217
Baldur's Gate 3 Now Available on Mac
(www.macrumors.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
217 points (97.0% liked)
Apple
17435 readers
122 users here now
Welcome
to the largest Apple community on Lemmy. This is the place where we talk about everything Apple, from iOS to the exciting upcoming Apple Vision Pro. Feel free to join the discussion!
Rules:
- No NSFW Content
- No Hate Speech or Personal Attacks
- No Ads / Spamming
Self promotion is only allowed in the pinned monthly thread
Communities of Interest:
Apple Hardware
Apple TV
Apple Watch
iPad
iPhone
Mac
Vintage Apple
Apple Software
iOS
iPadOS
macOS
tvOS
watchOS
Shortcuts
Xcode
Community banner courtesy of u/Antsomnia.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It is mind boggling that Valve won’t bother recompiling Source games for Mac. I guess they figure it isn’t worth it?
It's mind boggling that Apple would drop 32bit support. Adding 64 bit support can be a lot of effort, especially on older code bases, and there's a whole bunch of games that'll never receive updates again. You could've had arm32 support, with the ability to run any x86 games.
It’s bad on both sides. Apple broke userspace but Valve could almost certainly compile for modern Apple systems without too much effort.
I can see how you might come to that conclusion, but porting to 64bit is way more involved than it may seem. x86-64 is different enough to x86 that you're basically porting to a new architecture: all your assembly will break just like it would porting to arm. On top of that all your sizes have changed and caused all sorts of bugs, for instance:
longis 4 bytes under 32 bit on all platforms, but it's 8 bytes on macOS & Linux and 4 bytes on Windows under 64 bit.But they’ve done it before… Other Source engine games, like Counter Strike Global Offensive, have been recompiled to run on modern macs. I understand it takes some effort but it’s still dumb.
Yes, but it's highly unlikely they can reuse that effort. TF2 uses an older version of source, so you either end up having to update everything to a newer version or redo all the effort you've already put in to porting source, but for an older version. Now multiply that by the number of source games.
Valve is worth billions of dollars. TF2 almost certainly generates enough income to justify the resources needed to recompile the game. Again, I totally understand that it requires effort but it’s still dumb.
Oh I'm sure they can justify spending the time porting the game. I just can't blame them for not doing so when Apple's policy is to not give a shit.
Thank you for this perspective. It brings my irritation levels down a …. Bit
At this point they're seemingly all in on Linux. If it ever reaches a point where <50% of users are on Windows, I imagine they wouldn't even bother with Windows releases anymore