Impact of Apple's Switch to Arm on Mac Gaming

[marshman]

Hi, Paradox has been pretty great about porting games to Mac but with the shift to Arm I'm wondering if they'll still be able to do this as seamlessly.

Civ VI is alrready on iOS which now works on Macs- I'm wondering will Pardox do the same? Can they just compile their games in Arm?

Would love any knowledgeable opinions.

 

[Idhrendur]

Hi, Paradox has been pretty great about porting games to Mac but with the shift to Arm I'm wondering if they'll still be able to do this as seamlessly.

Civ VI is alrready on iOS which now works on Macs- I'm wondering will Pardox do the same? Can they just compile their games in Arm?

Would love any knowledgeable opinions.

It depends on the level of hackish behavior on Paradox's part, but it's probably 'just' a recompile with whatever new tooling is out there.

But I'd guess it would also involve buying a new Mac as a build machine, at least. Apple doesn't seem the kind of company to create a cross-compiler. Still, all things considered, that's a pretty trivial expense (about half a man-week or so buy my ballpark). There may also be some limitations on which OS versions/computers are supported after a while.

 

[marshman]

It depends on the level of hackish behavior on Paradox's part, but it's probably 'just' a recompile with whatever new tooling is out there.

But I'd guess it would also involve buying a new Mac as a build machine, at least. Apple doesn't seem the kind of company to create a cross-compiler. Still, all things considered, that's a pretty trivial expense (about half a man-week or so buy my ballpark). There may also be some limitations on which OS versions/computers are supported after a while.

Isn't it more complicated than just recompiling - they have to at least write a version in MacOS right? I don't think they even do that now.

 

[Idhrendur]

Isn't it more complicated than just recompiling - they have to at least write a version in MacOS right? I don't think they even do that now.

Ah, yes, I was assuming they had a MacOS version. If they don't there's potentially a lot more work involved. But it really depends on how they set things up.

For example, in the converters I developed, all that's really needed for a Mac version is functions to handle various disk access things, and possibly some character conversion things (and a Mac build environment). But we're not doing anything fancy. If we were doing graphical work, there might be a greater need to redo the graphical parts for the different OS. And if we had multithreading, it would really depend on the multithreading model we had adopted. Some are mostly universal. Some are OS specific.

 

[pomegranate321]

They have MacOS versions for many of their games (I play quite a few on my Mac). So the question is will they continue offering Mac version going forward?

 

[sbalani]

I think there is actually a fantastic opportunity here for Paradox. Not only should they (I hope) add support for mac. Should they choose not to, Apple has released its own virtualization tools like rosetta. It's not ideal for games, but it would be a start. However the true advantage for Paradox here, in supporting the new apple architecture is that games optimized for the new mac....would also run on the Ipad/Ipad pro. Which, with IOS14 is getting, not only expanded controller support. But also Keyboard & Mouse support for games. Finally making it suitable for serious pc-like gaming. I honestly only take my laptop these days for gaming. The Ipad is an extremely capable gaming device, and being able to play strategy games on my Ipad, would finally allow me to travel with just that device.

I dream for the day. It would also open up a potentially whole new market for paradox

 

[Kovax]

If the games are written with the basic UI functions all calling device-specific "drivers" as needed, it should only require rewriting the drivers for the new machine. That could take some time and effort, but if the program has already taken it into account up front, it shouldn't be a major obstacle. If that's NOT done up front, then the conversion from Intel's architecture to an ARM processor after the fact could be a daunting task.