this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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https://www.dexerto.com/tech/how-to-use-apple-game-porting-toolkit-2175563/
I’ve been tracking this, and I’m hopeful… that said, I think unless Blizzard actually gets officially involved, the M1 Max I have probably isn’t going to cut virtualising (more or less) D4 in a meaningful way. I say this with zero experience actually trying.
This isn't the before-times anymore, everything is compiled and should be portable across architectures.
They should also be using moderately stable graphics apis like vulkan or opengl, though you can use wine derived libs to deal with direct3d.
The os is pretty different, but again, high quality shops don't write to the os, they have their own abstraction stack just in case they have to deal with variants like with game consoles.
Tl;dr - if blizzard can support games on ps5 they can support Mac just as well.
It’s a good point, but even with abstraction, don’t you think there’s a certain amount of effort to hit “generic performance parameter” on any given OS? The Mac native version of Battle.net is a .app package, and I’m assuming they did that for speed/stability considerations for Hearthstone/WoW/HotS.
Like with PS5 in your example, clearly their product manager was able to argue that allocating $X IR&D to supporting PS5 would result in a solid NPV/ROI, and were unable to create a similar substantiating argument for MacOS. My gut tells me there’s like 3+ man-months of “official” effort and Activision/Blizzard said nah.
Yes, you're absolutely right.
But also, software "discipline" has improved over the years, surprised the hell out of me actually, but writing abstracted code means they should have a near path to bringing it up on different platforms, maybe not at launch, but a quarter or so later I don't see a real issue.
I'm saying it should be a stretch goal for some sprint somewhere and once the game is launched they should go back and revisit.
It isn't an industry run by stereotypical unbathed neckbeards anymore, now there's professional managers and armies of tweens to do their bidding.
I miss the old days.