End of the official Mac OS X port

[cabbit]

I know some people have already suggested using emulation to provide a way to run OpenTTD on OS X, but it's possible to take that just 1 step further and actually offer VM image all ready to go; in fact, I'd be willing to have a go at producing a VirtualBox OpenTTD "appliance" for the stable releases and release candidates, although it looks like VirtualBox may not be fully supported on OS X, either ... unfortunately, it's the only cross-platform Virtualization software that I can work with.

[Zuu]

That sounds like a good idea. (I'm not a Mac user, but still it sounds reasonable)

Just keep in mind that you have to leave out the TTD data files and any other files which you do not have permission to redistribute. You could probably bundle it with OpenGFX though. However bundling it with graphics has a week point, there will be new releases of graphics. So if you do that then you have to add a strong recommendation that people should start with going to the online contents system and update the included content.

[Oliver_Sanders]

Virtual Box really is the last resort, it works pretty well for me on OSX but its hardly perfect. I have tested the windows versions in wine for OSX (Darwine) and they work fine. If an OSX coder doesn't materialise using the windows versions seems the most sensible option.

[orudge]

Virtual Box really is the last resort, it works pretty well for me on OSX but its hardly perfect. I have tested the windows versions in wine for OSX (Darwine) and they work fine. If an OSX coder doesn't materialise using the windows versions seems the most sensible option.

I must just say, by the way, that Darwine is now somewhat out-dated and no longer under active development - stock Wine supports OS X itself now.

[iProxy]

Hello for solve your problem I suggest you send your request here :

http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo

But you can make version for work only with X11. http://linuxreviews.org/software/x11-terms/


And Apple have added inside 10.6 Open CL... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

[Rubidium]

Hello for solve your problem I suggest you send your request here :
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo

Which of the dozens of lists? None of them even remotely says: "dump you request here and we'll make sure it gets fixed" and until I know for sure that whatever list accepts such requests I'm not going to post that request.

But you can make version for work only with X11. http://linuxreviews.org/software/x11-terms/

Does that solve all issues with OS X? Why are you linking to terminals? You mean we should make only a dedicated server for OS X? That would solve most of the issues, but isn't what you want. Not to mention that using X11 would require users to install some external thing on their computer which makes using OpenTTD even harder for those "point-and-drool" OS X users that left Windows because "it just doesn't work".

And Apple have added inside 10.6 Open CL... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

So ditch all non 10.6 users and 10.6 users that don't have a compatible video card? Also it's talking about parallelism being the most important feature of it, which is exactly what we don't need for OpenTTD. It also doesn't look like an API that is useful for putting stuff onto your screen or getting sound out of your speakers.

[iProxy]

sorry I don't have see 5 others page I have read only first page and if you want only OS X Server

Add topic for help buy this mac min server with OS X Server:

Hello members please help buy this computer for can continue dev OS X version
http://www.apple.com/macmini/server/

http://www.openttd.org/en/donate

[Alberth]

I suggest you re-read the second post at the first page that explains that money is not the core problem, and how having macs at our disposal does not solve the maintenance/bugfixing problem.

[Rubidium]

Add topic for help buy this mac min server with OS X Server

And how do we host such a server? It isn't in a size that a data centre would host it, so it has to run at someone's home which adds all kinds of (maintainance) trouble we do not want to have. Note that I think Apple is doing a bad job selling this as a server because it's nothing more than a beefed up home computer and not a server.

[dpaanlka]

Unfortunately it seems most of us Mac users no little or nothing about coding.

That's absolutely not true. Where do you think all the software you're using comes from? There is a thriving world of Mac developers. They just tend to not play OpenTTD.

This thread is merely to ask whether there is someone capable enough to continue the Mac OS X port.

Should we just, from this point on, take this to mean that unless a Mac developer literally volunteers themselves to the OpenTTD project, the Mac OS X port is dead and nobody else should waste their time thinking about other solutions?

You guys (as in the developers) should just come out and say you just plain don't have any time you're willing to spend to adopt the Mac OS X port yourselves and leave it at that. It's not the platforms fault you aren't willing to take the time to learn to develop on it properly. More and more developers every day seem perfectly capable of doing this, and here you keep trying to tell us its impossible! Impossible!!!!!

