I'd really like to see a game developer comment on... ehm... our technology transition. From a gamer's point of view, it seems great. I always thought the port of x86 code to ppc code was one of the main difficulties, and well, that'll soon be gone, and making games for OS X should soon be as easy as making a Linux port.

Well, is it that easy? Is there a chance we'll see more games in the future? Or is it just me being too dumb and a lot of good thinking?

I would assume it would be fairly easy, though I am not a VO dev. Appearently, the "upper level" of VO sits on an engine, and the upper level is more or less the same between platforms (from what I have heard/seen, I am not saying this is true, I may very well be wrong). The engine will need a few tweaks, but not as many as you might think.

And no, the PPC worries are not over. Until a few years after apple completely phases out the PPC comps, they will need fat binaries.

I found a really interesting article on IMG where developers comment the switch:

http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/view.php?ID=355

some are very optimistic, some very pessimistic, but be sure to read Ryan Gordon's (Epic Games) comments. :-D

HA, Ryan Gordon is awesome.
"Can't wait for someone to hack up one of these boxes to run PC-intended video cards. There goes that 500 dollar GeForce market, and good riddance to shitty exploitation"
Hell ya!

I hope Incarnate doesn't mind my doing this... if he does, I don't mind if he erases it.
[snipped from a late night IRC chatlog]

Jun 08 22:03:46 <Asp> What are the ramifications of the Apple architecture switch? Concerning Vendetta Online?
Jun 08 22:04:00 <Incarnate> well.
Jun 08 22:04:10 <Incarnate> basically, we'll have to see if their fat binary stuff works
Jun 08 22:04:17 <Incarnate> and if it does, it should be like a 5 minute recompile
Jun 08 22:04:27 <Asp> Hehe
Jun 08 22:04:31 <Incarnate> and if it doesn't, we'll have to start carrying separate PPC and x86 mac versions in the updater.
Jun 08 22:04:40 <Asp> Oof.
Jun 08 22:04:42 <Incarnate> which will be annoying. so I imagine they'll make the fat binary stuff work really well.
Jun 08 22:04:50 <Incarnate> since all their developer base will be dependent on it
Jun 08 22:05:12 <Asp> What do you think of their decision? You know more about the industry than I do... I'm sort of... well, I don't know what to think. I'm reluctant to invest in software, which sucks, because I was about to get a bunch..
Jun 08 22:05:17 <Incarnate> I'm a little concerned, only because we've had some pretty annoying bugs just with one arch, with two it might be worse.
Jun 08 22:05:32 <Incarnate> well. I think it's a good long-range decision for them.
Jun 08 22:05:43 <Incarnate> from a business sense.
Jun 08 22:06:01 <Incarnate> and it should really be looked at as a business decision, unrelated performance, since all the chips are roughly the same anyway.

What is the arch thing incarnate is talking about?

Arch refers to CPU architecture. Even though a cpu architecture change does not change the overall operation of the system, certain bits of code, especially those that do vector/matrix math or that has been heavily optimised for maximum speed, can break or act strangely when compiled for a different CPU architecture. This may be especially true for VO, since the devs probably won't be able to check that "Universal Binary" box in Xcode and be done with it.

The good news is that they will have plenty of time to work out an appropriate solution, and if their code is already portable across 3 operating systems, transitioning one of those platforms to another CPU arch can't be all that painful (I hope).

Good luck with the conversion guys!

Its like little vs big endian. Please dont start a flame war, though :B

ok the way I understood Steve Jobs: people HAVE to use a mac with Xcode 2.1 to create universal binaries that will run on the intel OS X. But he also said that for infinite time into the future Rosetta will take care of on the fly translating any non universal (Intel mac) apps.

M. Duncan