As a Unity developer, I used Windows machines almost exclusively. Around a month ago, My tools expanded to include an i7 Mac Mini and iphone 4.
While I’m not going to talk about the merits of Mac vs PC, I will be discussing the merits of working from a Mac platform after using PC.
I advise using the system settings to swap the command and ctrl keys on the keyboard. This will allow you to keep your kinetic awareness of the ctrl commands used for copy and paste.
Almost all of my open source tools, Gimp, Blender, Inkscape, Sculptris, Wacom tools, and of course Unity. A few have not been ported to Osx, leaving me to wonder why, since they often have linux versions… Either way, mac seems a solid primary development platform overall.
Unity seems slightly odd in how the interface and tools work on a Mac, leading to small glitches I don’t see on the PC. On the other hand, I get less hard crashes.
The builtin backup, easy-to-use filesystem, usb 3.0 ports combined with an external hard-drive makes for some of the best backup functions available.
It’s the only functional way to produce for the iPhone platform. Combined with Xcode, it makes for a very solid development system. Not sure how well the mac produces for the android platform yet.
The main reason I got an quad-core i7 was in order to deal with the cpu heavy needs of unity pro, such as rendering the shadow passes and using other cpu heavy rendering tools. Trying to do that on an i5 would just be too painful. It’s processing power is high enough to make reasonably short work of the CPU intensive processes. Even better, it’s quiet, even with the fan running hard and the cpu hitting temps ~100C. Nothing to complain about there.
Long story short, even a low-end i7 Mac Mini does a great job. So for those of you considering a Mac for iPhone development, I really advise it’s worth the cost. Just keep in mind, you’ll also probably need a keyboard/mouse/monitor for it. If you want dual monitors, you’ll need to add a thunderbolt port adapter for hdmi.
I prefer Unity on a Mac, with the exception of more or less having to use the schizophrenic MonoDevelop. This is no surprise, as the Editor was Mac exclusive for quite some time (v2.5 was its Windows debut).
I too have seen glitches, but I think they’re related to the latest versions of OS X. I’ve deliberately kept my workstation a few versions behind and had no issues, but have heard from others that it’s less than perfect on the latest, and have seen what I suspect are related issues on other workstations at work which have been updated. No idea why, but some things in the GUI just don’t seem to size or lay out properly.
One thing that constantly irks me on Mac is the mouse acceleration. It’s not that I think the default is silly, that’s completely subjective. It’s that it’s somehow tightly bound to the mouse sensitivity, changing one always changes the other, and even 3rd party hack solutions don’t fix the whole problem, so unless your preference happens to be the default settings there’s no way to customise it to be just-right for you. I find this boggling coming from people who are supposedly all about “user experience” on a system that pushes mouse interaction so strongly (I mean, seriously, some dialog boxes can’t even be interacted with by keyboard, they literally force you to mouse around).
I disagree to some extent: Most people here are indy developers, and that almost always involves a few of the following situations:
They need to produce on a budget, this means that many won’t have the budget for multiple detail levels and such.
This means they need to determine the percentage of the population they want to produce for, and that means dealing with low-end graphics capacity.
Almost all macs deal with gl level graphics, and even under the best graphics card, this limits shader power and ability. (Mind you, you can find tricks around this, but it’s still a limit…)
Combine this, and we find that mac can work wonderfully for most indy game designers starting out, meeting the qualifications for minimum entry. Keep in mind, by the time they have the funds for UnityPro for all team members, and possibly for Ios and android, along with the cost of multiple other tools, you would think that they would have a hardware budget as well for macs, pcs, android phones, tablets, iphones and ipads,
On the other hand, many start out with unity free and run from there… And with iphone being the platform of choice, this means they need the cheapest way to produce for one. I have tried using a virtual machine to run osx, and it did NOT run well, stably, or usable enough even on an i7 heavy PC. This means mac is pretty much the only choice right now, and mac minis make for the best entry point combining raw processing power vs cost.
And if the games they make sell, or make a profit? Upgrade. Old macs seem to resell for much higher than old pcs. They should be able to get back over 60% the value of what they paid on it, ESPECIALLY if you get the extended warrantee… I know I could not find a used mac at ANYTHING resembling a reasonable price for used.
Of course, this is based on my research and needs, but I’m pretty sure I’m not too far off the money.
I’ve had Steermouse for ages and it works for making the mouse behave like I want. I also have ContollerMate…pretty cool, but I can’t help wishing it had a scripting interface; the visual stuff is “neat” but frustrating when I want to do something complex.
Integrated graphics just means it uses main memory instead of dedicated VRAM. It doesn’t have anything to do with the capabilities of the GPU. The early integrated GPUs such as the Intel GMA 950 were fairly poor, but later ones are better.
Does SteerMouse actually fix the problem? Properly? I want linear acceleration and separate speed scaling.
I’m hesitant to fork out for a pricey solution when so many other claimed solutions just flat out don’t work, in ways that suggest they didn’t actually understand the problem int he first place.
Edit: From the same guys as SteerMouse, CurseorSense seems like it solves just the acceleration/speed issue without additional features, and it’s just half the price. It also seems like it might not mess with other stuff your mouse drivers might do, so if you’ve got a mouse with fancy features it you might not lose support for those (but not sure).
As far as I understand it, integrated can render it, just slower. The main issue is with shaders that use advanced tricks only available to dx11 on pc. The macs just don’t even know how to process it, since the version of GL they use has nothing comparable.
