I saw Daniel Stahl say in TTS the other day that he had just received word that a Mac client was indeed being given the green light. I haven't heard it officially stated anywhere outside of TTS, however.
Perhaps he will see this thread and post about whether or not that's still a thing or not.
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You can try installing Wine for OSX (link: http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX). You should be able to play STO with it. (I have no idea how good Wine for OSX is. Maybe someone else has more experience with it?).
The Mac userbase is probably small, 10-15% of personal computer gamers.
However, not having Mac support keeps PC users from playing because they will prefer games they can play with their friends.
Hence, games with a Mac client remove one of the potential caps on their number of Windows users.
By how much may vary but I don't know any game has topped a million players without a Mac client so I think there's a point where it makes sense and am guessing PWE marketing has primary or secondary research backing this up now, hence why Cryptic is now prioritizing it... And it probably helps having more games that could be ported.
The two big hurdles as I understand it are Direct X and that the patcher uses Internet Explorer, which is probably an artifact from when Cryptic was partnered with Microsoft. (I always wondered if that's how Stahl wound up at Cryptic because it would have aligned with when he came over and he was a Microsoft employee prior to working at Cryptic.)
(I also wondered whether Stahl knew the Neverwinter folks because he worked for WotC, which is a Hasbro company. I know Van Citters -- the CBS rep for Star Trek -- used to work for Jesse Heinig at Decipher and always wondered if he put Heinig in touch with Cryptic. These things tend to be incestuous.)
I think that the guys from Cryptic are makin' a huge mistake... nowadays every user counts. They can work around the problem with Direct X and I.E "need". But as @stoleviathan99 said, they might not have been interested at all, because of some "partnerships". We will have to wait to see.
By how much may vary but I don't know any game has topped a million players without a Mac client so I think there's a point where it makes sense and am guessing PWE marketing has primary or secondary research backing this up now, hence why Cryptic is now prioritizing it... And it probably helps having more games that could be ported.
SWTOR, for one.
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
The use of an Internet Explorer wrapper for the launcher is a none issue, they could use any other browser, or package a lightweight HTML renderer into a standalone launcher.
The biggest work will likely be recoding the game to use OpenGL/OpenCL APIs where they currently use DirectX.
Interestingly, the only PWE game I can see that has a Mac OS X client is Torchlight, developed by Runic Games.
For Mac users wanting to play STO, until a dedicated client is made bootcamping Windows is simple and works great. You have to reboot into Windows, but it doesn't suffer the bottlenecks and limitations of virtualising Windows within OS X using Parallels/VMware.
To the OP: there's an unofficial wineskin available elsewhere on the forums that will get STO running in OS X with relative ease. Here's the thread.
I used it myself for a while - it does what it says on the tin, with some drawbacks. Tends to be unstable if your graphics settings are set too high, especially loading into large hubs like ESD or Qo'nos. It'll also run slower than it should regardless of those settings. But it works. And for all I know doh123 could've fixed those issues by now, or the Wine libraries have improved in the last year or two. Your mileage may vary.
But I'd seriously recommend putting together a proper Boot Camp partition (better yet: a secondary drive just for that purpose if you're on a Mac Pro) if you plan on logging any serious time into STO on a Mac, or any other games for that matter. Even the games with proper honest-to-god not-Cider Mac ports tend to run slightly better in Windows due to not being hamstrung by Apple's outdated drivers, or the Direct X vs. OpenGL thing, depending on the exact game and your hardware.
Chances are that even if Cryptic gets their STO Mac client running this year it still might not run much better than the unofficial wineskin, depending on how it's being ported. That's not a jab at Cryptic; even billion dollar megacorps like EA use Cider for Mac ports on occasion and the results are often pretty terrible. Anyone else play the Mac port of Spore? Holy balls. Inversely, I think CCP used Cider for EVE Online, and it's absolutely rock solid, with no detectable drop in performance between the Mac and PC versions.
The TL;DR: The linked wineskin works alright in a pinch. Boot Camp is better if you can swing it.
I saw Daniel Stahl say in TTS the other day that he had just received word that a Mac client was indeed being given the green light. I haven't heard it officially stated anywhere outside of TTS, however.
Perhaps he will see this thread and post about whether or not that's still a thing or not.
Yeah, I get the impression up until now it's been one of those 'if a dev feels like working on their lunch hour' projects. Hopefully that will change shortly.
That said if you poke around the forums for the unofficial Mac version it works well enough for now.
The use of an Internet Explorer wrapper for the launcher is a none issue, they could use any other browser, or package a lightweight HTML renderer into a standalone launcher.
Actually, on this point, I'm not sure that's true. They're reliant on features of IE not present in other browsers. It may have been designed to keep them bound to Windows specifically. The smart thing would probably be to NOT use an existing browser at all. But I think they got tied up with IE when they were getting Microsoft money.
