DICE Considering Bad Company 2 for the Mac

[Andy Chalk]

DICE Considering Bad Company 2 for the Mac

The good news for Mac gamers just keeps on getting better: EA DICE Executive Producer Karl Magnus Troedsson says the studio is thinking about making a version of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_11?url=search-alias%3Dvideogames&field-keywords=battlefield+bad+company+2&x=0&y=0&sprefix=battlefield] for the Mac.

It's been a good week to be a Mac gamer. Valve revealed yesterday that a Valve [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/98946-Valve-Announces-Steam-and-Source-for-Mac] catalog, including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal and the Half-Life series. That's some pretty hot stuff, but now it looks like there might be even more fun in store for the future.

Writing on his Twitter account, Troedsson DICE [http://twitter.com/L_Twin/status/10187327582] is no doubt also be thinking about the advantages of bringing the modern warfare bug to the Mac ahead of certain other developers.

Did I miss a memo here? Where's all this Mac love coming from? It's only two developers, sure, but that's still two more than usual. If this keeps up, I'm going to be reduced to pointing and laughing at the FreeBSD crowd.

via: UGDB [http://ugdb.com/news/view/battlefield-possibly-making-its-return-to-mac-thanks-to-steam/]


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[Asehujiko]

Did I miss a memo here? Where's all this Mac love coming from? It's only two developers, sure, but that's still two more than usual. If this keeps up, I'm going to be reduced to pointing and laughing at the FreeBSD crowd.

It's a secret handshake between PC supporting devs. It kind of says "we support all things with more then 1GB of ram, even if you have to pay $200 extra to get them in any other color then "kitchen appliance"."

 

[fix-the-spade]

I don't know, maybe the slow but steady rise of Macs in popularity from creative professional machines to 'lifestyle products'that;s resulted in a hell of a lot of Macs kicking about in the hands of hip young things.

BC2 must be doing pretty well then if they're already thinking about expanding it into the riskiest of all the gaming markets. Then again they would have an almost an open market with Valve, Modern Warfare (the first one) and Halo (also the first one) are still listed on the front page of Mac's gaming page...

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

If this keeps up, I'm going to be reduced to pointing and laughing at the FreeBSD crowd.

You mean you don't do that now? But its so easy (and rewarding)! Telling the world you use FreeBSD these days is like announcing your computer ran O/S2 Warp back when people could be relied on to have actually heard of it - you'll get a lot of head scratching and "why the hell are you doing that?" comments.

If you're going to go with open source, use Linux - less people will point and laugh at you, ha ha!

 

[Cherry Cola]

It's the future, people! I'm telling you! Gaming on complex platforms is going to disappear! Soon we will be playing Modern Warfare 5 with only 1 button on our Super-mega-awesome-consoles!

 

[Escapefromwhatever]

I have to say- I have been happy with EA lately. They seem to be working hard to redeem themselves of the negative reputation they have garnered.

 

[matt87_50]

heh

so Apple, that's a bit of A pickle, I bet your users don't think their iMacs are so pretty when they are playing games at 640x480...

so apart from the fact that Apple products are clearly not designed for gaming, how many Mac gamers are there actually out there?

honestly, I see this as a bigger boon for the indie developer, with their low spec, app store like games, I'm sure the popularity of the app store might carry over to the Mac. sucked in Apple, Steam beat you to it!

as for AAA? well... openGL sucks, and is being left in the dust by directX. assuming the worst doesn't happen, and game devs start developing exclusively in openGL for mac AND WINDOWS (this is not the case with source, it has a GL and directX branch), the simple fact of the matter is games just won't run as well on them, not to mention Microsoft spend like 50% of their time making dev tools, compilers, and SDKs that would shit all over the ones Apple has.

 

[ASnogarD]

Well , good for the Mac gamers ... as long as EA / DICE FIRST fix the issues bugging the PC version , then try adding the Mac.

I just wonder if EA's ZX Spectrum that runs the Master server can deal with the influx of all 10 Mac users (joke, Mac's ).

 

[achilleas.k]

I have to say- I have been happy with EA lately. They seem to be working hard to redeem themselves of the negative reputation they have garnered.

QFT. I thought I was the only one.

 

[GRoXERs]

*squee*


...that's really all I have to contribute.

I have been hoping for something like this to happen. Who gives a shit if I have integrated graphics? It's still good enough to run CS:S!
*squeeeeeeeeeeeeeee*

 

[Delusibeta]

Telltale Games has a lot to answer for.

Also, matt87_50's never saw a Rage or Overgrowth screenshot, otherwise he wouldn't be saying "OpenGL = crap". The more people who uses it, the more it develops and so the better it gets.

More competition between OpenGL and DirectX = better graphics for all.

 

[mikecoulter]

The Mac love is coming from years of Mac hatred. Viva La Mac!

I just can't wait to join in on some TF2 action.

 

[qbanknight]

more gamers = more fun; mac owners can play on the same servers as windows guys (says Valve) so others like DICE will do the same. As long as Jobs doesn't complain, and fewer games get branded with "Games for Windows" (honestly does ANYONE care about this DRM platform?), Mac owners can finally play with us PCers. Then I can set them all on fire behind their back in TF2

 

[Korten12]

more gamers = more fun; mac owners can play on the same servers as windows guys (says Valve) so others like DICE will do the same. As long as Jobs doesn't complain, and fewer games get branded with "Games for Windows" (honestly does ANYONE care about this DRM platform?), Mac owners can finally play with us PCers. Then I can set them all on fire behind their back in TF2

nah it will only cause more fights about who is better at TF2 based on what their playing on.

and I dont like where this is going.

