As part of their initial announcement back in March, Valve has stated quite proudly that rather than taking the easy route like many game developers have taken by using Cider or another form of emulation to make a game written for Windows run on a Mac (which I should add run very poorly), they have instead ported their entire Source engine and tools to OpenGL, providing an honest-to-goodness native version on the Mac platform without using any emulation.
However, an interesting find in the support files for Portal has been raising some eyebrows:
A few have been implying the existence of these highlighted files indicate that Valve’s Source engine-powered games are not true OpenGL ports as they have been advertising, but are being run through a DirectX translator/emulator. I was a bit skeptical about this claim, as Valve is a smart enough company to know that someone would eventually find out about this and call them on embellishing the truth. And, I might add, the performance of Portal (and other Source-powered games to come in the near future) would be far, far worse.
It appears my skepticism has been vindicated based on a post from one of Valve’s lead Mac developers:
I wrote the native OpenGL module for Source Mac. It presents a DX9 compatible interface to the engine, engine calls me, I call GL, dots appear.
The performance issues being investigated are generally driver level things – below this layering. The layering doesn’t exhibit any noticeable overhead in our profiling.
The whole app is compiled with gcc as a native Mach-O binary using the OS X toolchain.
Oh and the .dll’s are not loaded, they are extraneous content. You’re welcome to “sudo fs_usage” to prove it.
I suspected that Valve, during testing, probably tried a form of DirectX to OpenGL emulator but found results unsatisfactory. I wasn’t too far from the truth. In reality, it’s a very clever way of saving some development time.
Cracks me up every time. It’s actually part of a series called the Gmod Idiot Box, which is a Robot Chicken-esque sketch show made in Garry’s Mod. The whole series is a riot – highly suggested watching for anyone who is a fan of Half-Life/Team Fortress/Left 4 Dead or just likes silly humor and/or good machinima.
Speaking of Valve games, Left 4 Dead 2 is my choice for best game of 2009. No game has made me laugh, cry, and scream like a little girl as much as L4D2 has in a long, long time.
So I was diagnosed with strep throat a few days ago – I haven’t gotten it in years, and I was reminded of just how bad it sucks. Being that I’m a “carrier”, in that it’s easy for me to catch it and pass it on, even if I’m not showing symptoms, I had to stay home for several days to prevent getting anyone else sick. It was an all-too-soon revisiting of the past months of being alone and out of work.
Anyways, I’m feeling a lot better now and should be back to work and with my friends in a couple days.
Master Angler of Azeroth is considered one of the most difficult achievements to earn in WoW, mainly due to the sheer luck factor and that it could only be achieved by one player once a week (now twice a week with the new Northrend fishing contest introduced in patch 3.3). I’ve tried probably about a dozen times total, and honestly that’s probably a lot less than many people have, but it’s a relief to finally be among the most skilled of virtual fishermen in Azeroth.
Or restart, whatever the vernacular may be in this day and age.
I’ve tried several times to keep a blog going and updated frequently, but at some point along the way, I usually just get bored or give up – probably because I’m just not a very interesting person who does things that are worth telling the entire Internets about. Of course, there are lots of people out there who are probably even more boring than I, and they can’t shut the hell up about what they had for breakfast or what was on TV last night.
So I suppose with that logic – and yes, my logic is bulletproof, in case you didn’t know – it’s worth giving this blog thing another shot. Tell me what you think in the comments and in the meantime I’ll do my best to make you think I live the rockstar lifestyle.