If you just say you're overloaded as it is and end it, it's much more palatable than blaming the platform and all its crazy loopy otherworldly APIs.

[Gremnon]

Unfortunately it seems most of us Mac users no little or nothing about coding.

That's absolutely not true. Where do you think all the software you're using comes from? There is a thriving world of Mac developers. They just tend to not play OpenTTD.

This thread is merely to ask whether there is someone capable enough to continue the Mac OS X port.

Should we just, from this point on, take this to mean that unless a Mac developer literally volunteers themselves to the OpenTTD project, the Mac OS X port is dead and nobody else should waste their time thinking about other solutions?

You guys (as in the developers) should just come out and say you just plain don't have any time you're willing to spend to adopt the Mac OS X port yourselves and leave it at that. It's not the platforms fault you aren't willing to take the time to learn to develop on it properly. More and more developers every day seem perfectly capable of doing this, and here you keep trying to tell us its impossible! Impossible!!!!!

If you just say you're overloaded as it is and end it, it's much more palatable than blaming the platform and all its crazy loopy otherworldly APIs.

You know, it'd help those Devs if they had a Mac computer to develop it on too. Something not easilly affordable. Plus there's the time to learn. Plus there's their life and all other work they do.

If you're so vehement it's so easy to learn, why don't you do it yourself, get a mac, and maintain it yourself? You seem to claim it's possible for anyone to do it, so prove it, I say.

[Rubidium]

Should we just, from this point on, take this to mean that unless a Mac developer literally volunteers themselves to the OpenTTD project, the Mac OS X port is dead and nobody else should waste their time thinking about other solutions?

Yes

You guys (as in the developers) should just come out and say you just plain don't have any time you're willing to spend to adopt the Mac OS X port yourselves and leave it at that. It's not the platforms fault you aren't willing to take the time to learn to develop on it properly. More and more developers every day seem perfectly capable of doing this, and here you keep trying to tell us its impossible! Impossible!!!!!

It's not that I don't have the time, it's that:

• I don't have a Mac nor the intention to ever acquire one; my opinion is that they are expensive. The few times that I have worked on them they started to annoy me pretty soon.
• I run my hardware and software fully legal:
  • I run use Linux with only packages coming from the Debian repository, except OpenTTD (and related tools) and trunk of GCC for testing.
  • For the development of OpenTTD I have VirtualBox (via the Debian package manager) installed to run my MSDN AA licensed Windows + MSDN AA licensed Visual Studio 2008.
  • VirtualBox is also used to run several free OSes that OpenTTD compiles/works on: Haiku, Hurd, OpenSolaris, *BSD.
  • All packages that I use are installed and especially (security) upgraded/updated via Debian's package manager; I don't like it when I have to hunt for newer versions of <whatever>, just do everything automatically for me please.
  • Apple does not allow Mac OS X to be ran virtualised on non Apple hardware; as a result running it on my hardware would be illegal, even though it doesn't even seem to work in VirtualBox (I won't install VMware because it caused too much crashes in the past)
• Apple has a habit of breaking (removing) APIs that it introduced a release ago. So once you have implemented something after a year or two you have to redo it with against another API and writing lots of code so OpenTTD runs on both the old Mac OS X and the new Mac OS X.
• Creating a cross-compiler for Mac OS X, although probably not fully legal, is possible. But... whatever compiles in the cross-compiler is not guaranteed to compile on Mac OS X. I've tried to maintain the port via a cross-compiler for a while and I generally introduced 0.8 compile bug for each compile bug that I fixed via the cross-compiler. This meant that repeatedly Mac OS X users had to come with patches to fix my fixes. With my new computer I ditched the cross-compiler.

So me not fixing Mac OS X has nothing to do with time, just a complete lack of interest in Mac OS X as a whole.
You probably don't even know the enormous amount of time we have spent in building the compiler that's used to make OpenTTD; we were the first that could make Mac OS X 10.5 Intel binaries with a cross-compiler! So please do not blame it on the 'fact' that we do not want to spend time on it. Hell, if we did not want to spend time on it we would have, more or less silently, dropped support a year ago by not making the compile farm and thus building the binaries.

