Turbine may be working on a Mac client for DDO? [Archive]

Virgonian

08-23-2012, 07:45 AM

I would love to see a native mac client to.

I did get it working fairly good under lion, but there still are a few glitches and it take some effort to get it going.
(Don't look forward on doing it all again when i go mountain lion.)

I think with a mac client, turbine could tap into the growing mac community, who tend to spend more money on their entertainment.

griffin_230

08-23-2012, 10:09 AM

...
I think with a mac client, turbine could tap into the growing mac community, who tend to spend more money on their entertainment.

I was thinking this too. Since Turbine have already made a Mac client for Lotro, surely a Mac client for DDO can't be too far behind ? Lol.

TrinityTurtle

08-23-2012, 10:47 AM

I was thinking this too. Since Turbine have already made a Mac client for Lotro, surely a Mac client for DDO can't be too far behind ? Lol.

Depends. It was my understanding Turbine was bought in the first place because it was the only LOTRO license the parent company (who would be the ones calling the shots what r & d money is spent on) didn't have and they wanted. So because they are keen on developing Lotro and greenlighting it, doesn't meen parent company (I have totaly forgotten which on it is, pardon, Warner Bros maybe?) will greenlight a similar expense for ddo or ac.

QNecron

08-23-2012, 10:48 AM

I think with a mac client, turbine could tap into the growing mac community, who tend to spend more money on their entertainment.

If that was the case Turbine would be targeting Linux as the HiB have shown Linux users will pay more for a game than Windows or Mac users.

At this point and time there is no reason why Turbine shouldn't have a Mac client, especially with many of the game makers expressing their distaste for the new Windows 8 that will be hitting shelves/OEMs soon.

Flavilandile

08-23-2012, 11:12 AM

If that was the case Turbine would be targeting Linux as the HiB have shown Linux users will pay more for a game than Windows or Mac users.

At this point and time there is no reason why Turbine shouldn't have a Mac client, especially with many of the game makers expressing their distaste for the new Windows 8 that will be hitting shelves/OEMs soon.

Not sure they will go for a Mac Client for DDO. DDO has always been the ugly duckling compared to the pristine LoTRO.

Just look at how the character transfer following European Shutdown was done on both game :

- In DDO characters from both European Servers were dumped on something, then they were merged with Ghallanda already existing population.
From the player point of view they had to : download the Turbine version of the game, create a Turbine account ( and give CC information if VIP ), make sure the Codemasters account had the 'I Agree' box ticked on time ( and make sure the subscription was cancelled ), wait a few month, eventually rename the characters.

- In LoTRO Turbine just took over the existing servers. Players just had to disconnect from the game and reconnect... the Client would download a ( huge update ) that would leads them to the new US servers.
They also had to update their billing information if VIP, as it wasn't transfered.

Also DDO has several time been the testing ground for new ideas that were marketting gamble. ( F2P comes to mind, but the Mailbox System has been beta tested in DDO before being put in LoTRO. )

As for the Windows 8 Case...
I'm still on XP and will install W7 once I change my PC... Oh and I'll also start using the SUN Ultra 45 I have sitting somewhere for photo-editing with GIMP.
From what I've seen lately from MS even numbered Windows are a mess, while odd numbered ones are fixes for the mess. All in all the WAY MS is heading makes me look at Macs and alternate systems...

Theolin

08-23-2012, 11:13 AM

Would be nice, would save me from windows completely as ddo is the only thing I use windows for

BruceTheHoon

08-23-2012, 11:26 AM

Turbine putting out a mac client would be nothing but great news. As more potential playerbase always is, for a MMO.

If they do make a Mac client, does that mean we may someday see the introduction of a Linux client?

I greatly prefer running applications natively rather than having to port through WINE or some other such method. It's to the point where I have a Windows install solely for gaming purposes.

A girl can dream!

Oh, I sure hope so.

oweieie

08-23-2012, 12:10 PM

Not testing updates can only add bugs so fast, a Mac client would be the easiest way to double their bug count overnight!

QNecron

08-23-2012, 12:27 PM

Not sure they will go for a Mac Client for DDO. DDO has always been the ugly duckling compared to the pristine LoTRO.

