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General discussion (archive)January Mac Game Update: 10 New Additions(68 posts)(68 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted January 24, 2013
2 excellent indies and 8 classic titles join GOG.com Mac catalog!

Mac gamers! We've prepared another set of games for you today. GOG.com is now offering almost 100 Mac titles! As for today's additions, we've got some RPGs, some strategies, a point-and-click adventure, an FPS, and even a space fighter combat sim. Most of today's additions are classic titles, but we also have two indies, that should appeal to old-school gamers nonetheless. Let's have a quick look at the new arrivals, shall we?

Starting with the indies, Legend of Grimrock is one of the last year's most celebrated independent games, briliantly reprising the classic dungeon crawler gameplay in modern visual style. The game comes with an intuitive built-in Dungeon Editor. Only $14.99.

Blackwell Bundle is a collection of four old-school point-and-click supernatural investigative adventures, complete with hand-drawn graphics and top-notch voice acting. A must have for adventure gamers longing for a new story to unravel. Only $14.99.

Moving to the classics, Alpha Centauri serves as a great spin-off of the legendary Civilization series, in a refreshing Sci-Fi setting. The game now comes with a very rare addition, the Alien Crossfire expansion. Only $5.99.

Fallout 2, the larger and even more open-ended sequel to Black Isle's smash-hit RPG will have you exploring the nuclear wasteland, potentially for hundreds of hours. If you're an RPG fan, this game is an obligatory addition to your collection. Only $9.99.

Sid Meier's Colonization, the classic turn-based strategy game of conquest and management, lets you play either the French, English, Dutch, or Spanish colonial powers, each with distinct characteristics and political situations. Only $5.99

Postal 2 Complete, the legendary sandbox of sadistic stunts and mindless mayhem witn no political corectness, comes in a form of gory FPS that will have your soul twitching and your mind screaming. Comes packed with the Apocalypse Weekend and Share the Pain expansions, for only $9.99.

Ultima 7: The Complete Edition includes The Black Gate, Forge of Virtue, Ultima 7 Part Two: Serpent Isle, and The Silver Seed, so you can expect many, many hours of masterfully crafted classic isometric fantasy RPG experience. Only $5.99.

Freespace (+Expansion), the cult space combat sim that casts you as a s a pilot for the Galactic Terran Alliance in the war with the ominous alien Shivans. This edition includes the original Freespace and the Silent Threat mission pack. Only $5.99.

Terminal Velocity is an action-packed fast-paced interplanetary fighter sim straight from the depths of 1990s. Check out the 3D Realms classic for only $5.99.

Conquest of the New World, a historical turn-based strategy title that puts you in control of a native civilization or an expeditionary force from one of five European countries. Complete with the Deluxe Edition features, such as the scenario editor. Only $5.99.

That's it for our January Mac selection. We hope you enjoy it. As you surely know by now, we're continuing our work to bring more titles to your Apple computers. For example, the Mac version of Geneforge 1-5, an RPG series for die-hard fans of the genre: hundreds of hours of gameplay, and unique setting, is coming out next Tuesday. Expect even more good news from GOG.com quite soon.
Posted January 25, 2013
Good news for Mac users.
Posted January 25, 2013
Oh, now i understand. Well, then I guess it's not the same version after all. At least not exactly the same. In this case you'd have to ask the developer for details what was changed and why. I'm sure there must be some reason for t.

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rampancy: Yes, but TET's earlier comments in his interview with Inside Mac Games implied that WINE had (at least in the short-term) been ruled out as an option for adding Mac support to GOG, at that point in time at least. Clearly GOG's ability to employ and test WINE has made a lot of progress between then and now.

Using WINE as a means of officially providing support always seemed problematic because it introduced another potential point of failure for a ported game; e.g., if game X didn't work on OS X, was it because of the game, the OS, or because of WINE? - now that they've apparently sorted that out, it makes Linux support a lot easier. In other words, if they can officially support ported games using WINE on OS X, it's now a lot more likely that they can officially support ported games using WINE on Linux too.
He ruled it out, because there was nothing officially to announe yet and TET is not the lord of GoG, he can only work with what he is given. Linux Support will come one day eventually, but the main problem with Linux is and remains its lack of unity. It's much easier to get Mac support properly done where there is only a handful of possible hardware configurations. Now add on top of all the possibilities for people to run Linux all the possibilities for Wine and it's easy to see why Linux is still unsupported. If Linux was as unified as OS X I'm sure we would have seen at least DOSBox ports by now.
Posted January 25, 2013
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HiPhish: Oh, now i understand. Well, then I guess it's not the same version after all. At least not exactly the same. In this case you'd have to ask the developer for details what was changed and why. I'm sure there must be some reason for t.
I contacted Spiderweb support about it a week ago; I sent them a screenshot outlining my observations above; I've also contacted GOG about it too. Hopefully I'll get a conclusive response soon.

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HiPhish: Linux Support will come one day eventually, but the main problem with Linux is and remains its lack of unity.
Which is why I'd predict that if/when Linux support comes to GOG, it'll likely be on one distro, or a limited amount of distros (hence my remark earlier about GOG now having to work out which distros to support).
Post edited January 25, 2013 by rampancy
Posted January 25, 2013
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HiPhish: Oh, now i understand. Well, then I guess it's not the same version after all. At least not exactly the same. In this case you'd have to ask the developer for details what was changed and why. I'm sure there must be some reason for t.

avatar
rampancy: Yes, but TET's earlier comments in his interview with Inside Mac Games implied that WINE had (at least in the short-term) been ruled out as an option for adding Mac support to GOG, at that point in time at least. Clearly GOG's ability to employ and test WINE has made a lot of progress between then and now.

Using WINE as a means of officially providing support always seemed problematic because it introduced another potential point of failure for a ported game; e.g., if game X didn't work on OS X, was it because of the game, the OS, or because of WINE? - now that they've apparently sorted that out, it makes Linux support a lot easier. In other words, if they can officially support ported games using WINE on OS X, it's now a lot more likely that they can officially support ported games using WINE on Linux too.
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HiPhish: He ruled it out, because there was nothing officially to announe yet and TET is not the lord of GoG, he can only work with what he is given. Linux Support will come one day eventually, but the main problem with Linux is and remains its lack of unity. It's much easier to get Mac support properly done where there is only a handful of possible hardware configurations. Now add on top of all the possibilities for people to run Linux all the possibilities for Wine and it's easy to see why Linux is still unsupported. If Linux was as unified as OS X I'm sure we would have seen at least DOSBox ports by now.
Are you up for setting a target date on that and betting on it? I am willing to bet $100 worth of GOG games to one person that there will be no Linux support on GOG in 2013.
Posted January 25, 2013
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Kristian: Are you up for setting a target date on that and betting on it? I am willing to bet $100 worth of GOG games to one person that there will be no Linux support on GOG in 2013.
Assuming that the groundwork was laid around a few months ago with the efforts put into testing compatibility with WINE, I'd likely put preliminary limited Linux support (like with GOG's initial push into OS X support) as coming around 2014, if not late 2013. I wouldn't bet on it though, but I'd be fairly bullish on it.
Posted January 25, 2013
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Kristian: Are you up for setting a target date on that and betting on it? I am willing to bet $100 worth of GOG games to one person that there will be no Linux support on GOG in 2013.
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rampancy: Assuming that the groundwork was laid around a few months ago with the efforts put into testing compatibility with WINE, I'd likely put preliminary limited Linux support (like with GOG's initial push into OS X support) as coming around 2014, if not late 2013. I wouldn't bet on it though, but I'd be fairly bullish on it.
That's my thinking as well. If it does come out this year it will be very much later this year. My guess is probably sometime in 2014 for some type of official Linux support (I'm not going to prognosticate about which or the number of distros :P), with 2015 at the latest. They may not have actually started on Linux support yet, but I think it will before 2015 though. If I had to narrow a time down, first quarter of 2014. :)
Post edited January 25, 2013 by crazy_dave
Posted January 26, 2013
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Kristian: Are you up for setting a target date on that and betting on it? I am willing to bet $100 worth of GOG games to one person that there will be no Linux support on GOG in 2013.
Eventually could bean even in 10 years, but I'm sure it will come eventually.
Posted January 26, 2013
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crazy_dave: The thing I'm curious about is the joystick - last I tried Wine and early pre-DirectX (winmm) joystick games did not get along in OS X (Linux-Wine has the appropriate joystick code, OS X - wine does not).
I tried my old Logitech Wingman joystick with latest wineskin and ws9wine1.5.21 engine and it is working...
Posted January 26, 2013
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crazy_dave: The thing I'm curious about is the joystick - last I tried Wine and early pre-DirectX (winmm) joystick games did not get along in OS X (Linux-Wine has the appropriate joystick code, OS X - wine does not).
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cyboff: I tried my old Logitech Wingman joystick with latest wineskin and ws9wine1.5.21 engine and it is working...
which game? Freespace? Because it is still not working for me for Freespace either on GOG's default engine or on engine ws9wine1.5.21. The game recognizes that I have a joystick but doesn't recognize button presses or axis movements.

