Looks really good. Congrats man. 84% overwhelmingly positive isn’t anything to sneeze at too. The experience must have been amazing. I learned more about computers in developing games that were 1% of what you’ve done. No matter the financial outcome you are winning at nerd life, which is the only life that matters (other than to your spouse your family and friends).
The hard truth is that Mac users represents less than 1% of our potential user base and it is hard to justify the time to support Mac. We are planning to revisit this decision soon and see how much effort would it be.
Is this because they fab their own parts rather than off-the-shelf stuff that has been in supply side limbo for 2 years?
$1000 "arm board" with impressive power and performance envelopes will get you some market share, especially if the existing ecosystem bends to the manufacturer's will. As they do.
I fully expect the first company to really try and make an impressive risc-V workstation to clean up in that market, especially with people like myself that use higher end consumer parts as servers.
No not that direcly. Even with mac + intel chips the situation is the same, the hardware not really the main barrier.
It's just a different software stack (OS, Drivers, Window management/UI, Sound, Networking, file access). It has similar barriers/differences in Linux. It requires extra build/compile pipelines at the minimum and most cases it means some refactoring of your code. In the worst case your gfx/audio/netcode is just plain incompatible (hard coded for a Windows/DirectX stack), meaning you have to rewrite quite a bit to abstract away the differences. This counts even in unity, it just helps here and there with making it cross platform and enforcing an opinion. These guys didn't use much of Unity and seems to use unity just as a rendering pipeline.
People who buy macs tend not to game on them much, they buy it for other reasons. I think people who owns macs and play games, tend to have consoles or even a gaming rig (since they can most likely also afford those to begin with).
No. If you’re just waking up a lot has changed. There’s a pandemic. Donald Trump (seriously!) was president. There’s a new Cold War. Everyone works from home and drives an EV. Cars can drive themselves now. It’s a weird time to be alive. Good luck!
And Apple is no longer the cool company it used to be. Their decline in hardware and software quality was what made me stopped buying Macs after being a fan for the longest time.
In the industry I'm in (just fintech SAAS), the only "change" I've been noticing is that all of our Mac user devs have even worse local development performance than before: inability to run some Docker containers, and very slow local server runtime.
I may be straying away from M1-related issues now, but I've also been seeing widespread Linux-style "why can't I share my screen?"-type problems. Not to mention fear of installing new updates and things breaking. It's like Mac is now the worst of both worlds of old Windows and Linux.
To be fair, I'm not actually a Mac user - this is just stuff I've been observing from the outside.
M1 has indeed introduced some positive and negative things.
(+) Impressive performance while staying literally quiet and cool all the time. My MBP's fans kicked in only once—when using ffmpeg. This in itself has pushed the industry forward. We shall see what Intel and AMD have to offer soon.
(-) Apple is obviously, well, Apple. They broke some things that used to work perfectly (or things for which there used to be a workaround). Apple is pushing a vision for user experience, which tbh, is not always ideal, but I get that. For this vision, they sacrifice so many things along the way (see this for example: https://medium.com/@parttimeben/mac-it-just-works-horribly-c...).
Docker has been working well for me. But I agree that some changes (esp. M1) have made macOS feel a bit like Linux.
I work in fintech saas and yes this has been an issue; my 11 year old x220 felt faster than the m1 when working on our monolith and services written in asp.net core and the docker services it needs. For everything native, it’s really fast. You really need to be careful to have everything native. With .net 6 which has an m1 target things are so much better. Same for the jvm, android dev and react native. Xcode is still buggy but we only use the tooling anyway.
In short; it started out rocky, but, if you are careful and use only native application so Rosetta doesn’t kick in, it is a phenomenal machine (I have the air); great keyboard, touchpad and screen, great battery life and it stays cool throughout a development day.
If you need x86/64 binaries, then these laptops are not a good choice; wait until there are m1 arm targets.
Like it was mentioned earlier, yes M1 kicked off for one year all the others in terms of performance - but hey, now we have 12th gen Intel Core H-series processors which have caught up (and overtook already from what I've seen in benchmarks) Apple's M-serie processors.
They are far from catching up in power usage which is what matter for laptops. 5 hour battery life and loud fans does not seem like a very good price to pay for a hypothetically 10% faster cpu.
Without P2W and micro-transaction mechanics, I don't think Mac users are more valuable than other ones for OP (I assume that, in the context, you are referring the fact Apple users spend more [1, 2], tho it could just be a cheeky joke).
Author mentioned that they only use unity for the rendering and audio, cross-platform games will use unity for a lot more, and generally get cross-platform for a significantly reduced "cost".
This project is in C# so that's the first hurdle, I'd guess.
C# has had cross platform support for 17 years. Without getting into the horror show of absolutely counter-intuitive acronyms that is modern .NET development (of which C# is a part), .NET now directly and natively supports cross platform targeting. I can build a Linux/Mac/etc binary from my Windows machine with the same compiler by changing a single flag. It's pretty cool stuff.
The Uno platform is a third party project that ties this, and more, together to enable building single code-base cross platform apps with native UIs simultaneously targeting Windows/iOS/Android/Web (WebAssembly)/Linux/macOS/Surface Duo.
Compiling modern C# is usually not a problem on Unix. Building the relevant tools yourself is a challenge, but the average macOS dev won't be doing that.
It is, but there are always some quirks that needs to be addressed on different platforms, and this takes up time when it comes to fixing and supporting those quirks.
I would definitely also just release for one platform, Windows that is, and then consider every platform added after that as a bonus.
Per-platform pricing is easy: just release the Mac version on Gog, the PC verson on Steam, the Linux version on … EA? Then you can set separate prices for each :)
I thought that by now game engines just have two extra checkboxes to ’build for Mac’ and ‘build for Linux’. Perhaps the signing requirements changed that, though.
Notably also, plenty of games work fine under Wine, but Steam client itself doesn't—on Mac.
We do use Unity that does lots of heavy lifting for you regarding porting to other platforms.
However, it's not always that easy as checking a box. For example some shader optimizations may be specific to DirectX. File system works differently (no "User/Documents" on Mac). Or issues with native libraries.
Our game does work on Linux Proton though, that was a surprise to us.
Proton with DV9K is - for a few games - faster than native windows. I don't fully understand it, but apparently the process of automatically rewriting shaders from DX to Vulcan can speed things up.
It's pretty straightforward to have an abstraction for file systems with "special" file locations, it's been common in app sdks for at least a decade in a half. Unity doesn't have something like that?
Eg you would never use /tmp or %USER%/AppData, but call a function File::getPath(TempDirectory) or something like that.
Cross-platform languages (and by extension -- engines and frameworks) rarely work exactly as advertised. The "just check a box" rarely holds true except for the simplest of programs.
In the old days, Java would advertise itself as being cross-platform (Write once, run anywhere!), but in practice, rarely worked that way.
I'm in this boat also. Geforce Now https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/ has worked pretty well for me with these sorts of games. It's not perfect, but it's been relatively responsive.
Looks really good. Congrats man. 84% overwhelmingly positive isn’t anything to sneeze at too. The experience must have been amazing. I learned more about computers in developing games that were 1% of what you’ve done. No matter the financial outcome you are winning at nerd life, which is the only life that matters (other than to your spouse your family and friends).