Quote: Original post by ChaosEngine
IMHO, the real news here is not that Valve's Source-powered games will be available on Mac, but that Steam as a platform is. This gives all kinds of people an easy marketplace on Osx.

It was probably only a matter of time before Apple decided to try their hand at a Mac App Store through iTunes. This way, Valve gets to maintain their "I was here first" advantage that has helped them push everyone else out of the Windows downloadable game market.

There are a few other Mac downloadable game stores (some even with Steam-esque community features and a dedicated application), but I definitely can't remember their names right now, which probably says it all.

Quote: Original post by Kwizatz
as I understand it, the gold engine (HL1) does optionally run using an OpenGL renderer,

Well, the HL engine was a heavily modified Quake engine game (with some Quake2 networking stuff bolted on to start with as I recall); back then while it had a OpenGL, software and D3D renderer you'd be mad to use anything BUT the OpenGL renderer (assuming you had the hardware.. <3 TNT2) as the D3D side of things was a mess and OpenGL ruled the roost... oh how times of changed...

Quote:
The server already runs on Linux, and there are Xbox versions, so I'd think a lot of the code is already cross platform.

Well, server code wouldn't touch graphics drawing, so it would be pretty hard to make that platform dependant. The XBox however is very close to D3D9 so it was probably very little work to get the game up and running on that.

What probably happened is they have brought their old OpenGL path up to spec; so D3D9 era added in, maybe some D3D10 level stuff as well with GL3.x

I wouldn't count on seeing GL4.x on OSX for a while; all the systems Apple currently sell, including the new MacBook Pros only have DX10 level hardware in them and OpenGL4.x, by virtue of including the various tessellation shaders into the core, require DX11 level hardware. If they DO say 'we have OpenGL4.0' then I'd stay FAR FAR away from anything which wasn't already on the DX10 hardware as it'll be done in software... and well, software tessellation isn't going to end well... <_<

Other than all that however, while not being a mac user myself, the fact the Store is going up over there is certainly the best bit of this announcement from a game producers point of view.

Now, who want to port my crazy multi-threaded D3D11 based rendering system to OSX's OpenGL backend? *chuckles*

Quote: Original post by phantom
I wouldn't count on seeing GL4.x on OSX for a while; all the systems Apple currently sell, including the new MacBook Pros only have DX10 level hardware in them and OpenGL4.x, by virtue of including the various tessellation shaders into the core, require DX11 level hardware.

The hardware isn't even the biggest problem. For all Apple's hyping its OpenGL support, it actually has pretty dated drivers. I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro5,5 (bought December 2009) and its OpenGL version is 2.1 - not 3.0, not 3.1, not 3.2. It could be a while before we see GL4.x support in OS X.

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi
The hardware isn't even the biggest problem. For all Apple's hyping its OpenGL support, it actually has pretty dated drivers. I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro5,5 (bought December 2009) and its OpenGL version is 2.1 - not 3.0, not 3.1, not 3.2. It could be a while before we see GL4.x support in OS X.

most likely not earlier than in the successor of snow leopard. and i guess that's still far off.