 

[Delusibeta]

If the end result of all this is the extinction of Games for Windows Live, it will be a Very Good Thing.

 

[Jared]

Well I suppose atl east it woukld only be fair. Offered to everyone at least

 

[shadow skill]

This is good. I would much rather use OS X than Windows if I couldn't use Linux. (Which I do for everything save games.)

 

[mambodog]

There's been a lot of talk lately about whether it really matters whether a game runs on DirectX or OpenGL, with one article getting a lot of attention: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

The point of all this is that developers are coming to terms with the fact that if you develop a game with modern ideas of abstraction in mind, swapping out the graphics, audio and input APIs is relatively little work (in relation to a full length development cycle, anyway). Basically this makes it a hell of a lot less effort to port to platforms like Mac, because provided you've abstracted things properly, all you really need to do is swap out the graphics pipeline (and a little bit of storage and network code). Ideally you could use OpenGL on all platforms, except that it isn't available on Xbox, and OpenGL is a second class citizen on Windows, due to lack of support from Nvidia and ATI.

 

[Uncompetative]

heh

so Apple, that's a bit of A pickle, I bet your users don't think their iMacs are so pretty when they are playing games at 640x480...

so apart from the fact that Apple products are clearly not designed for gaming, how many Mac gamers are there actually out there?

honestly, I see this as a bigger boon for the indie developer, with their low spec, app store like games, I'm sure the popularity of the app store might carry over to the Mac. sucked in Apple, Steam beat you to it!

as for AAA? well... openGL sucks, and is being left in the dust by directX. assuming the worst doesn't happen, and game devs start developing exclusively in openGL for mac AND WINDOWS (this is not the case with source, it has a GL and directX branch), the simple fact of the matter is games just won't run as well on them, not to mention Microsoft spend like 50% of their time making dev tools, compilers, and SDKs that would shit all over the ones Apple has.

From the tasteful and articulate way you put yourself across I can only assume you use one of those other machines...

 

[matt87_50]

There's been a lot of talk lately about whether it really matters whether a game runs on DirectX or OpenGL, with one article getting a lot of attention: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX
.

I agree completely with everything that this article says. accept for one thing: DirectX is BETTER than OpenGL!!! I have used both extensively! the opengl "standard" is anything but! honest to god: you have openGL and openGLES, both have exactly the same function names and parameters, but in openGLES, the parameters mean COMPLETELY different things to what they mean in openGL! I recently started making a multiplatform engine that supported windows and the iphone, so obviously I used openGL on the windows version to make life easier. and you think if you just used the openGLES subset of functionality, it would just work on windows... but no, functions are different names randomly, and all these other problems, and don't even get me started on extensions... to make one library that is suitable from fixed point software renderer on like the DS, to something that tries to compete with full blown DirectX 11, is, in a word: HARD. and openGL just looks like your typical open source attempt at doing that. it looks like its made by people who aren't being paid: good, great even, but not quite professional. as I said, Microsoft is a giant company that dedicates a vast amount of their time to developers. and it shows.

I am so sick of all these damn hippies and their "oh, open standards are sooo much better than everything else, and down with the big horrible corporations who dare to try and make something better!"

fact: even if microsoft ditched directX and focused all their attention on openGL, they still wouldn't make anything as good as directX, because it has to support a vast variety of configurations. you know all those people who ***** about windows being bloated? yeah, thats because it has to support a massive variety of current and old hardware. this is the same challenge facing openGL.

yes, OpenGL is ideal, if you can do everything you need to with it, then for god's sake use it! yes, microsoft are evil for going out of there way to make openGL run shit on windows so as to push their directX agenda. but I don't hate them for making directX! and I don't hate them for not making it open! yes, sites written using standards will work better than flash equivalents... right up till the point where you decide that your site needs a feature that only flash does! all they have done with the new web standards is just hardcode in all the most commonly used functions of flash(this is fine: but don't talk down flash! remember where you came from!)! but even before the standard is fully released people are finding that "ah, actually we can't use HTML5 for video because we want our player to have this special feature that you haven't thought of to steal from flash".

but again: YES! USE HTML5 if it meets your needs! it will be faster than flash because it doesn't have as many features! and flash is overkill for most things!


all I'm trying to say is, yes, open standards are ideal (and I don't mean open source, flash is an open standard, anyone can make a player for any platform they desire). but don't hate the big companies that are willing to plough tonnes of money into R&D in order to try and make something that is better! and don't expect them, after spending millions of dollars on R&D, to then give it all away for free by making it open source!!

besides, if you want to ***** about MS making it hard to port stuff, forget directX, thats a lightweight compared to what they have coming: they are ONLY supporting c# and XNA on all their platforms! like winMo7. forget writing wrappers, THATS A WHOLE DIFFERENT LANGUAGE! have fun porting then! oh.. but whats this? C# is an open standard! it must all be awesome then! yeah! except in actuality you have everything ELSE that uses c++, and now platforms that don't support that! sure, you can maybe get C# runtimes for everything else... like mono and such... but the reality is: for games developers - the people who port the most stuff between the widest variety of platforms - c++ has always been where it's at, and to all of a sudden force us to use c# and XNA is a CLEAR attempt to try and monopolize the market! making us choose either one or the other! if that wasn't the case? if you just want us to see the light and migrate to c# fine, ALLOW BOTH C++ and C#! then lets see which is best! its clear, they are just trying to lure n00b or lazy coders in to use the easier to use c# and then find that "oh, look at that, you can't port to any other platform... guess your an MS exclusive!"

I am seriously looking forward to seeing how middleware providers overcome the fact that each platform uses a different language...