Never knew that, I thought they was both being developed with the same standards. Sad, but not shocked, that's how DDO is looked upon :(

As for the Windows 8 Case...
I'm still on XP and will install W7 once I change my PC... Oh and I'll also start using the SUN Ultra 45 I have sitting somewhere for photo-editing with GIMP.
From what I've seen lately from MS even numbered Windows are a mess, while odd numbered ones are fixes for the mess. All in all the WAY MS is heading makes me look at Macs and alternate systems...

Not unusual, Win7 isn't all that it's cracked up to be IMO - just Vista 2.0. Windows XP would still be my choice for a MS OS if it supported newer hardware (8+ GB of RAM, SSDs, MBs, etc)... hell I might even still be developing stuff for NWN1 if I had XP.

Watch out for the Mac parade, the way they are linking all their iOS stuff with OSX will eventually result in some sort of hybrid that nobody wins with lol.

Keep a watch out for Valve :) http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/ What they could potentially bring to Linux could make dual booting for the most of us something of the past, especially if certain companies use the information they are collecting and handing out for porting.

GentlemanAndAScholar

08-23-2012, 12:30 PM

If they're making a Mac client for Lotro then I wonder if they're making one for DDO too:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/08/22/lotro-lifts-rohan-nda-unveils-mac-client/

That would be fantastic. Although I've have had no issues with Bootcamp, I'd rather run it on the Mac natively.

Ryiah

08-23-2012, 01:07 PM

If they do make a Mac client, does that mean we may someday see the introduction of a Linux client?

Nice wishful thinking there. I highly doubt it will ever make it to Linux. Article claims it is a native client but I wonder if it used any of the D3D-to-OGL frameworks out there.

DanteEnFuego

08-23-2012, 01:12 PM

That would be fantastic. Although I've have had no issues with Bootcamp, I'd rather run it on the Mac natively.

Slight diversion...

My brother has a Mac and wants to play DDO. Is there a set of instructions for him to follow to run DDO for now? Until then, he is stuck in Diablo 3, which is brain dead fun,but a vastly inferior game...

Kaytis

08-23-2012, 01:18 PM

I would love to run it natively on my Mac. It's a pain to have to boot Windows just to play.

I could see the argument being made that they would be better off searching for bugs, but its amazing how many bugs become obvious when you port code.

The Mac also has some excellent dev tools that can help pinpoint leaks and CPU bottlenecks almost trivially in some cases.

I witnessed a demo by Blizzard a few years back of the Mac dev tools being used to figure out why wow hung for a few seconds when you flew your griffin into a certain zone. The profiler made it very easy to see what was going wrong.

I think it would be a good investment in time if for no other reason than the stability and performance improvements that would come out of it.

Kaytis

08-23-2012, 01:28 PM

Slight diversion...

My brother has a Mac and wants to play DDO. Is there a set of instructions for him to follow to run DDO for now? Until then, he is stuck in Diablo 3, which is brain dead fun,but a vastly inferior game...

Some people use emulators like Wine, VMWare or Parallels to run Windows while the Mac OS is still running.

I personally bought a copy of Windows 7 64-bits and installed it using BootCamp which you can find in the /Applications/Utilities folder. I prefer this approach because it is not emulated. You change your startup disk to an actual honest to goodness Windows volume, the Mac OS is not running at all.

Note that BootCamp has certain minimum hardware requirements for Windows 7 installs. Any Mac from the last 3 to 4 years should be fine. If it's older than that you might have to use XP.

EDIT: you shouldn't even consider using a PowerPC based Mac. It won't run Bootcamp, and the emulation programs really are emulating the i86 instruction set. It will not be in any way functional.

Ryiah

08-23-2012, 01:30 PM

Is there a set of instructions for him to follow to run DDO for now?

Same methods you'd use to run any Windows game on an Intel Mac. You can try using either Bootcamp (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1461) or VMware Fusion (http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/overview.html). Both require a copy of Windows.

DanteEnFuego

08-23-2012, 04:15 PM

Same methods you'd use to run any Windows game on an Intel Mac. You can try using either Bootcamp (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1461) or VMware Fusion (http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/overview.html). Both require a copy of Windows.