The biggest work will likely be recoding the game to use OpenGL/OpenCL APIs where they currently use DirectX.
This is what I'm not sure that they'll do. I think it probably will be a Cider wrapper. Perhaps professionally prepared. Maybe with an outside partner and a big launch party, following the trend of Steam/Raptr/etc. I think Cryptic likes to have some kind of launch party like this every 6 months or so to get new people in. I'd count LoR as one. I could see the next one being sometime after Halloween and maybe closer to Christmas.
Before this is over, we may yet have an XBOX launch party.
You can try installing Wine for OSX (link: http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX). You should be able to play STO with it. (I have no idea how good Wine for OSX is. Maybe someone else has more experience with it?).
Good luck with Wine. It's a nightmare trying to get it to work in Linux. Even if you do get your app to work, there will still be compatibility issues that will pop-up and when your app updates you'll see more issues. I don't recommend Wine.
You're better off duel booting with Windows on a Mac to have the full 100% operating system running without any translation or emulation in the background.
If you try virtualization you won't have the best video capabilities because hypervisors usually emulate a lesser-capable video card that does not have DirectX abilities.
If they get STO working on MacOS, that could lead to having it run on BSD or even Linux AND FINALLY DROP WINDOWS!
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I tweeted the STO team about this and was told that this is something they would like to happen this year. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I've got the Wineskin version running but it's far from smooth - and that's on a retina MacBook Pro - specs don't get much higher.
In the meantime I'll just have to keep dusting off the old Sony Vaio whenever I want to take the Captain's chair!
Bootcamp is a great way to have a Mac and your STO fix at the same time, but it would be nice to have that dedicated Mac client.
When i saw the Q&A back in January I was very happy, the only issue I have with the way I do it now is the time spent booting in and out of Windows just to play STO, it makes it so its not worth it for anything but a marathon session. I live in the Mac environment and would prefer to keep my machine booted in OSX, I hope they get the client worked out.
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My impression is that the current numbers are considerably less.
Your impression is only correct if you are counting the number of subscribers. Since F2P, the computation of the number of players is a lot squishier, but it is well north of a million.
You also overestimate the number of Mac gamers, and your idea that PC gamers avoid games because their Mac-owning friends can't play them is sketchy at best. All the Mac gamers I know have dual boot anyway.
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
Your impression is only correct if you are counting the number of subscribers. Since F2P, the computation of the number of players is a lot squishier, but it is well north of a million.
You also overestimate the number of Mac gamers, and your idea that PC gamers avoid games because their Mac-owning friends can't play them is sketchy at best. All the Mac gamers I know have dual boot anyway.
Pretty correct here, mac owner myself and I only boot into windows to game. If I could stay in OSX to do that I gladly would. When GW2 released their Mac Client Beta I was quiet happy. When word of a STO client being developed reached my ears I was also happy. Though the game runs perfectly well in Boot camp also, pretty much anything does honestly.
Not everybody wants to do a Boot Camp install. Some don't have the disk space. Some don't want to buy a whole Windows license to play one (otherwise free) game. Using FileVault 2 whole disk encryption also precludes the option to use Boot Camp. For those of us carrying around sensitive information on our laptops, that feature is not optional.
People also use their platform of choice for their own reasons. They aren't likely to switch their main computer for one (again, otherwise free game). Nor will most people want to have a separate machine just for that. I have a PC dedicated to STO, but I'm a fringe case in the amount of techno clutter I'm willing to tolerate in my home.
Regardless of the existing "solutions", they all represent a barrier that could prevent an otherwise willing player from playing the game. Though Mac market share globally is something like 7% (impoverished third world countries don't buy a lot of brand name anything), STO is primarily a North American and otherwise English speaking game, with some popularity in other European countries (especially Germany). North American Mac market share is more like 15%. Web usage share is potentially higher, but I couldn't find usage share numbers for specific markets (just globally). Even taking the 15% number, ignoring 15% of your potential customers in your biggest market is bad for any business.
And who are these 15%? Well, they're people who can afford a Macintosh apparently. I love the Mac platform for many reasons, but Apple does not play in the bottom of the market. You want a Mac laptop, come with a budget of at least $1000 or don't bother to show up. It's reasonable to assume that those of us who are OK with spending $1000... $1300... maybe even $2000 on a laptop have the disposable income to sink some serious cash into a hobby. Basically, Mac users are people Cryptic should very much want to tap into, without additional barriers in our way.
Don't know about you guys, and yeah Cryptic or Stahl might have said it would be realized in 2013 but its more then just changing the launcher to 'support' Mac and its done.
Realising a full MacOSX supporting client means implementing OpenGL instead of using DirectX(3D) which is quite a bit of altering of the very core of the game engine.
