Steam for Mac

Things seem to be running much more smoothly today. Whereas yesterday I was getting between 50-150kB/sec through my company's T1 line, today I'm downloading TF2 at 1.5-2MB/sec! So a 20x increase in speed. Also haven't gotten any "too busy" errors today.

Civ IV does now show up in my "all games", but not in my "Mac games"...c'mon, Valve!

Minarchist wrote:

Things seem to be running much more smoothly today. Whereas yesterday I was getting between 50-150kB/sec through my company's T1 line, today I'm downloading TF2 at 1.5-2MB/sec! So a 20x increase in speed. Also haven't gotten any "too busy" errors today.

Civ IV does now show up in my "all games", but not in my "Mac games"...c'mon, Valve!

You have TF2? Is that because you're in the beta?

Gravey wrote:
complexmath wrote:

IMAGE(http://i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv294/complexmath/noooooo.png)
Nooooooo!

That sounds like a reformatting will be required. Got a backup?

I'm a bit upset that while Portal runs like a dream at 1920x1080 and everything on high on my Boot Camp partition, it runs like a dog at 1920x1080 and medium under OS X. It's the same damn hardware and it's bad on the Apple side—and even worse when a portal is open. This doesn't bode well for the rest of the Orange Box, let alone L4D2. That's not what I was hoping to find out after a five hour download. :(

Ill make a backup today. It's a bit disconcerting that performance is a problem too though. Maybe I'd be better off with Boot Camp after all. Though I guess I can always use both, assuming I find the disk space for it.

I just tried portal, and it seems to run okay at the lowest settings, I topped at 60 fps in some areas and ~30 average and 20 when looking into a portal on my '09 13" MBP. I just can't right click, even with two fingers or cmd-click. Slightly annoying... but nothing I can't work around for Portal. For TF2 and L4D2 this is a killer...

Queueball wrote:

I just tried portal, and it seems to run okay at the lowest settings, I topped at 60 fps in some areas and ~30 average and 20 when looking into a portal on my '09 13" MBP. I just can't right click, even with two fingers or cmd-click. Slightly annoying... but nothing I can't work around for Portal. For TF2 and L4D2 this is a killer...

So does this have a 9400 in it? I've got an 8600 256meg card in my 15". I think the two should be somewhat compatible. I'm grabbing Portal now but it's slow going.

Phishposer wrote:
Minarchist wrote:

Things seem to be running much more smoothly today. Whereas yesterday I was getting between 50-150kB/sec through my company's T1 line, today I'm downloading TF2 at 1.5-2MB/sec! So a 20x increase in speed. Also haven't gotten any "too busy" errors today.

Civ IV does now show up in my "all games", but not in my "Mac games"...c'mon, Valve!

You have TF2? Is that because you're in the beta?

Do you not have it in your game list? If not, maybe it is a beta thing. I dunno. Nothing else of Source besides portal, though...no HL2 or affiliated episodes, no CS:S. I'll hop on TF2 for a short bit today and see if I can't test it out.

Minarchist wrote:
Phishposer wrote:
Minarchist wrote:

Things seem to be running much more smoothly today. Whereas yesterday I was getting between 50-150kB/sec through my company's T1 line, today I'm downloading TF2 at 1.5-2MB/sec! So a 20x increase in speed. Also haven't gotten any "too busy" errors today.

Civ IV does now show up in my "all games", but not in my "Mac games"...c'mon, Valve!

You have TF2? Is that because you're in the beta?

Do you not have it in your game list? If not, maybe it is a beta thing. I dunno. Nothing else of Source besides portal, though...no HL2 or affiliated episodes, no CS:S. I'll hop on TF2 for a short bit today and see if I can't test it out.

TF2 is not even in my game list on the mac. I believe everything else is listed, though.

EvilHomer3k wrote:
Queueball wrote:

I just tried portal, and it seems to run okay at the lowest settings, I topped at 60 fps in some areas and ~30 average and 20 when looking into a portal on my '09 13" MBP. I just can't right click, even with two fingers or cmd-click. Slightly annoying... but nothing I can't work around for Portal. For TF2 and L4D2 this is a killer...

So does this have a 9400 in it? I've got an 8600 256meg card in my 15". I think the two should be somewhat compatible. I'm grabbing Portal now but it's slow going.

It's a 9400. It's not really a great GPU, but I'm not aiming to make this a serious gaming machine. But should be good in a pinch.

EvilHomer3k wrote:
Minarchist wrote:
Phishposer wrote:
Minarchist wrote:

Things seem to be running much more smoothly today. Whereas yesterday I was getting between 50-150kB/sec through my company's T1 line, today I'm downloading TF2 at 1.5-2MB/sec! So a 20x increase in speed. Also haven't gotten any "too busy" errors today.

Civ IV does now show up in my "all games", but not in my "Mac games"...c'mon, Valve!

You have TF2? Is that because you're in the beta?

