Tuesday, September 11, 2007

EVE sips the Cider

Well Cuppy already wrote about it(I swear she is first to everything), but EVE Online the golden boy of PvP and Sci-Fi will be playable on the Mac(OSX) and Linux platforms by years end. This is fantastic news for us Mac gamers, no longer will we have to pay the reboot tax to get our mine on. I am really interested to see how things go as far as performance, as CCP is using Transgaming's Cider portability engine to essentially fake a port. While I won't say this is a bad thing I am concerned about the performance hit the user will take as a result, because there will be some, there just has to be given how the technology works.

Press Release

I am also concerned because earlier this year EA at this years WWDC(Apple Developer Conference) announced that they would be bringing a few of their popular titles to the Mac using Transgaming's technology. Then months later nothing, and finally recently EA admitted to dropping the whole thing. Now this could have been due to cost, sales predictions, and any number of things but one of those questions asked must be, was the technology to blame? Can Cider scale to handle these kind of intense games? Looking at Transgaming's list of games already using Cider technology, it is slim at best. So while this provides no conclusive evidence it is something to consider when looking at this news. And while CCP has been good at customer relations and I don't think that they would release a piece of junk, I worry about these things as someone who has had generally poor experiences with translation technologies and Transgaming in general. I don't want to "hate on" Transgaming, they do a lot of great work for a crowd that is consistently under served, but I can't ignore my past experiences.

--
Cheston

3 comments:

Chestone said...

BTW the Transgaming product I am referring to is Cedega.
http://www.transgaming.com/products/cedega/

heartlessgamer said...

People trying to game on MACs need to give a little bit of that extra money to me. Why spend thousands more to game on a MAC when you can build a decent PC for half the price and dual-boot a better Linux distro?

The MAC cult simply amazes me.

Chestone said...

Well I didn't buy my Mac specifically for gaming, I'm a developer and thus my computer is primarily for that purpose but I enjoy gaming as a hobby. I'm not saying every company should be forced to develop games for all platforms, but it would be nice, and it would certainly expand their market. And I've used linux(gentoo, debian, and fedora) for years and found OSX to be generally more appealing and suited for my needs.