News Important Mac announcement

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amigacooke {macOS}

amigacooke {macOS}
I don't suppose there's any possibility that we can avoid going over the same ground again?

What's done is done, and different conclusions can reasonably be drawn from past events, actions and statements.
 
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Jack Schitt

Jack Schitt
Max Factor said:
Are you really saying that Mac users funded ED getting off the ground. I would say that the more likely scenario is that the Mac sales were a tiny amount of the fund that helped make ED. Most of the money was not from the Kickstarter at all.
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Context.

  • On December 27th 2012 the pledge fund stood at £982,000 against a target of £1.2million by January 5th. A stretch goal for a native Mac version of ED was announced on the same day, if the fund reached £1.4million before the end of the campaign.
  • On January 3rd 2013 the campaign reached its original target of £1.2million and ED was funded.
  • On January 4th 2013 the campaign reached £1,443,634 and the Mac version was officially confirmed.
  • On January 5th 2013 the campaign came to an end with a total pledged sum of £1,578,316.
There was a surge of pledges between the announcement of the Mac stretch goal and the campaign crossing the line, alongside a bunch of anecdotal quotes from Mac users announcing that they had pledged. It is not possible to determine whether the campaign would have succeeded without the Mac users' direct contributions or the attention they and the gaming media brought to the project, but they were not insignificant.

It is most unlikely that ED would exist in its current form had the Kickstarter campaign not been successful. There's a possibility it wouldn't exist at all, although only DB/FD will ever really know what alternative strategies were on the table had the KS failed.

You're right in that the money spend on the design and development of ED over the past six years dwarfs the original KS campaign pot. But the Kickstarter is what got the ball rolling, and Mac users were definitely a contributor to that.

On a personal note, when the KS was funded I was looking for new hardware to replace my ageing PC both for general use and as a machine on which to play ED. I came this >< close to dropping a small fortune on one of the then new "dustbin" Mac Pros. Given the ultimate fate of both that platform and the OSX version of ED, I seem to have dodged more bullets than Neo when I eventually went with a new PC instead.

So I'm no hardcore Mac advocate by any means. Just pointing out that Mac users played a significant role in the Kickstarter, which in turn greenlit ED. Some will also have been instrumental in helping to steer the early development of the game via the Backers' Forum and/or the DDF. IMO they have a right to feel a little miffed at how things turned out. The only unanswerable question is whether to point an angry digit in the direction of Cupertino or of Cambridge, or to cross one's arms and do one of each.
 

Noobilite

Noobilite
I wonder if they will do something with vulkan eventually or similar and make an overlay to get it working again. Can they translate to metal? I'm surprised vulkan doesn't have stuff built in to do this since vulkan originated from metal. Or they both originated from the same place. I don't remember.
 
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-VR- Max Factor

-VR- Max Factor
Jack Schitt said:
Context.

  • On December 27th 2012 the pledge fund stood at £982,000 against a target of £1.2million by January 5th. A stretch goal for a native Mac version of ED was announced on the same day, if the fund reached £1.4million before the end of the campaign.
  • On January 3rd 2013 the campaign reached its original target of £1.2million and ED was funded.
  • On January 4th 2013 the campaign reached £1,443,634 and the Mac version was officially confirmed.
  • On January 5th 2013 the campaign came to an end with a total pledged sum of £1,578,316.
There was a surge of pledges between the announcement of the Mac stretch goal and the campaign crossing the line, alongside a bunch of anecdotal quotes from Mac users announcing that they had pledged. It is not possible to determine whether the campaign would have succeeded without the Mac users' direct contributions or the attention they and the gaming media brought to the project, but they were not insignificant.

It is most unlikely that ED would exist in its current form had the Kickstarter campaign not been successful. There's a possibility it wouldn't exist at all, although only DB/FD will ever really know what alternative strategies were on the table had the KS failed.

You're right in that the money spend on the design and development of ED over the past six years dwarfs the original KS campaign pot. But the Kickstarter is what got the ball rolling, and Mac users were definitely a contributor to that.

On a personal note, when the KS was funded I was looking for new hardware to replace my ageing PC both for general use and as a machine on which to play ED. I came this >< close to dropping a small fortune on one of the then new "dustbin" Mac Pros. Given the ultimate fate of both that platform and the OSX version of ED, I seem to have dodged more bullets than Neo when I eventually went with a new PC instead.

So I'm no hardcore Mac advocate by any means. Just pointing out that Mac users played a significant role in the Kickstarter, which in turn greenlit ED. Some will also have been instrumental in helping to steer the early development of the game via the Backers' Forum and/or the DDF. IMO they have a right to feel a little miffed at how things turned out. The only unanswerable question is whether to point an angry digit in the direction of Cupertino or of Cambridge, or to cross one's arms and do one of each.
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There is always a surge as the compaign comes to an end in a kickstarter. There is no evidence to suggest the mac users got the game funded. But they did contribute, that I have not denied. Whether that contribution got the game funded or not is a different matter. We don't know and probably never will do.