Thanks!

Flavilandile

08-23-2012, 04:40 PM

Keep a watch out for Valve :) http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/ What they could potentially bring to Linux could make dual booting for the most of us something of the past, especially if certain companies use the information they are collecting and handing out for porting.

Sorry I'm allergic to Steam. ;)

And I have forgotten about dual booting long ago.
( well I have probably forgotten more about multiboot than a lot of people knew about it... my first multiboot was a DOS 4.0/Linux 0.9something on a 386.... which lasted about a month as I never managed to launch X-Window on the Linux. )
I professionally need to launch several OSes on various systems... [ Read : Linux Flavours, Solaris, HP-UX, ... ]
Some of them need to be jumpstarted from a VMWare Image... Some days I can have up to 3 virtual beasts running at the same time on my professionnal PC.

Anyway, the interesting point about a Mac porting is that it makes it really easier to port to Linux. ( Max OS X is not exactly a Linux, as it's based on NextSTEP, but as all the Unix Flavours are related one way or another back to System V and BSD, compatibility between them is just a matter of having the right libraries in the right versions at the right places compiled for the right processor. [and it's a real pain... which is why almost nobody does it ] )

Ryiah

08-23-2012, 05:04 PM

Sorry I'm allergic to Steam. ;)

It may not be trouble free, but it is far more preferable to most other forms of DRM out there. But then I'm not really shocked to see a Linux user make this comment. Most I've run into are "allergic" to the sources that are most likely to bring gaming to their platform.

compatibility between them is just a matter of having the right libraries in the right versions at the right places compiled for the right processor

Why not just simply scan the distro for the location of the libraries you need and store symlinks to all of them in one unchanging location?

AZgreentea

08-23-2012, 05:09 PM

LotRO has a few things that DDO never saw its own version of. Remember the tool that allowed you to defrag your client files?

simo0208

08-23-2012, 05:22 PM

Just run virtual machine. Partition a segment of your HD, install virtual machine, load windows and DDO onto that segment. Win. It runs quite smoothly, and macs get higher resolutions than PCs in many cases (I don't have a mac, but a few of the people I play with do)

Ryiah

08-23-2012, 05:46 PM

macs get higher resolutions than OEM PCs in many cases

Fixed that for you. Though I should point out that just because you can achieve a bigger resolution doesn't mean the game will run smoothly at it with maximum settings. Features like supersampling take a lot of GPU power even at modest resolutions.

Claver

09-02-2012, 07:57 PM

I use Bootcamp to play DDO on my macbook pro but have limited space on the partition for anything else.

Porting DDO into MAC would be a huge plus for me since many of my good friends from my past are mac users and what keeps them from playing DDO with me is the hassle of wineskin/bootcamp.

It's the same reason I have never tried LOTR as a MAC user...too much hassle

Now that it is coming to my operating system; I'll give it a shot on the MAC.

seebs

09-03-2012, 03:30 AM

If that was the case Turbine would be targeting Linux as the HiB have shown Linux users will pay more for a game than Windows or Mac users.

Not necessarily. The question is players*price, where players = number of likely players on that platform, price = what they're willing to pay. If there are 5x as many Mac users as Linux users, and they're willing to pay half as much for a game, then the Mac is a more lucrative platform. Etcetera.

I would love to see more games being built portably, to be sure.

Virgonian

09-03-2012, 05:59 AM

Slight diversion...

My brother has a Mac and wants to play DDO. Is there a set of instructions for him to follow to run DDO for now? Until then, he is stuck in Diablo 3, which is brain dead fun,but a vastly inferior game...

You could run ddo using wine. Not the easiest way, but it works fairly good.
I made a topic how to install it on lion:

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=388498

DanteEnFuego

09-03-2012, 08:43 AM

You could run ddo using wine. Not the easiest way, but it works fairly good.
I made a topic how to install it on lion:

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=388498

Thx! Sent him the link... +1

goodspeed

09-03-2012, 11:50 AM

lol regular software usually has to be homemade to work on mac by random people after so many years of them being sick of not having it. As it stands games for a computer itself are getting slim with mmo's being the main left. Though if what I read in that game informer issue is true it seems like they're trying to bridge that gap to consoles as well.

