Gaming

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From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!

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Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac to Justify It (narwhal.city)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/10/valve-confirms-counter-strike-2-no-macos/

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’d have thought the pain point would have been the processor architecture (ARM64) rather than operating system - MacOS still supports AMD64 using a compatibility layer but it would probably be quite a drawback to game performance.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not really, unless the game code was written in X86-64 assembly language, does low-level VM allocation for some reason, or otherwise has special dependencies on Intel CPU-isms. With a few exceptions, C/C++/Objective-C code written for X86-64 can be easily recompiled for ARM64.

The PowerPC to X86 transition was much rougher, because of the byte order change + PPC allowing integer division by zero while X86 disallowed it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

What’s your experience here? I’m interested to hear about projects that you have done this for.

The source engine has code that’s over 20 years old. A monolithic project like a game engine, which is statically and dynamically linked with god knows how many libraries they don’t even have code for, let alone permission, to compile in a different architecture, is not gonna be an easy thing to do.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've brought various apps, bundles, and frameworks from PowerPC to Intel to 64-bit to ARM ever since macOS 10.0 first launched. Usually the most difficult parts were:

During the PPC to Intel transition, converting code that expected all data to be big-endian over to handling little-endian data, and catching integer division by zero before sending such operations to the CPU
During the 64-bit transition, switching from all the APIs Apple removed over to newer APIs, if not already done, and converting all code that expected integers and pointers to be 32-bit over to 64-bit
During the ARM transition, converting code that abused variadic functions to code that used them properly, and converting all code that expected long doubles to be 128-bit over to 64-bit (I know some developers were burned by the VM page size change, but that didn't affect anything I did)

But yeah, usually the most difficult part of the transition is managing the dependencies. Whenever Apple transitions CPU architectures, if your app depends on a closed-source third-party library or kernel extension made by developers that went out of business years ago, you're more or less screwed unless you can find or build a replacement.