Do you not have it in your game list? If not, maybe it is a beta thing. I dunno. Nothing else of Source besides portal, though...no HL2 or affiliated episodes, no CS:S. I'll hop on TF2 for a short bit today and see if I can't test it out.

TF2 is not even in my game list on the mac. I believe everything else is listed, though.

me too

Minarchist wrote:

Things seem to be running much more smoothly today. Whereas yesterday I was getting between 50-150kB/sec through my company's T1 line, today I'm downloading TF2 at 1.5-2MB/sec! So a 20x increase in speed. Also haven't gotten any "too busy" errors today.

Civ IV does now show up in my "all games", but not in my "Mac games"...c'mon, Valve!

I've been reading up on this in the Steam forums, and it turns out that we will not be getting Civ 4 on Mac. Here's the deal:

Steam Play is not retroactive to all titles, and Civ 4 is one of the titles not included. If you bought it yesterday, then you get both Mac and Windows versions. If you bought it before yesterday, you only get Windows. The Steam Play FAQ page was even updated to reflect this.

So we owners of Civ 4 on Steam for Windows are SOL. Very sad times, thanks a lot 2K.

Queueball wrote:
EvilHomer3k wrote:
Queueball wrote:

I just tried portal, and it seems to run okay at the lowest settings, I topped at 60 fps in some areas and ~30 average and 20 when looking into a portal on my '09 13" MBP. I just can't right click, even with two fingers or cmd-click. Slightly annoying... but nothing I can't work around for Portal. For TF2 and L4D2 this is a killer...

So does this have a 9400 in it? I've got an 8600 256meg card in my 15". I think the two should be somewhat compatible. I'm grabbing Portal now but it's slow going.

It's a 9400. It's not really a great GPU, but I'm not aiming to make this a serious gaming machine. But should be good in a pinch.

A quick poke in the Steam forums suggests some culprits for the difference in performance on the same hardware:

1) Source has been optimized for DirectX since its beginning, but OpenGL Source has just started;
2) OpenGL is not as good as DirectX for gaming tasks, though it's getting better;
3) Windows handles the GPU differently than OS X, e.g. OS X leaves Quartz running when it's not needed; and
4) Apple's video drivers are not as efficient as those on the Windows side.

So that's in what I think is the order of least to most likely. I have a '09 iMac, 3.06GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, and a 9400. The bottleneck is obviously the video card, though playing 3-year-old games in Windows assuages that—it just seems OS X compounds that problem. Bummer.

On the "what's listed" front, all my prior Steam purchases are showing up, Source or not, except TF2. Deus Ex, Half-Life and expansions, HL2 and episodes, L4D2, Portal, Stalker, TFC, and The Witcher are all there but greyed out (except Portal). TF2 is AWOL.

ahrezmendi wrote:
Minarchist wrote:

Things seem to be running much more smoothly today. Whereas yesterday I was getting between 50-150kB/sec through my company's T1 line, today I'm downloading TF2 at 1.5-2MB/sec! So a 20x increase in speed. Also haven't gotten any "too busy" errors today.

Civ IV does now show up in my "all games", but not in my "Mac games"...c'mon, Valve!

I've been reading up on this in the Steam forums, and it turns out that we will not be getting Civ 4 on Mac. Here's the deal:

Steam Play is not retroactive to all titles, and Civ 4 is one of the titles not included. If you bought it yesterday, then you get both Mac and Windows versions. If you bought it before yesterday, you only get Windows. The Steam Play FAQ page was even updated to reflect this.

So we owners of Civ 4 on Steam for Windows are SOL. Very sad times, thanks a lot 2K.

Booooooooooooooooooo

ahrezmendi wrote:

So we owners of Civ 4 on Steam for Windows are SOL. Very sad times, thanks a lot 2K.

IMAGE(http://i651.photobucket.com/albums/uu231/BNoice/VaderNooo.png)

Gravey wrote:

3) Windows handles the GPU differently than OS X, e.g. OS X leaves Quartz running when it's not needed; and
4) Apple's video drivers are not as efficient as those on the Windows side.

Historically, Apple has turned a blind eye to gamers. It could be that the availability of something as huge as Steam on OSX will force Apple to at least acknowledge that people want to play games (other than Bejeweled) on Macs and OSX, and maybe provide some support. Although that would be awesome, I'm not holding my breath.

ahrezmendi wrote:

So we owners of Civ 4 on Steam for Windows are SOL. Very sad times, thanks a lot 2K.

Suddenly, I feel less bad about having missed the bundle earlier this month.

IMAGE(http://www.goopeg.com/img/ZsXg0uHn.jpg)

syndicatedragon wrote:
Gravey wrote:

3) Windows handles the GPU differently than OS X, e.g. OS X leaves Quartz running when it's not needed; and
4) Apple's video drivers are not as efficient as those on the Windows side.

Historically, Apple has turned a blind eye to gamers. It could be that the availability of something as huge as Steam on OSX will force Apple to at least acknowledge that people want to play games (other than Bejeweled) on Macs and OSX, and maybe provide some support. Although that would be awesome, I'm not holding my breath.

