This generally isn’t relevant to Unity, but may affect some developers out there and poses and interesting question to OTEE about the direction of the company.
The company TransGaming recently announced that they have a new technology called Cider that they have developed that allows a PC game to be played on a Mac without a port being made. This apparently works by running the PC executable in a wrapper and remaps libraries on the fly.
Certainly this is an interesting technology (if it works) and significantly changes the landscape for Mac games and theoretically, other PC applications. It will be interesting to see how PC publishers and Mac publishers deal with this.
And does it automatically port HLSL code to GLSL? I mean come on, nothing is a magic bullet and it’s hard to get a technology like this close to 100%. And if it isn’t near that, then it’ll be too annoying to use.
There must be restrictions to what libraries you use that will port using Cider, especially since the website claims
Cedega on the other hand, is for playing Windows games on Linux, and seems to have limitations as well:
I would imagine that Cider would see some kind of performance hit when compared to the native Windows executable, since it appears to map between Windows and Mac technologies. There certainly are limitations to what technologies your Windows game uses that would translate to a Mac:
Unless they can really make this a “magic bullet” then you’re right Jon, it won’t amount to anything. The current claims are rather bold so it will be interesting to see a game that actually uses this.
The other possiblility is other virualization software, which seems to be a hot topic at the moment. If TransGaming can beat Parallels ( who are also trying to reach this market), then they may win the whole market with first-mover advantage.
I haven’t seen “Cider” yet, but I do have experience with Wine, DirectX for Wine and Cedega (Transgaming’s other projects) under Linux. Unlike “Parallel”, a copy of Windows is not installed on your system and the Windows OS is not emulated. In theory there isn’t any performance hit, in fact, some applications can run faster than they would under Windows.
That’s the theory. In reality Wine, DirectX for Wine and Cedega only work with a limited number of applications. Some applications (like Notepad and Microsoft Word) work seamlessly, while others (like Photoshop and some games) work but have “problems” (usually graphical issues with screen elements).
I guess we’ll see just how far Transgaming has been able to improve their technology when Cider starts to hit the streets.
Exactly my thoughts. HLSL is very similar to GLSL so that should not be a major problem. Porting the rest of D3D (all it’s versions!) to GL would be much harder I think.
Me wonders what are they gonna do with games that use libraries without source code (D3DX comes to mind first). From what I understand, Cider is not an emulator/virtualizator, so this would imply such games just won’t work. Which is probably 99% of the games. Or am I missing something? Edit: oops, it seems to be possible. They seem to load Win32 exes/dlls directly on a mac, which could solve this.
That shouldn’t be too hard methinks. I’d be impressed to see any game that uses D3D extensively running on a Mac. Or something like this for a start :roll:
Although I haven’t seen Cider, I’m guessing it has alot of Cedega and Wine code/technology in it. If that’s the case, then you wouldn’t need to “translate” any of your HLSL shaders to GLSL. What they’ve done is to get DirectX to work under Linux without the Windows operating system. Take a look at this:
