Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Wednesday, April 17, 2002
11:25 - If you can't beat 'em... http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/top_news_item.cfm?NewsID=4522	(top)
Well, this was certainly an unexpected twist. A British firm called Coderus has just announced a development API toolkit called MacDX. This product's lofty goals are nothing less than an implementation of DirectX for the Mac. They claim that this has the potential to cut porting turnaround time on DirectX games from months to days. Which in turn would pretty much eliminate any of the economic commitment barriers preventing game developers from releasing Mac versions, which until now have had to be developed for OpenGL and GameSprockets/OS X HID. I'm still not sure how I feel about this-- the gut reaction is naturally "Feh! More stooping to the lowest common denominator! More crawling on the floor for scraps from Microsoft's table!" But then, the more I think about it, this is probably going to turn out to be a very significant benefit-- and almost without drawbacks, in fact. Considering that this article is an exclusive pre-story before a much longer one in the upcoming MacWorld issue, it seems many people are hailing it as such. And with good reason, I would venture. Okay: Idealism is one thing. Native Mac applications have their set of philosophical standards, their UI guidelines, their Cocoa frameworks and their open-source spirit. We can revel with pride in those. But games... well, it's been a long, long time since games had any visual or operational bearing on the platforms they ran on. The line between PC and console games is blurring more and more with each passing day. (Think back to 1993-- and imagine a TV ad for a game, like Doom for instance, that is being released simultaneously for PC and the currently popular consoles. Wow! Freak show! Remember what happened when they tried? Remember that so-awful-it-caused-permanent-brain-damage port of Wing Commander for the SNES?) UI issues are a thing of the past; every game now has its own interface and its own set of controls, and there's no dependence on Windows control methods or even any understanding of how Windows works. Port a game to the Mac and it looks almost exactly the same as on the PC. So where's the "purity" argument? There really isn't one. The only complaint I would have is about users having to install this implementation of DirectX in order to play games developed with it. But apparently that's not going to be necessary: A developer-level solution, MacDX furnishes an application with DirectX- interfaces and functionality, so the product runs as it would on a Windows PC. Thomas explains: �The MacDX interface provides a development path to the Mac OS platform, which gets the most out of your existing development investment with minimum development-time required.� So this isn't going to be like a "DirectX emulator" or a Classic compatibility box. It's something for the developers themselves to use, and end-users would see nothing but the usual game installation. And it would just work. If this works as well as Coderus claims, it could well open the floodgates. After all, how many people do I know who say with wistfulness and considered thought, "Gee, I'd like to buy a Mac-- except there are so few games available for it"? A lot. The perceived lack of a game library is a very big part of what's keep people off the Mac right now. Why didn't anybody see this coming? Was it that off-the-wall an idea? Did people just not think it was possible to port DirectX to another platform? And if this was possible, what about DirectX on Linux? Huh? Huh?