Yeah, it's a start, but it looks like in the meantime if I don't want to reboot I can look forward to L4D2 running even sh*ttier than normal.

syndicatedragon wrote:

Historically, Apple has turned a blind eye to gamers. It could be that the availability of something as huge as Steam on OSX will force Apple to at least acknowledge that people want to play games (other than Bejeweled) on Macs and OSX, and maybe provide some support. Although that would be awesome, I'm not holding my breath.

From what I understand, at least some of the OpenGL optimization work that has gone into OSX in 10.5 and 10.6 was done with input from Blizzard's experience with WOW; 10.5 brought a rather large speed boost from WOW that made it perform pretty similar on the same hardware as in Windows. (At least on my system...) They're doing some pretty cool stuff nowadays (including optimizing GL bytecode with llvm at runtime) that should provide good boosts. I would not be surprised if they're not talking with Apple and vice-versa, about how else to improve things.

It seems at least somewhat likely that a little optimization of the OpenGL side should help quite a bit, plus adding support for using libdispatch and some of the Apple-specific threading APIs could potentially give a big boost on Snow Leopard.

Ranger Rick wrote:

It seems at least somewhat likely that a little optimization of the OpenGL side should help quite a bit, plus adding support for using libdispatch and some of the Apple-specific threading APIs could potentially give a big boost on Snow Leopard.

That's what I'm hoping for. I'd prefer not to be playing a waiting game, but I guess that's where things are now.

I just hope they get their optimizations done in time for L4D 2. That's what I've really been waiting for, since I don't have enough free space to install it on my Windows partition.

Ranger Rick wrote:

It seems at least somewhat likely that a little optimization of the OpenGL side should help quite a bit, plus adding support for using libdispatch and some of the Apple-specific threading APIs could potentially give a big boost on Snow Leopard.

That sounds great. Maybe there will be some help from the graphics card side in the form of better OpenGL hardware drivers too. I can dream.

Just finished downloading Portal, and the sound doesn't seem to be working at all. Known issue? I'm playing on an '08 Macbook Pro 17"

Edit: Never mind - seems to be working ok on quitting and restarting.

I'm having an odd issue. I downloaded some "Meet the..." videos, but when I go to watch 'em Steam tells me I don't have the right permissions.

Anyone else having this issue? Already done the usual tricks (repair permissions, set the folder/content permissions wide open) and it didn't fix it.

Gravey wrote:

On the "what's listed" front, all my prior Steam purchases are showing up, Source or not, except TF2. Deus Ex, Half-Life and expansions, HL2 and episodes, L4D2, Portal, Stalker, TFC, and The Witcher are all there but greyed out (except Portal). TF2 is AWOL.

Huh. Same here. Kind of weird.

I'm disappointed that Torchlight saves don't sync cross-platform, but otherwise, things seem to be working fine for me so far. And not having to rebuy games in order to play them on both platforms is a major plus.

Oh, and TempestBlayze: Is that a PPC or 680xx Mac attached to that mouse?

(Why is it that I can't resist the "one-button mouse" bait, anyway?)

complexmath wrote:
Gravey wrote:
complexmath wrote:

IMAGE(http://i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv294/complexmath/noooooo.png)
Nooooooo!

That sounds like a reformatting will be required. Got a backup?

I'm a bit upset that while Portal runs like a dream at 1920x1080 and everything on high on my Boot Camp partition, it runs like a dog at 1920x1080 and medium under OS X. It's the same damn hardware and it's bad on the Apple side—and even worse when a portal is open. This doesn't bode well for the rest of the Orange Box, let alone L4D2. That's not what I was hoping to find out after a five hour download. :(

Ill make a backup today. It's a bit disconcerting that performance is a problem too though. Maybe I'd be better off with Boot Camp after all. Though I guess I can always use both, assuming I find the disk space for it.

I have heard some other games have problems with case sensitive HFS too, like WoW.

That is really crappy about Civ 4, if it stays that way. I won't be re-buying unless the bundle drops to under $10.

Looks like they've reneged on their reneging. Downloading Civ IV for the mac right now!

Hypatian wrote:

Pre-tannhausered, but the details:

Valve wrote:

Yesterday when we shipped Steam on the Mac, previous owners of the PC Steam version of Sid Meier's Civilization IV, Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword, Civilization IV: Warlords, Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization, or Sid Meier's Civilization IV: The Complete Edition did not have access to their games when logging in on a Mac.

But as of now, upon logging into Steam, those owners will have access to the Mac version of their games, right in their Steam library.

Yay! This makes me happy, because I *own* Civ IV and Warlords for the Mac already. (I also own the PC retail version, *and* the Steam version of Civ IV, Warlords, and BtS... >_>) I would be sad to have to buy it again again.

Awesome!

Huzzah! Hats for everyone!

...oh wait, this isn't TF2.

WOOOHOOOO! Now I can ruin my life by saying "One more turn, just one more turn! Oh, it's 5am..."

Anyone else having trouble launching Civ IV?