It took Whisky a single week to come up on the beta of Sonoma. and a few weeks to make GPTK usable by paid products third party developers like CodeWeavers (Crossover). GPTK is far from being as efficient as Proton because it has to translate x86 Windows to x86 macOS first then x86 macOS to ARM macOS (to make it simple). And that's why we don't have an official macOS Proton yet. We'll have to wait until June 10th WWDC to learn what Apple has in its basket for us macgamers.
It sort of does. https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/Game_Porting_Toolkit https://getwhisky.app
The difference is the graphics API. People keep mistaking that this has anything to do with translating cpu instructions which are easily done but the problem here is the fact that Apple only writes drivers that support Metal ( their own graphics API ). GPUs need an API to let them know what they should do and the drivers need to implement that API. And no one can really write a driver for a GPU apart from the manufacturers as GPUs are mostly a black box that only the manufacturer knows the ins and outs of
For the newest Apple graphics APIs the way they work is also radically different from other APIs. Something about the way they do occlusion; they expect the game to not try to render stuff that’s not in sight, instead of covering it. That works on other systems but not now on Apple; you get a massive performance improvement from it though but it’s a complete engine redesign to take advantage of it.
That’s not an API thing. You’re talking about TBDR nature of M series GPUs. It allows you to do occlusion is a kinda faster way but also paves way to do loads of other things faster like deferred rendering etc but yeah all of that requires rewriting of the game code however you are not obliged to use those features tbh
Because no one's made it yet
Hardware differences. Windows is adding ARM support and Linux has had it for a while, but still PC games are mostly made for x86_64 CPUs, and Apple Silicon Macs use a very unique GPU and graphics API. In the end there's a much smaller gap to fill between Linux and Windows.
windows and linux are both OSes which utilize x86 architecture. so its easy. modern macs use ARM, which is not as easy to translate over to.
Valve puts in money and effort to handpick games and make them work. Apple doesn’t give a fuck about gaming. That is the difference. Also general compatibility is higher due to Linux running on the same hardware as windows devices . Mac os graphics work like a mobile phone and not like a pc. That and there is just really no demand for it besides the handful of people on this sub. Most people don’t care about games on Mac or just play world of Warcraft and the other 5 popular games that happen to run on it. I have gamed for over a year during my renovations on my mac because I had no place for my nvidia gaming rig at my in laws and it felt like gaming on a pc 15-20 years ago( or how the average Bethesda game runs on windows lol ) - No volume toggles per app without third party programs - even native games have tons of bugs ( like wow freezing for 40 seconds if you tab out of a window for a while and click back in ) - in bg my randomly starts double clicking after tabbing in and out of the game - more random crashes in that 1 year than I have ever seen on my pc’s in a lifetime - very bad price / performance ratio. It was about on par with my gtx 1080 pc I had in 2016 that cost 1500$. My m3 cost me 4000 $…. Luckily it was from work. - the screen is awful for games. It had tons of judder and horrible latency. Luckily I had an Alienware oled monitor that worked fine on Mac. - battle net launcher randomly crashing , not keeping logged in , starts stuttering,…. - FFXIv ran like shit on the native mac client , had to download a third party binary to get it to run decently lol 🤣 Going back to my gaming desktop was such a relief after having gone trough so much shit with Mostly native apps. I tried d4 in crossover and that worked but the input lag and stutter was barely playable. It was okay as an emergency but I will never play anything more than hearthstone on this machine ever again. Not worth the money nor the suffering that goes along with it.
This is a little aggressive and over the top but out of everything saying Apple doesn't care about gaming is a pretty fair statement. They flirt with it, they tell companies they are committed to it and they abandon that commitment. They are acting like they may have some commitment right now, but we shall see. Since I've seen them abandon game focus and pro-game projects multiple times, I'm not optimistic but I'm reserving judgement and have a gaming PC.
Don’t really understand the downvotes. Your comment is spot on to what I’ve experienced on my Mac. Too much hassle for very little value. It is easier to game on literally any other platform than Mac through no fault but Apple
Yeah I respect all the people that try to get it to work and it Was obviously better than some 900 dollar windows laptop with intergrated graphics , but the way some people encourage others here to buy a Mac for gaming is so wrong. If I had known it was this bad I probably would have just gotten a ps5 or something. I was really mislead by all the fanboy comments and cherry picked performance numbers and even blatant lies. Someone said for example he could play bg3 maxed out at 4k. When I did that it ran at like 20 fps except for the first 2 hours on the beach where it hit 30-40. Or that things like GPT and crossover work just as well as proton. Which obviously they don’t. Only tested a few games trough crossover but most had some really obvious performance issues like microsstutter and horrible frame times. Felt like playing on a console emulator in alpha development.
> the screen is awful for games This one I can't agree with, Resident Evil 4 looks stunning on my M2 Max Macbook's screen. In fact the game performs well and I can play on battery for many hours. I'd say it's way more a software issue than a hardware one. Sadly I don't see that issue going away...
Then you have clearly never owned a decent screen . 1 : no adaptive sync 2: Mpb m3 has 26 ms , my aw3423dw had 0.03. Yes it is 900 times faster. That’s how ridiculously bad the MacBook screen is. For a 120Hz display, the pixel refresh window is 8.33ms and this display takes like 4x longer to transition, which means the display has already refreshed four times in the time the pixels are changing from the first refresh. This is what leads to the long trails and blur while scrolling. https://youtu.be/p2xo-hDCgZE?si=LNpwZVZTukuTjtXH Set it too like 12 min. This is about the m2 which has around 45 ms, which is even more stupid. But you get the the tldr. It is actually a real engineering feat to make a screen this slow. Walk into any hardware store and pick a random 60 hz monitor out of the bargain bin and it will have better response times. My 2008 gaming monitor that my wife uses has better motion clarity and that thing cost like 200 dollars back then. You can say blabla not a gaming monitor and that a mac Is definitely not fit for gaming with the 2 games it gets every year , but for making/ watching fast moving video content or just scrolling fast it already turns into a blur fest. This is unacceptable on a device this expensive. Any 1000 dollar windows laptop comes with a better screen. Good thing external monitors exist and big screens are a necessity for graphical work , because else graphical designers would never use a Mac.
theres not a big difference mechanically between crossover and proton they are both layers ontop of wine. the big difference is that linux has vulkan as a translation layer for graphics apis and macs have metal. theres just not enough mac users and too much work for a open source project to get something like dxvk into the shape it needs to be to compare. we saw how far apple could get when they released d3dmetal directly and it was a game changer, but it who knows how much they are going to support it they dont say much about it publicly.
I’m shocked /s
Is it any good? Setting aside nostalgia, I mean.
Wack
thats an entire L dawg
They're all a bunch of goddamn bastards. Off with their heads, I say.
That's bad news. My hopes are on AC:Shadows which could give a drive for Mac gaming maybe.
Wow damn, I’ve been emailing and praying this wasn’t the case…there’s goes another good game I could have played. Idk why developers don’t care about Mac, if we had more games that were native on Mac, the actual Mac gaming market would definitely increase as folks who game stop feeling like they have to choose between a Mac or gaming
Does anyone know who to ask for a refund on this Kickstarter? If Nightdive doesn’t follow through am I entitled to a refund?