Care to quote someone else sharing your opinion on their work? This should be easy, since Feral is apparently "known" for its crappy ports.
Sure, it's usually discussed after sessions at Siggraph, GDC, GTC and the like. Last time it came up and I was there was after the GTC E32776 session when someone asked what the partnership with Nvidia for the game AI meant for multi platform titles.
"Titles that don't look good"? What about RoTR, Shadow of Mordor or Alien Isolation? These were quite good looking when they were released.
Not really.
Anyhow, given that no other house ports AAA games to the Mac, I'm not sure what your reference is.
There have been other companies porting games and even to date some companies hire teams to do in-house porting. And why exactly is it that we need a reference to compare to? This could be done by metrics, QA and other ways without having a reference.
If you don't care about honesty, they you should stop speaking from authority here. No one here can contradict you about game development except Leman (and he just did).
Either you have a bunch of typos in there or maybe read again what I said? I don't care about what flat-earthers are trying to tell me either. Leman didn't contradict anything, he stated his opinion when the gaming world clearly does things differently, even if that doesn't fit the hope of Mac gaming fans. It's very easy to proof someone wrong, bring it up at the usual conferences, forward it to game developers which will in turn communicate it to everyone working for and with them.
So first you keep saying that it’s not cheap or profitable for devs including yourself to port AAA PC games to an additional platform like Mac and that’s why there is no interest among the devs and nobody even mentions Mac at dev conferences and among the people you know but now it’s cheaper and profitable if devs build their PC games with additional platforms like Mac in mind from the start?
Try not to put things out of perspective, people talk about Macs at conferences all the time, they also talk about games on Raspberry Pies and even Arduinos. From a pure technical point of view. No one is however seriously talking about real development effort that is costly to begin with. Porting can be cheap or very expensive depending on how it's done and to what degree people go.
Why don’t all those devs saying it’s not worth it just build their games with the Mac in mind from the start then to make it profitable like the popular AAA franchises I mentioned?
They don't build their games with Mac in mind. They build their engines with multiplatform in mind with no specific optimization for any platform.
You and other devs here have also said several times that porting even simple Unity games to Mac is not just like flipping a switch. It takes lots of debugging, optimizing and customer support and it’s not worth it. Now it’s suddenly a matter of flipping a switch when it comes to AAA franchises like Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and Metro?
That depends on features used in the engine. How much it costs depends on featureset and how much QA studios actually do (see XCOM port). Flipping a switch in this context means rather cheap. Nothing is ever free.
nd those games have simple engines and graphics? Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Deus Ex MKD and Metro Exodus? Really?
Really! I'm going to pick just one. How exactly does Tomb Raider look so good? The one thing that looks good is wet surface/skin. The rest is rather meh, look at the dry skin or surfaces, look at hair and hair physics. Trees, bushes, etc. that all looks rather bad. What we get with Tomb Raider is what we get with many games, using psychology. Draw attention to one thing that looks good and away from anything that doesn't look good. That's not really new and done all the time, people went nuts when God of War 3 came out and said how good it looks. They only thing that looked really good was lighting with different colors and the powerup orbs flying around illuminating everything. The rest was rather poor. We've seen similar tricks used in games like Uncharted because the PS3 was very difficult to program for and had severe shortcomings for specific features. But it's not even exclusive to games, it's used in movies all the time as well, Spielberg, JJ.Abrams, etc.
The devs must have made the decision for the first engine after careful consideration meaning they found the Mac’s small user base still profitable despite the huge costs of porting the engine and the AAA games.
No, as said above, they didn't make the decision for the Mac, but for multiplatform without any specific optimization.
That was when they were developing Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Which was developed for DX11 first and then DX12 features were added later, not just for RTX.
In fact in an
interview with Capcom’s lead programmer Tomofumi Ishida he
explained how they had to build a brand new engine since MTFW was not useful anymore for Resident Evil 7.
You're sure trying to read a lot into things when there's nothing to read into. RE is new just the way Windows 11 is new, macOS Venture is new and UE5 is new and... in other words, it's not new, but still based on the same old engines with changed, abandoned and new features. Heck, you can run both engines side by side and see they're still doing the exact same thing for some things. Just like with Windows 10 vs 11, UE4 vs UE5, Monterey vs Venture and so on.
Are these awards for Ferals ports or for the games in general, because I am not sure how Feral would have any bearing on the awards given out. Do they collaborate with the IP owners and make changes to the games in a material way?
Awards are just that, awards. What they actually mean is usually not understood by people who never received some or are not involved in the industry. I've won my share of awards, including Apple and can say "design" doesn't always mean what the name suggests. Then you have the issue of nomination, sometimes you have to pick the lesser of the evils when only bad stuff is nominated. Then you might have financial interest in awards... I've won awards for work I've not been proud off, ashamed even. Yet it won an award because I knew people in the commitee and they wanted to work with me, so they tried to do me a favour. Same for political reasons. We've seen academy awards handing out awards to afro americans or female artist not because of performance, but as a statement for BLM, MeToo or similar social movements.
So what does an award for Texturing actually mean? That someone sat down with Photoshop and made some nice textures. Doesn't say anything about the game. One could take a photo and use it as a texture... there's the award for most photorealistic texture.
What does an award in Game Design actually mean? Could be level design alone? Could it be the setting (in Earth, moon, etc.)? These awards need to be understood to interpret correctly.
Besides were there any other titles in these categories? These awards sounds like "just for showing up" type awards.
Most awards are like that.
I don’t know whether to blame Feral or Firaxis but XCOM2 ran terribly in my experience. Also there was a graphical bug after some update where Playstation buttons would show in menus.
You must be mistaken, we've been told they're doing a great job with this. So something like this, which is a QA issue, surely can't happen.
But yes, I played XCOM on the Mac... for a while.
That’s beside the fact that XCOM2 is just a bad game in general.
Well, subjective, but it's not as good as the original games in my opinion.
JordanNZ's pic is a compressed jpeg while the other one is a png. How do you think lossy compression works? Lol
Lossy compression surely doesn't introduce jaggies... it's introducing blocks at well defined size in this case 8x8 during the DCT and quantization stages. And while one can create jaggies from blocks, one can't always create blocks from jaggies.
Moral of the story, this has become like talking to flat-earthers. Fans will always believe the next big thing is around the corner when there isn't much. And if it's so great, we'd all enjoy those Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard, Rockstar and other games on our Macs. And yet the crickets are chirping. In the meantime, I'll fire up and old Mac and replay Star Trek Judgement Rites which is something I've been wanting to do since the 90s. So I guess that's my share of AAA gaming I'll get for now.
EDIT: I've been busy with a really small part of a project the past two weeks, involving Apple hardware. That's going to spark a new thread come winter (or maybe spring, depending on progress which is out of my hands). So we can have the same discussion all over again after the keynote.