I would love to see this happen though, I just dont think it will happen any time soon.
Don't know about you guys, and yeah Cryptic or Stahl might have said it would be realized in 2013 but its more then just changing the launcher to 'support' Mac and its done.
Realising a full MacOSX supporting client means implementing OpenGL instead of using DirectX(3D) which is quite a bit of altering of the very core of the game engine.
I would love to see this happen though, I just dont think it will happen any time soon.
It's probably just going to be a supported Cider wrapper rather than a true native client.
It's probably just going to be a supported Cider wrapper rather than a true native client.
Yup, and that's totally fine. Microsoft did a good thing in creating DirectX, a complete end-to-end API for game development. I understand why things are developed for DirectX, and I wouldn't expect a game developed for it to get totally rebuilt for OpenGL and OS X's various other APIs (CoreAudio, etc). Cider may involve a performance hit, it would be better to have a true native version, but I'll take what we can get. Whatever helps people get into the game with minimum hassle.
On the other hand, STO runs on the Cryptic Engine. Porting the Cryptic Engine means the bulk of the work is done, and that work can then be applied to the other Cryptic games (Neverwinter anyone?). So, while it might not be worth the effort for STO alone, it may be worth the effort when you take into account the financial return across all Cryptic games. Porting UE3 allowed me to play Arkham Asylum on my Mac Mini without much trouble, I'd be ecstatic for a true Mac port of STO.
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Not enough of a market for it to make it worth devoting the resources to doing a conversion.
That being said, I'd love for that to happen. The only reason I even have Windows on my Mac is to play STO.
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Same here. Such a shame to see it go.
Perhaps he will see this thread and post about whether or not that's still a thing or not.
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There has also been another thread here (http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=515511) about the matter.
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The Mac userbase is probably small, 10-15% of personal computer gamers.
However, not having Mac support keeps PC users from playing because they will prefer games they can play with their friends.
Hence, games with a Mac client remove one of the potential caps on their number of Windows users.
By how much may vary but I don't know any game has topped a million players without a Mac client so I think there's a point where it makes sense and am guessing PWE marketing has primary or secondary research backing this up now, hence why Cryptic is now prioritizing it... And it probably helps having more games that could be ported.
The two big hurdles as I understand it are Direct X and that the patcher uses Internet Explorer, which is probably an artifact from when Cryptic was partnered with Microsoft. (I always wondered if that's how Stahl wound up at Cryptic because it would have aligned with when he came over and he was a Microsoft employee prior to working at Cryptic.)
(I also wondered whether Stahl knew the Neverwinter folks because he worked for WotC, which is a Hasbro company. I know Van Citters -- the CBS rep for Star Trek -- used to work for Jesse Heinig at Decipher and always wondered if he put Heinig in touch with Cryptic. These things tend to be incestuous.)
SWTOR, for one.
The biggest work will likely be recoding the game to use OpenGL/OpenCL APIs where they currently use DirectX.
Interestingly, the only PWE game I can see that has a Mac OS X client is Torchlight, developed by Runic Games.
For Mac users wanting to play STO, until a dedicated client is made bootcamping Windows is simple and works great. You have to reboot into Windows, but it doesn't suffer the bottlenecks and limitations of virtualising Windows within OS X using Parallels/VMware.
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I used it myself for a while - it does what it says on the tin, with some drawbacks. Tends to be unstable if your graphics settings are set too high, especially loading into large hubs like ESD or Qo'nos. It'll also run slower than it should regardless of those settings. But it works. And for all I know doh123 could've fixed those issues by now, or the Wine libraries have improved in the last year or two. Your mileage may vary.
But I'd seriously recommend putting together a proper Boot Camp partition (better yet: a secondary drive just for that purpose if you're on a Mac Pro) if you plan on logging any serious time into STO on a Mac, or any other games for that matter. Even the games with proper honest-to-god not-Cider Mac ports tend to run slightly better in Windows due to not being hamstrung by Apple's outdated drivers, or the Direct X vs. OpenGL thing, depending on the exact game and your hardware.
Chances are that even if Cryptic gets their STO Mac client running this year it still might not run much better than the unofficial wineskin, depending on how it's being ported. That's not a jab at Cryptic; even billion dollar megacorps like EA use Cider for Mac ports on occasion and the results are often pretty terrible. Anyone else play the Mac port of Spore? Holy balls. Inversely, I think CCP used Cider for EVE Online, and it's absolutely rock solid, with no detectable drop in performance between the Mac and PC versions.
The TL;DR: The linked wineskin works alright in a pinch. Boot Camp is better if you can swing it.
Yeah, I get the impression up until now it's been one of those 'if a dev feels like working on their lunch hour' projects. Hopefully that will change shortly.
That said if you poke around the forums for the unofficial Mac version it works well enough for now.
Did they maintain a million?