In contrast, a later game like IL-2 recognizes them just fine.

My joystick is a Logitech 3D extreme pro.
Post edited January 26, 2013 by crazy_dave
Posted January 27, 2013
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cyboff: I tried my old Logitech Wingman joystick with latest wineskin and ws9wine1.5.21 engine and it is working...
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crazy_dave: which game? Freespace? Because it is still not working for me for Freespace either on GOG's default engine or on engine ws9wine1.5.21. The game recognizes that I have a joystick but doesn't recognize button presses or axis movements.

In contrast, a later game like IL-2 recognizes them just fine.

My joystick is a Logitech 3D extreme pro.
for Freespace it is strange - with GOG provided wine 1.3.5 joystick is not detected at all, with wine 1.5.21 it is detected in setup and it is working well there, but it is totally dead inside the game - no buttons, no movement... I thought it can be something wrong in joystick mapping in the game, so I checked it by installing normal windows version of Freespace (where all worked well for me) through wineskin, but it is the same problem...
Posted January 27, 2013
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crazy_dave: which game? Freespace? Because it is still not working for me for Freespace either on GOG's default engine or on engine ws9wine1.5.21. The game recognizes that I have a joystick but doesn't recognize button presses or axis movements.

In contrast, a later game like IL-2 recognizes them just fine.

My joystick is a Logitech 3D extreme pro.
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cyboff: for Freespace it is strange - with GOG provided wine 1.3.5 joystick is not detected at all, with wine 1.5.21 it is detected in setup and it is working well there, but it is totally dead inside the game - no buttons, no movement... I thought it can be something wrong in joystick mapping in the game, so I checked it by installing normal windows version of Freespace (where all worked well for me) through wineskin, but it is the same problem...
Interesting I think my joystick got detected by both engines, but was dead inside the game regardless.

The reason the joystick gets detected but is dead in-game is because OS X-wine lacks the joystick code to pass the joystick commands to the old winmm control system. In a recent addition (engine 1.3.19/20 somewhere around then), OS X-wine gained the ability to do it for games using dinput (DirectX). Linux-wine has the code for both winmm and dinput for awhile. OS X-wine has only the latter. When downloading the wine source code you can even see this in the number of joystick files for Linux versus OS X. Apparently if you know what you're doing, the code to make the winmm work in OS X-wine shouldn't be too bad (would be similar to the dinput which one has the Linux and OS X versions and winmm version for Linux). While I'm an okay scientific programmer, I'm not sure I'd know enough to solve it. However, I've often wistfully thought of trying. :)

The bug report is here:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18424
Post edited January 27, 2013 by crazy_dave
Posted January 27, 2013
Too bad about the joystick issue with Freespace. I guess I will still be playing that one within a Parallels WinXP virtual machine then. I must have the joystick for a space sim game.

I imagine this means a gamepad would not work either, right?

I probably should just do the work to install FSOpen but when I looked over the instructions for a OS X install of that I became confused and my head began to hurt so I put it off for maybe/someday.
Post edited January 27, 2013 by dirtyharry50
Posted January 27, 2013
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cyboff: for Freespace it is strange - with GOG provided wine 1.3.5 joystick is not detected at all, with wine 1.5.21 it is detected in setup and it is working well there, but it is totally dead inside the game - no buttons, no movement... I thought it can be something wrong in joystick mapping in the game, so I checked it by installing normal windows version of Freespace (where all worked well for me) through wineskin, but it is the same problem...
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crazy_dave: Interesting I think my joystick got detected by both engines, but was dead inside the game regardless.