There is one semi-active developer (michi_cc) who has implemented some things using some form of "Mac OS X"-not-on-a-Apple, but he still needed people (compile) testing it on the real thing. Even so, he has not been able to fix any of the bugs; he just implemented some features. With his hardware he cannot fix issues that are quite related to the actual hardware, like scrolling mousepad as far as I know only Apple has. I do not know whether he will accept a (few) Mac(s) and start maintaining the port and the compile farm or whether he has actually time to do so.

The rest of the active developers are, as far as I know, not interested in taking over maintainance of the Mac OS X port.

[dpaanlka]

I don't have a Mac nor the intention to ever acquire one...they are expensive...they started to annoy me ...just a complete lack of interest in Mac OS X as a whole

Sorry, I just can't sympathize with you anymore. Thousands of other developers, commercial and independent, seem to do just fine.

You've just admitted that, it's not actually any of the reasons you said earlier, but rather "I don't feel like it!" Your first line of defense is blame Apple and blame Mac OS X because how dare they tie their operating system to their overpriced hardware (aahhh!!!!!), rather than realizing that many professionals including myself buy computers to do more important stuff first, with OpenTTD being a nice afterthought. If you're going to try to push a nerd/nix agenda via OpenTTD then I think you're making a mistake because OpenTTD is just a toy and people will be sorry it's discontinued for a day or so then move on.

[thepalm]

but rather "I don't feel like it!"

You do realize that Rubidium et al are only developing OTTD in their spare time. You are not paying them anything. If Rubidium says he doesn't like something that is a pretty valid reason to not do it. People develop OTTD because they find it interesting

If you're going to try to push a nerd/nix agenda

So why is there a windows release?

[dpaanlka]

You do realize that Rubidium et al are only developing OTTD in their spare time. You are not paying them anything. If Rubidium says he doesn't like something that is a pretty valid reason to not do it.

Yeah, but the protest here isn't that they're dropping OpenTTD it's that they're blaming Apple for their own inability to develop for the Macintosh. It is not Apple's fault if you don't take the time to learn to develop on their platform. Finding it "annoying" or "confusing" because you don't know how to use it isn't Apple's fault.

The better reason would be, we're dropping OpenTTD for Mac because we don't have the time, or we're not very good with Macs, or we don't have any Mac developers. Not the "Well Apple did this and Mac OS X is like this and the APIs are oh so confusing and oh my gosh I don't know anythings!!!"

So why is there a windows release?

The aforementioned VirtualBox, which I also use on Mac OS X to run Windows 7 and Ubuntu, also for development purposes.

[tylerc]

I just wanted to chime in to volunteer my services as a software developer who also happens to be a Mac owner and user. I really really enjoy playing this game and I'd hate to see it go away for lack of somebody to hack on it. I've started going through the bug system and poking around in the source to see what I can reproduce / start debugging. I'm not an expert on Mac OS systems programming but I've been meaning to get around to it, and what better time could there be?

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

I'd like to add a few things to the discussion here.

First, Wine on OS X is perfectly fine if all you want to do is run a windowed Windows app and use ONLY that app (essentially) at a time. As soon as you want to go fullscreen or switch apps, things start to go south very quickly, depending on the version of OS X, the version of X11 you have, and whether you've downloaded updates from xquartz.macosforge.org. In other words, Wine is really not an option (neither is CrossOver), and since X11 is all borked, obviously switching to X11 as a video backend will not work either, in addition to the other reasons given for not switching.

Second, Darwine was rejuvenated for a while a few months ago; it got turned into WineBottler (which I have not tried yet, but the included version of Wine seems to be fairly up to date). Winehelper was out of date, I guess, but it didn't actually do anything other than display console output and enable you to track what programs were being run.

Lastly, I don't know Objective-C or C++ but I'd be willing to build and/or test builds. I haven't tried the latest Mac OS X nightly because I've been too lazy; OpenTTD 0.6.3 has worked fine for me in Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard. Additionally you can test basic functionality of the PPC port on an Intel machine by forcing Mac OS X to run the PPC portion of a universal binary.

