Guild Wars 2 for Mac

[JiaYow]

It takes a minute if that to reboot. If that's to long get a SSD and do it in like 10 seconds.

It's not because of the time it takes to reboot.

People usually enjoy idling in MMOs, even using them as instant messengers and so on. Because of this, many people, like me, have their games running in the background while doing other stuff. Or they might want to splitscreen play/chat on desktop, or whatever. Endless possibilities.
Now, if you have to use Windows everytime you want to play GW2, you have to stop doing whatever else you're doing at that time, or install everything (have fun with constant Skype synchronisations) on both OS. While that's of course all possible, it's really annoying.

I'll give you a small example from me. I'm an iOS developer, so I usually have my coding environment active at any time even after work, casually switching between programming and playing/chatting and so on. Now, a friend comes online and asks me to do an event with him real quick. I have to save and close down everything I'm currently doing, reboot, start GW2, and play. Say, my friend goes afk for a few minutes. Instead of using the time to read through my source code, I have to do something else, just because you can't develop (legally and/or easily) for iOS on Windows, at least the environment is drastically different. Usually someone might IM me while I play and ask me for some information, which I can't access from Windows (maybe because the password is stored in the Mac Keychain or whatever). Now I have to ask him to wait until I stop playing, which plainly sucks. After I stop playing, I have to reboot again into MacOS, open everything I was working on and proceed. Obviously that's much harder than just alt-tabbing around.

You see, while it's of course not impossible to just boot around, it's a real pain.

[zaphon]

Well unfortunately you're fighting a losing battle here. Even with Steam now available on the Mac, the adoption rate of new games is still almost non-existent. I have 4 Mac Pro's (1 2008, 3 2009's) in my house, and sadly all 4 are now running Windows 7 as their OS simply due to software support (Mac OS X is completely gone, and I didn't see a point in scrapping the hardware just yet, as the 2008 had 32GB of ram, and the 2009's have 24GB of ram, and all had dual quad core xeons. The only thing I upgraded was the video cards to ATI 6950's (about the best you can put in a Mac Pro due to the power supply) While WoW runs under Mac OS X, simply rebooting to Windows 7 I gained almost a full 100% frame rate increase, plus the ability to enable more features). To get around the problem you're running into, I actually have Lion running under Virtual Box and it works quite well (as well as I have a Macbook Pro which still runs Lion full time)

So I understand your desire, but the reality is it's likely not going to happen, and even if it did, it would run better under Windows (Mac's video driver support is lacking)

[Arkenaw]

Not to sound like I'm bashing, but I just don't understand why people who game on the computer would ever own a mac.

[zaphon]

Not to sound like I'm bashing, but I just don't understand why people who game on the computer would ever own a mac.

Simple answer, as a long time UNIX based developer (15+ years), it's the only machine that really solved the problem of giving me a full UNIX development environment that ran Microsoft Office native (so I can send people spreadsheets/powerpoints/etc. that they can actually open (openoffice just doesn't cut it)). For now I have a powerful enough machine that I can do most of what I need to do in VirtualBox, but just a few years ago, that wasn't really possible.

[JiaYow]

Not to sound like I'm bashing, but I just don't understand why people who game on the computer would ever own a mac.

Because iOS/Cocoa developers play games too. And many other people who just happen to like Macs more.

[Lucky_]

It takes a minute if that to reboot. If that's to long get a SSD and do it in like 10 seconds.

Don't use full restart of the OS. Just hibernate one and resume other. Even on hard drive, that will take as long as it takes to save entire RAM to hard drive, and read the contents of RAM from another OS back from HD to RAM.

Using an SSD that takes just a few seconds and saves people developing the game a lot of effort.

[Deleted]

I wouldn't hold your hopes up for Mac or Linux native clients, there's a lot of additional overhead in officially supporting those operating systems and while Blizzard have the resources for that, I'm not sure ArenaNet do.

However that being said, due to the way Guild Wars was originally developed, it was very easy to get it fully working under WINE for Linux and I imagine similar is possible on the Mac. Hopefully Guild Wars 2 will be of equal standing and then we'll have best of both worlds.

[Deleted]

Not to sound like I'm bashing, but I just don't understand why people who game on the computer would ever own a mac.

Bought mine to develop for the iPhone and mac...and because I knew that dual booting with windows was easy, so it was kind of a versatility thing.

At the moment the iMac devours everything I throw at it...when it starts to chug I'll build a dedicated gaming box. I'm *hoping* I'll be able to plug it in to the iMac screen.

[Deleted]

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Please post productively. Infracted. -Edge

[masterpiece]

-Snip-

You could always write a program to run GW2 on a mac since you say your a developer, an improved version of wine for this game specifically. I'm sure mac gamers everywhere would love that.

[JiaYow]

You could always write a program to run GW2 on a mac since you say your a developer, an improved version of wine for this game specifically. I'm sure mac gamers everywhere would love that.

That's like telling you to win a soccer match, alone against a full national team, because you're a "gamer". :-p

However, as Lashen correctly said, GW1 works like a charm under Wine, maybe we'll be lucky with GW2.

[sacrypheyes]

You could always write a program to run GW2 on a mac since you say your a developer, an improved version of wine for this game specifically. I'm sure mac gamers everywhere would love that.

actually, there's already a mac version of wine/cedega : cider. as for the gw2 support, time will tell if it'll work.

also, i believe there are 2 ways to use windows on a mac :
- bootcamp : dual boot system (OS X / Windows) which most people know
- VMWare : while cedega/wine/cider "translate" software instructions, VMWare emulates an entire configuration (meaning it can run OS other than windows btw), allowing you to run windows and applications without rebooting your mac but can be a bit slower than the bootcamp solution as you have to share resources - the difference might be negligible if your cpu supports virtualization, which most recent intel-based macs do i believe.

[Deleted]

- VMWare : while cedega/wine/cider "translate" software instructions, VMWare emulates an entire configuration (meaning it can run OS other than windows btw), allowing you to run windows and applications without rebooting your mac but can be a bit slower than the bootcamp solution as you have to share resources - the difference might be negligible if your cpu supports virtualization, which most recent intel-based macs do i believe.

A lot of games can't be played within VMWare, Virtualbox or similar. Either the game can't interface with the virtual driver properly or the framerate is unplayable (2-3 frames per second) as a lot of virtual software doesn't have very good 3D support yet.