Space Empires on MAC

Give up the mac man, I used to be a die hard mac fan... software just isn't there, especially games.

SEV, more than a feeling.

Less people use mac than Linux. I wish they would do a linux port over mac for sure, then mac users can switch to linux and play as well as people with PCs on linux.

Linux needs more native games, instead of using bad 1 cd per computer Windows and proprietary expensive macs they can use a free OS that can be used on any type of computer.

I wish they would work on Linux over Vista support even, vista is the biggest hog trash OS in years.... Linux has offered more for longer and you dont need 2 GB ram to play games on it either. My brother bought a new PC, no programs aside from Vista on it, and Vista tells that its using 43% of his 2GB of memory.... and people buy this OS? You would think they have deals with Kingston or Crucial....

There hasn't been many good native games on linux in a while, only a few shooters that are quite old and free open source games. There used to be a lot of companies that did linux ports but they stopped.

Actually I wouldn't consider a linux port vs a mac port. If you have a source code that can compile on Linux, it could take one guy a matter of hours to port it to OSX. Sometimes it just works without any modifications. Usually the biggest issue is the endianess, but it's a CPU specific issue (biggest or smallest byte first in multible byte variables) and since Apple switched to Intel, the problem is avoided if you target Intel Macs only. Sad for the PowerPC users, but true.

The huge question is if some Windows only libraries are in use, like DirectX.

As for playing on a MacBook. SE5 works great in bootcamp so if you want the hardware, then go for it. It appears like VMware and parallels will some day support advanced games like SE5 (WMware's beta already supports DirectX 8.1 hardware acceleration, but it shows signs of being a beta). One thing that you should be aware of is that you should have an external mouse with two buttons if you plan on using windows. A mighty mouse works nicely, but any other USB mouse with two buttons will do.

I wouldn't say that macs lack software. It's true when it comes to games, but not software in general.

Too bad that the mac lacks certain games. I would love not to need to reboot into bootcamp when I want to play certain games. I see the biggest reason to the lack of mac games in DirectX. Software developers decides on DirectX for a reason or another and then they forget about linux and mac until it's too late and way too expensive to recode all graphical stuff. Moving to intel (and the same endianess as windows) will likely not change much about this issue.

As I understand it SEV is a directX reliant game but it might be worth dropping Aaron an E-mail about porting it to LINUX as whilst the user base is small a game Like SEV with its immense ability to Mod would appeal to the sort of person who likes LINUX. Also LINUX games are not that common so it’s a hungry market

You guys talk like it's either mac or linux, but not both. This is not the case. The smallest change I have seen that was needed to port a game from linux to mac was an addition of 3 lines!
Now how long does it take to write 3 lines? Considering you might have to find the right location for them and add comments: 5 minutes if you know what you are doing. (ok, then some stuff should be added to make the game feel more native to the system, but it was working after just adding 3 lines)

The main issue is that DirectX is windows only. If the game can be ported to linux, then it can be ported to mac in within a timescale that's financial sane.

Funny thing is that if the game were open source and not relying on any Windows only libraries, then it would be ported to mac and a zillion variants of linux by now.

It also probably wouldn't have been made, because our dear Aaron wouldn't have made very much money on it as a commercial venture...

Open source is great, but it also tends to be hard to make a profit on unless the market is right.

I am 100% sure that there will never be a mac or linux port done for se5. Go vote SE5 up on winehq its gonna get more accomplished.

edit: heres a link for the internet inept http://appdb.winehq.org/votestats.php