My impression is that the current numbers are considerably less.
Actually, on this point, I'm not sure that's true. They're reliant on features of IE not present in other browsers. It may have been designed to keep them bound to Windows specifically. The smart thing would probably be to NOT use an existing browser at all. But I think they got tied up with IE when they were getting Microsoft money.
This is what I'm not sure that they'll do. I think it probably will be a Cider wrapper. Perhaps professionally prepared. Maybe with an outside partner and a big launch party, following the trend of Steam/Raptr/etc. I think Cryptic likes to have some kind of launch party like this every 6 months or so to get new people in. I'd count LoR as one. I could see the next one being sometime after Halloween and maybe closer to Christmas.
Before this is over, we may yet have an XBOX launch party.
Good luck with Wine. It's a nightmare trying to get it to work in Linux. Even if you do get your app to work, there will still be compatibility issues that will pop-up and when your app updates you'll see more issues. I don't recommend Wine.
You're better off duel booting with Windows on a Mac to have the full 100% operating system running without any translation or emulation in the background.
If you try virtualization you won't have the best video capabilities because hypervisors usually emulate a lesser-capable video card that does not have DirectX abilities.
If they get STO working on MacOS, that could lead to having it run on BSD or even Linux AND FINALLY DROP WINDOWS!
SCE ADVISORY NOTICE: Improper Impulse Engine maintenance can result in REAR THRUSTER LEAKAGE. ALWAYS have your work inspected by another qualified officer.
In the meantime I'll just have to keep dusting off the old Sony Vaio whenever I want to take the Captain's chair!
When i saw the Q&A back in January I was very happy, the only issue I have with the way I do it now is the time spent booting in and out of Windows just to play STO, it makes it so its not worth it for anything but a marathon session. I live in the Mac environment and would prefer to keep my machine booted in OSX, I hope they get the client worked out.
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Your impression is only correct if you are counting the number of subscribers. Since F2P, the computation of the number of players is a lot squishier, but it is well north of a million.
You also overestimate the number of Mac gamers, and your idea that PC gamers avoid games because their Mac-owning friends can't play them is sketchy at best. All the Mac gamers I know have dual boot anyway.
Pretty correct here, mac owner myself and I only boot into windows to game. If I could stay in OSX to do that I gladly would. When GW2 released their Mac Client Beta I was quiet happy. When word of a STO client being developed reached my ears I was also happy. Though the game runs perfectly well in Boot camp also, pretty much anything does honestly.
People also use their platform of choice for their own reasons. They aren't likely to switch their main computer for one (again, otherwise free game). Nor will most people want to have a separate machine just for that. I have a PC dedicated to STO, but I'm a fringe case in the amount of techno clutter I'm willing to tolerate in my home.
Regardless of the existing "solutions", they all represent a barrier that could prevent an otherwise willing player from playing the game. Though Mac market share globally is something like 7% (impoverished third world countries don't buy a lot of brand name anything), STO is primarily a North American and otherwise English speaking game, with some popularity in other European countries (especially Germany). North American Mac market share is more like 15%. Web usage share is potentially higher, but I couldn't find usage share numbers for specific markets (just globally). Even taking the 15% number, ignoring 15% of your potential customers in your biggest market is bad for any business.
And who are these 15%? Well, they're people who can afford a Macintosh apparently. I love the Mac platform for many reasons, but Apple does not play in the bottom of the market. You want a Mac laptop, come with a budget of at least $1000 or don't bother to show up. It's reasonable to assume that those of us who are OK with spending $1000... $1300... maybe even $2000 on a laptop have the disposable income to sink some serious cash into a hobby. Basically, Mac users are people Cryptic should very much want to tap into, without additional barriers in our way.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^this^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Realising a full MacOSX supporting client means implementing OpenGL instead of using DirectX(3D) which is quite a bit of altering of the very core of the game engine.
I would love to see this happen though, I just dont think it will happen any time soon.
It's probably just going to be a supported Cider wrapper rather than a true native client.
Yup, and that's totally fine. Microsoft did a good thing in creating DirectX, a complete end-to-end API for game development. I understand why things are developed for DirectX, and I wouldn't expect a game developed for it to get totally rebuilt for OpenGL and OS X's various other APIs (CoreAudio, etc). Cider may involve a performance hit, it would be better to have a true native version, but I'll take what we can get. Whatever helps people get into the game with minimum hassle.
On the other hand, STO runs on the Cryptic Engine. Porting the Cryptic Engine means the bulk of the work is done, and that work can then be applied to the other Cryptic games (Neverwinter anyone?). So, while it might not be worth the effort for STO alone, it may be worth the effort when you take into account the financial return across all Cryptic games. Porting UE3 allowed me to play Arkham Asylum on my Mac Mini without much trouble, I'd be ecstatic for a true Mac port of STO.