As to macs I am a big fan of the OS. I find it far superior to windows in just about every way and have used macs for a long time. The first mac I ever used was a Mac Classic II with a small B&W built in screen.

But the Mac PC's are not really great for gaming, I wish they would do a more upgradeable and cheaper home PC mac (not the mac mini) for people that want to play games and use it for other stuff at the home. I would probably get one in a heartbeat and if necessary, just use bootcamp to boot into windows for certain games. But alas they do not.
 
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amigacooke {macOS}

amigacooke {macOS}
Max Factor said:
But the Mac PC's are not really great for gaming, I wish they would do a more upgradeable and cheaper home PC mac (not the mac mini) for people that want to play games and use it for other stuff at the home. I would probably get one in a heartbeat and if necessary, just use bootcamp to boot into windows for certain games. But alas they do not.
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I don't deny that for a second. However, I suspect that Macs are just as capable of playing games as the vast majority of Windows machines which are not used, nor specified for, playing games specifically.
 

Phoenix_Dfire

Phoenix_Dfire
Jack Schitt said:
Context.

<Snip>

It is most unlikely that ED would exist in its current form had the Kick-starter campaign not been successful. There's a possibility it wouldn't exist at all, although only DB/FD will ever really know what alternative strategies were on the table had the KS failed.

<Snip>
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Didn't Fdev say that they'd already spent something like £8 mil of their own money developing the game and the kick-starter money was the icing on top. What I believed the kick-starter did was allowed frontier to release this independent of a publisher but I do feel that ED would probably be pretty similar to what we have.
 

amigacooke {macOS}

amigacooke {macOS}
With the benefit of hindsight, and in my opinion only, the KickStarter allowed Frontier to pretend that the money we strove to raise was vital, whereas in reality, it was not.
 
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-VR- Max Factor

-VR- Max Factor
amigacooke said:
I don't deny that for a second. However, I suspect that Macs are just as capable of playing games as the vast majority of Windows machines which are not used, nor specified for, playing games specifically.
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Most windows machines are for office work, but as we are talking about gameplaying lets keep it at that. Most people that play games are not going to buy an office PC.

Lets look at the Macs available. The Mac Mini and the 1080p iMac will not be great as the GPU's are very weak.

The 4K iMac would be okay, but the GPU is not that great on either, the more expensive one would be best, that is currently sitting at £1450.

The 27" iMac is the best of those, but they are sitting at between £1800 and £2250 and none of them are that upgradeable. I don't think you can upgrade the GPU (not sure on this, you never used to but that may have changed).

The iMac Pro will be, but that is £5000 and the Mac Pro's will be too but they are £3000 and £4000 pounds.

Not really what most would spend on a home computer primarily for gaming and emails. Most of them are production computers and not really designed for the home apart from the Mac Mini but that won't be any good for gaming. The price of the Mac Mini with only a Intel UHD Graphics 630 GPU is exorbitant.

As I said, if they produced a Home PC that was upgradeable and that didn't mean you had to remortgage your house to buy, then I would be all in.
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
Max Factor said:
As I said, if they produced a Home PC that was upgradeable and that didn't mean you had to remortgage your house to buy, then I would be all in.
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Just buy ex workstations and pop in a low mid end card. I bought an HP Z400 with a hex core CPU, 16 GB RAM, GT 1030, Win 10 included for £250. Plays ED really well and plenty of scope for upgrades.
 

Razzerman

R
Max Factor said:
Yes you could. But the cheapest one is £800. Add an E-GPU to it, that will take the cost to well over £1000.
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I'd agree with this. You may as well buy a cheap (£500-ish) gaming pc and have done with it. Even with the eGPU setup, you'd still need to put Bootcamp on it to run E:D anyhow, so there's not really any point.

Also the eGPU set up isn't without it's issues
 

Crazy Joe

Crazy Joe
Noobilite said:
I wonder if they will do something with vulkan eventually or similar and make an overlay to get it working again. Can they translate to metal? I'm surprised vulkan doesn't have stuff built in to do this since vulkan originated from metal. Or they both originated from the same place. I don't remember.
Click to expand...

Vulkan has nothing to do with Metal. Vulkan was an effort by the Khronos group to take the ideas and architecture created by AMD for their Mantle API and create a industry supported standard from these to replace the aging OpenGL standard. Metal on the other hand was Apple's effort to create a gpu programming platform for their mobile devices. This was later ported to OSX and extended somewhat to offer support for the more extensive features that discrete non-mobile GPU's offer over their mobile cousins.

Apple hasn't signed on to the Vulkan SIG and as such their devices don't have support for Vulkan. And their support for OpenGL was frozen at the level of OpenGL 4.1 (I think) from 2010, hardly what you would call modern.

There is a project running under the auspices of the Khronos group to create a Vulkan to Metal translation layer, that would allow Vulkan based applications to run on OSX, but it doesn't support the complete feature set of Vulkan. You can find out more about that one here => https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/portability-initiative
 
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