[Alberth]

The better reason would be, we're dropping OpenTTD for Mac because we don't have the time, or we're not very good with Macs, or we don't have any Mac developers.

That's what we are saying.

None of us is good enough with Mac development nor has the desire to become so, at least to my knowledge. As for the thriving Mac development community, they are not here, looking into problems and fixing bugs we cannot fix. Please invite them.

To some extent, lack of a Mac-owning dev is not a problem, we make binaries for several platforms for which there is no active dev, by means of cross-compiling and/or virtual machines. However, this is where Apple comes into play:

It is not Apple's fault if you don't take the time to learn to develop on their platform. Finding it "annoying" or "confusing" because you don't know how to use it isn't Apple's fault.

I hate to bring this to you, as you seem to believe that Apple is the perfect platform manufacturer, but Apple makes life very difficult for everybody that has no Apple system, and is interested in making software available to the Mac community without too much effort. See the reply of Rubidium as well as the first posts of the topic for all the things he tried and which did not work, and the things that cannot be done due to other reasons, eg licensing.

Summary:

• There is no dev that can, or has the interest, in fixing Mac related bugs.
• We have no users capable of filling that gap.
• Apple makes it impossible to support the platform as a simple 'one of the other platforms'.

If your believe of Mac being the ideal platform is so strong, that believing we are idiots is a better alternative, then so be it. That does however not improve the chances of finding a solution.

The aforementioned VirtualBox, which I also use on Mac OS X to run Windows 7 and Ubuntu, also for development purposes.

Yes, running non-Apple stuff on Macs no doubt works nicely. Now do it the other way around, legally.

[Phx_01]

The better reason would be, we're dropping OpenTTD for Mac because we don't have the time, or we're not very good with Macs, or we don't have any Mac developers.

That's what we are saying.

None of us is good enough with Mac development nor has the desire to become so, at least to my knowledge. As for the thriving Mac development community, they are not here, looking into problems and fixing bugs we cannot fix. Please invite them.

To some extent, lack of a Mac-owning dev is not a problem, we make binaries for several platforms for which there is no active dev, by means of cross-compiling and/or virtual machines. However, this is where Apple comes into play:

It is not Apple's fault if you don't take the time to learn to develop on their platform. Finding it "annoying" or "confusing" because you don't know how to use it isn't Apple's fault.

I hate to bring this to you, as you seem to believe that Apple is the perfect platform manufacturer, but Apple makes life very difficult for everybody that has no Apple system, and is interested in making software available to the Mac community without too much effort. See the reply of Rubidium as well as the first posts of the topic for all the things he tried and which did not work, and the things that cannot be done due to other reasons, eg licensing.

Summary:

• There is no dev that can, or has the interest, in fixing Mac related bugs.
• We have no users capable of filling that gap.
• Apple makes it impossible to support the platform as a simple 'one of the other platforms'.

If your believe of Mac being the ideal platform is so strong, that believing we are idiots is a better alternative, then so be it. That does however not improve the chances of finding a solution.

As tylerc offered to do something on the Mac platform as he is a software developer and Mac owner, I think it is rude/unfair to say that there is none capable and interested in fixing some bugs.

The sparseness of developers compared to Windows lies in its install base. And while there are some few Linux flavors (e.g. Ubuntu) which are more user-friendly, most of the rest are under the control of developers/system administrators, who constantly (need to) script/program something to improve the way their Linux work.
It is certainly no excuse, but an explanation, why Mac developers are not around every corner.

Also some may think that Mac is a perfect platform, but even as a Mac user, I do not see that really. For the users it is nice to work on for sure due to its simplicity and intuitiveness , but I can definitely see that due to the constant changes under the hood some developers are/become grumpy.

Personally, I was hoping that Linux is close enough to FreeBSD/Mac OS X that a port would be easy. Obviously, that is not the case.

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

Personally, I was hoping that Linux is close enough to FreeBSD/Mac OS X that a port would be easy. Obviously, that is not the case.

If that's all you wanted was a regular UNIX app I'm sure you can have that already. As I said however, X11 is pretty terrible on Mac OS X, so that's really not an option.