Steve Troughton-Smith has a great article detailing the increasing performance and capabilities of Transgaming’s Cider game translation engine. Particularly interesting are the results of a comparison between Aspyr’s native Doom 3 port and the Windows version running via Cider— a near-tie:
Doom 3 (id tech 4) is one of the most graphically demanding engines that Aspyr (arguably the premier native Mac porting house) has ported to the Mac. That the Windows version of the game, using the Cider portability engine, is able to run just as smooth is certainly a sign.
However, I have to say that I’m not happy with the conclusion he makes:
I believe that there’s not much future for native Mac gaming, and Cider is the future. Cider games are performant, and can be released on the same day (in same box) as the Windows versions. … Long live native Mac gaming. You won’t be missed :-)
I will be very sad if the capabilities of Mac games in the future are purely dictated by the services made available by Microsoft for their own platform. I’m thinking here of things like Black & White integrating with the local Address Book to pull out names of your contacts for use in the game, and the QuickTime-based video recording capabilities of World of Warcraft.
I’m a Mac user dammit, and I like my platform— I don’t want to buy cast-offs written to a largely-incompatible set of APIs, I want software which makes use of the facilities of my chosen operating system and hardware, and is tailored to it.
And most importantly— I don’t want to be marginalized as a consumer. If you want to sell me your game, make some fucking effort and learn about my system. This wasn’t so hard back in the 80’s and 90’s when most games were released for a variety of different systems by much smaller development houses. Now that they’re being produced by massive companies with turnovers larger some some countries’ GDP, we’re supposed to believe it’s infeasible to target more than one operating system? Get fucking real.