Long story and plenty of examples short, I really really wouldn't count on a company that obviously doesn't have the manpower and resources to fix a sheer wall greater then the wall of flippn china, to work on another client. And if by some miracle they did, good god man can you even imagine the sheer god awefulness of playing it?

I mean it takes em long enough to fix stuff. So of course mac would lag behind. Not to mention what weird problems would erupt. I'd be like every day being release day of an mmo in open alpha!

Hambo

09-03-2012, 12:05 PM

I doubt it.

Turbine doesn't officially support either Vista or Windows 7, they just happen to work.

When the xpack was on Lam, I loaded the client onto Win8, which worked fine. After one of the patches it stopped working. When I bugged it I made clear that I understood that Win8 itself was still in beta but wanted to give a heads up. They replied with the above statement.

I have since learned that perhaps relocating some of the files may fix the issue... it seems the installation directories were changed. I haven't tried that yet.

Just wanted to say I don't see a new client of any kind in the near future.

Hambo

09-03-2012, 12:10 PM

Not sure they will go for a Mac Client for DDO. DDO has always been the ugly duckling compared to the pristine LoTRO.

Just look at how the character transfer following European Shutdown was done on both game :

- In DDO characters from both European Servers were dumped on something, then they were merged with Ghallanda already existing population.
From the player point of view they had to : download the Turbine version of the game, create a Turbine account ( and give CC information if VIP ), make sure the Codemasters account had the 'I Agree' box ticked on time ( and make sure the subscription was cancelled ), wait a few month, eventually rename the characters.

- In LoTRO Turbine just took over the existing servers. Players just had to disconnect from the game and reconnect... the Client would download a ( huge update ) that would leads them to the new US servers.
They also had to update their billing information if VIP, as it wasn't transfered.

Also DDO has several time been the testing ground for new ideas that were marketting gamble. ( F2P comes to mind, but the Mailbox System has been beta tested in DDO before being put in LoTRO. )

As for the Windows 8 Case...
I'm still on XP and will install W7 once I change my PC... Oh and I'll also start using the SUN Ultra 45 I have sitting somewhere for photo-editing with GIMP.
From what I've seen lately from MS even numbered Windows are a mess, while odd numbered ones are fixes for the mess. All in all the WAY MS is heading makes me look at Macs and alternate systems...

Actually from personal experience DDO runs faster under Win8 than with Win7 on the same hardware, about 10% framerate increase.

The question is what has to be done to get it to run after some changes were made to the installation directories broke it under Win8 :confused::rolleyes:

Hambo

09-03-2012, 12:17 PM

Never knew that, I thought they was both being developed with the same standards. Sad, but not shocked, that's how DDO is looked upon :(

Not unusual, Win7 isn't all that it's cracked up to be IMO - just Vista 2.0. Windows XP would still be my choice for a MS OS if it supported newer hardware (8+ GB of RAM, SSDs, MBs, etc)... hell I might even still be developing stuff for NWN1 if I had XP.

Watch out for the Mac parade, the way they are linking all their iOS stuff with OSX will eventually result in some sort of hybrid that nobody wins with lol.

Keep a watch out for Valve :) http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/ What they could potentially bring to Linux could make dual booting for the most of us something of the past, especially if certain companies use the information they are collecting and handing out for porting.

It has nothing to do with "Standards", but with business partners. LotRO had better developement partners than DDO, not to mention a major ongoing movie franchise at the time. Had Atari been involved with LotRO I'm sude it would be in the same condition, if not worse off than DDO.

MrElusiveness

09-03-2012, 12:34 PM

If they're making a Mac client for Lotro then I wonder if they're making one for DDO too:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/08/22/lotro-lifts-rohan-nda-unveils-mac-client/

if they are going to make another client, it should be for linux because you can run linux on anything. open source YAY!

AZgreentea

09-03-2012, 01:10 PM

I was reading an article where Steam's founder was quoted as saying that their desire to make Steam games Linux compatible was based on his personal belief that Win 8 will damage the PC industry. The development of a Mac client for LotRO could be an experiment by Turbine to see how feasible it is to have a client on both systems, or it could be an attempt to look at new markets.