Mac Games at WWDC 2023

I’ve been really impressed by the games sessions so far at WWDC 2023. One of my complaints about Metal has been with the really small amount of community documentation – it can be difficult to find resources specifically on porting from DirectX. It looks like a problem Apple is really beginning to tackle. Automated conversion from HLSL based shaders is also a really good improvement. I’d love to see them support SPIRV shader conversion as well...

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Mac games and cursor warping weirdness

On the first internal test of Uru for Mac, I got some weird feedback from testers. As the player character was walking, the game wasn’t responding smoothly to the mouse. As the player moved the mouse to turn the player, the player would turn in fits and starts. The way Uru handles the mouse is pretty common for games, especially third person games. You hold down the mouse button, and then move the mouse left or...

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Scaled Back Apple Silicon Mac Pro?

Mark Gurman posted an update saying the M2 Extreme chip had likely been cancelled. I’m going to assume what Gurman is reporting is accurate, because it generally is. Workstation chips are expensive to design and produce. CPUs like the Xeon are sustainable because Intel splits the development cost over a wide range of customers. It didn’t seem sustainable for Apple to design a workstation chip just for the Mac market. According to Gurman, this is likely...

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One Year of Working on Myst Online for Mac/Metal

It’s been a year since I started working on the Metal version of Uru/Myst Online! In 2020, I received an Apple Silicon Developer Kit. One of the first things I did was make a list of games I wanted to see on Apple Silicon. I wanted to understand the performance of the DTK, and I also wanted to keep some existing titles from being lost in the transition. On that list was Uru/Myst Online by Cyan...

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An Early Eulogy for the Intel Mac Pro

The Intel Mac Pro at it's introduction

As Apple gets closer to replacing the Intel Mac Pro, I’m not sure what my next desktop Mac is going to be. I’ve always found myself working on many different kinds of projects over the life of my Mac. And it’s been important to me that my Mac should be able to evolve with me. If I have a new graphics project, I should be able to install the GPU that I need. New project going...

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Breaking up with Twitter

Since the Twitter buyout saga initially started, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to engage with social media. I want to do more medium and long form content about projects I’m working on, such as Metal and games. And I also want to own and control my content. Going forward I won’t be posting to my Twitter feed directly. I’ll configure WordPress to tweet out new posts. I may also still respond to...

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Transitions

I’m still learning SwiftUI. Learning something new is hard. I taught myself programming by typing random commands into HyperCard on a Mac SE. After that, I did REALbasic. When I was 14, I started learning Cocoa using whatever Apple tutorials and sites I could find online. It was a struggle. No one had taught me about classes, polymorphism, or memory management. I wrote a lot of bad code long before I wrote a lot of good...

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Reading Between The Lines On Marzipan

John Gruber today posted some reliably sourced rumors about Apple’s cross platform efforts. Most notably, he’s placing any changes in 2019, and not at WWDC 2018, and casting doubt that what Apple is doing is UIKit on the Mac. (And if you follow me on Twitter, you’re likely aware that I feel that UIKit on Mac would be a bad move.) “XKit” not assured. I read iMore’s article first and got quite excited about the prospect of an...

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Apple Universal API

I’ve been thinking about what a unified Apple API could look like. One of the biggest issues is that iOS devices and Mac devices are very different, and even some iOS devices like the AppleTV aren’t even similar to devices like the iPhone or iPad. One option Apple has is creating a new, massive API that exists on both iOS and Mac. This is a tremendous undertaking. It’s taken Microsoft many years of public iteration on...

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What should be the 2018 Mac Pro?

I’m really happy to see Apple’s announcement on the Mac Pro today. Last November I wrote: “Even if you think the Mac Pro is going to be updated, Apple’s lack of a mention of it (or the iMac) implies that Apple is still misjudging the expectations of the pro community. When you’re a Pro, you don’t like uncertainty around the tools you need to earn a living. Would you risk your business on a vendor that...

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