The reason the joystick gets detected but is dead in-game is because OS X-wine lacks the joystick code to pass the joystick commands to the old winmm control system. In a recent addition (engine 1.3.19/20 somewhere around then), OS X-wine gained the ability to do it for games using dinput (DirectX). Linux-wine has the code for both winmm and dinput for awhile. OS X-wine has only the latter. When downloading the wine source code you can even see this in the number of joystick files for Linux versus OS X. Apparently if you know what you're doing, the code to make the winmm work in OS X-wine shouldn't be too bad (would be similar to the dinput which one has the Linux and OS X versions and winmm version for Linux). While I'm an okay scientific programmer, I'm not sure I'd know enough to solve it. However, I've often wistfully thought of trying. :)

The bug report is here:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18424
But I still do not fully understand, why joystick is detected and functioning well during calibration in setup (FreeSpace.exe). It must be something like FreeSpace.exe is using dinput and FS.exe (game itself) winmm then, really strange:D Btw. I checked that Freespace 2 has similar behavior when installed in wineskin.
Posted January 27, 2013
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crazy_dave: Interesting I think my joystick got detected by both engines, but was dead inside the game regardless.

The reason the joystick gets detected but is dead in-game is because OS X-wine lacks the joystick code to pass the joystick commands to the old winmm control system. In a recent addition (engine 1.3.19/20 somewhere around then), OS X-wine gained the ability to do it for games using dinput (DirectX). Linux-wine has the code for both winmm and dinput for awhile. OS X-wine has only the latter. When downloading the wine source code you can even see this in the number of joystick files for Linux versus OS X. Apparently if you know what you're doing, the code to make the winmm work in OS X-wine shouldn't be too bad (would be similar to the dinput which one has the Linux and OS X versions and winmm version for Linux). While I'm an okay scientific programmer, I'm not sure I'd know enough to solve it. However, I've often wistfully thought of trying. :)

The bug report is here:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18424
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cyboff: But I still do not fully understand, why joystick is detected and functioning well during calibration in setup (FreeSpace.exe). It must be something like FreeSpace.exe is using dinput and FS.exe (game itself) winmm then, really strange:D Btw. I checked that Freespace 2 has similar behavior when installed in wineskin.
Yeah the transition for games is about 1998-2000 (from wikipedia dinput was first introduced in 1995, but it seems games didn't start adopting that instead of winmm until later). So how I *think* it is working is that wine has a method to detect the joystick connected to the Mac, it passes that info to the game. The game knows the joystick is there. If the game uses dinput, then wine can pass the button presses/axis changes to the game's queue. If not, it can't. As to why the calibration routine works, it may indeed not be the game's queue receiving that information, but a "system" queue as if it were running the Windows calibrator from back in the day. Honestly I have no idea. :) It is also possible that indeed the game has some early dinput code, but uses winmm for most of it. ::shrugs:: There are also even slight discrepancies between the Mac-wine and Linux-wine dinput code where Linux version can alter axes in the registry.
Posted January 27, 2013
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dirtyharry50: Too bad about the joystick issue with Freespace. I guess I will still be playing that one within a Parallels WinXP virtual machine then. I must have the joystick for a space sim game.

I imagine this means a gamepad would not work either, right?

I probably should just do the work to install FSOpen but when I looked over the instructions for a OS X install of that I became confused and my head began to hurt so I put it off for maybe/someday.
nope, gamepad won't work either

Actually getting FSO to work is not so bad - it just looks worse than it is (admittedly not as easy as the days when Turey's automated installer was working which is when I first downloaded FSO - I believe they are working on a new installer though). Part of the complication is that you have to install GOG's FS2 on your mac using wine first then move the game out of the wineskin. After that it is just downloading items one at a time and placing it in your Freespace 2 folder: download the Freespace app (build 3.6.14 is the most recent one), wxlauncher (the thing you use to launch the game), move some cutscene files around a bit, download the 3.6.12 media_vps (hi_res graphics), et whoa-la! In the launcher, you select the app (3.6.14) and the mod (media_vps) and you're playing a hi-res, native Mac version of FS2. To play FS1, download the FSport mod and in the launcher select FSport-mediavps as the mod you want to play. I had some trouble with the cutscenes for the 'ancients', but those were easily solved by replacing the cinematics FSport came with, with the GOG FS1 versions (different video encodings).
Post edited January 27, 2013 by crazy_dave
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General discussion (archive)January Mac Game Update: 10 New Additions(68 posts)(68 posts)
(68 posts)