End of the official Mac OS X port

[Rubidium]

Also this might be worth a look: http://www.macports.org/

In my understanding its a ports system similar to what BSD uses but made compatible for OSX.
This would mean that with little work you could make the linux build work in macports and thus on OSX

That'd mean using SDL. SDL's slowness and buggyness was the reason to write a full blown OS X port. Given the fact that the last stable release of SDL says, in the changelog, 'SDL now builds on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).' is not very hopeful for it building on Mac OS X 10.6. The changelog of the SDL 1.2 'release' branch shows signs of fixes needed for Mac OS X 10.6, which makes it even more likely to not build at all.

So the idea is nice, the result isn't what you want.

"port" OpenTTD to yet another 3rd party cross platform library like for example Qt or GTK+

That would require us to get those libraries supported by the compile farm, which is far from trivial. Even the simpler libraries pose a big enough challenge to get working.

[Gremnon]

I've had fairly good results with Wine, myself, although I'll concede it's not perfect.
And in response to whoever said Wine isn't on OS X - Here is proof otherwise - perhaps under a different name, but it does the same thing.

[orudge]

And we all know Wine is not for Mac OSX and Crossover stinks.

It does? I'm pretty sure, last time I checked, both Wine and CrossOver run OpenTTD fine. On my (old, Core Duo 1.83GHz) MacBook, it runs at a reasonable speed, too.

Obviously, running OpenTTD natively is preferable, though.

[Phx_01]

If we start using emulators, we can also go for the "big" ones like Parallels or VMware Fusion or go for Boot Camp. I even believe that some Mac users have a copy of Parallels or similar anyway. So, the issue of needing Windows (Crossover claim) is more a background issue than a real one. The thing is that I would rather be able to run OpenTTD natively. Especially after I tried v0.7.x on Parallels and the mouse was a bit over-sensitive within the game environment (in the rest of Windows it is just fine). And starting Boot Camp for a game like OpenTTD is like using it to play Hearts: It's overkill.

Also, I tried Crossover myself (try before buy) and I agree that many software which I use does not run properly or at all. Nothing to do with the price tag. If the intended games/productivity software would run, I would also pay the price for it, but I did and do not see it happen and hence stick with Parallels (office stuff) and Boot Camp (games).

[planetmaker]

I know that I'm not helping the issue: but Rubidium is absolutely right, SDL is something which would need an effort in porting itself before it could help porting OpenTTD to OSX. In other words: SDL doesn't work for me[1] and my currently preferred OSX version (10.6).

And instead of stating how bad this all is (yes it is!), I propose to actually take on the issues at hand; they need quite some time to get the mind wrapped around the issues, but they are feasable. Bit by bit.

[1] I know, "doesn't work" is no proper error description. But SDLlib requires symbols and functions which simply are not there (anymore) http://pastebin.ca/1577228

[andythenorth]

Wrong argument (correct argument is "how to maintain Mac support?"), but Crossover more or less is wine. Look at my config line for nforenum:

Code: Select all

NFORENUM = /Applications/CrossOver.app/Contents/SharedSupport/CrossOver/bin/wine --cx-app "renum.exe"

That's just FYI.

Meanwhile I'm going to try OpenTTD on Crossover this weekend.

[Crass Spektakel]

I happen to own a PPC Mac out of curiosity - I rarelly use it but OpenTTD is one of the few installed Applications though I never updated it beyond 0.6.something.

What exactly is the problem differating Mac from Standard-*nix?

Is OpenTTD accessing the Mac through Quartz or by X11? I would be really surprised to hear that Macs get problems with a X11 port because I found OpenTTD to compile nearly on everything perfectly as long as I get SDL and X11 (Yes, I compiled OpenTTD on my Simpad and my NetBSD-Amiga, works slow but flawless)

Kick the Quartzport and make X11 an requirement, should solve several dozend problems. Macusers ought to have X11 installed anyway (it isn't installed by default but done with three mouse clicks in two minutes)

[orudge]

Wrong argument (correct argument is "how to maintain Mac support?"), but Crossover more or less is wine.

CrossOver is Wine with a nice GUI, plus various fixes and enhancements. It doesn't run everything, for sure, but it does run a number of applications well. TTDPatch runs pretty much flawlessly on it, and when I last tried OpenTTD (which was a while ago), it worked well enough too. But anyway, just my 2p, and I may be slightly biased towards CrossOver due to the fact it's my job to work on it!

[Rubidium]

What exactly is the problem differating Mac from Standard-*nix?

Where should I start? Universal binaries, libraries that are common on standard unix are not available of Mac OS X because they implemented it somewhere in their API, a different encoding for the file system than any other OS, a different language (objective C) to talk to the OS, ...

Is OpenTTD accessing the Mac through Quartz or by X11? I would be really surprised to hear that Macs get problems with a X11 port because I found OpenTTD to compile nearly on everything perfectly as long as I get SDL and X11 (Yes, I compiled OpenTTD on my Simpad and my NetBSD-Amiga, works slow but flawless)

Kick the Quartzport and make X11 an requirement, should solve several dozend problems. Macusers ought to have X11 installed anyway (it isn't installed by default but done with three mouse clicks in two minutes)

The current Mac port uses Quartz and Quickdraw, where Quickdraw is the faster *but* deprecated variant. Both Quartz and Quickdraw are significantly faster than SDL. The pure OS X port was made because the SDL port had a number of unsolvable issues, which is why going back to SDL will not fix bugs, but only more reintroduce bugs than it can potentially fix; not all OS X related bugs can be solved by going to another GUI backend. Especially because SDL does NOT work for OS X 10.6.

Not to mention that we have so far failed to make universal binaries with SDL, so going for SDL would mean dropping OS X from the compile farm effectively making it an unsupported OS. Which is exactly what we are trying to prevent.

[planetmaker]

Using macports you will be using X11 which is available free in every OS since 10.4

Please try to install SDL, also via macports, on OSX 10.6. Get beyond what I posted in the footnote to my previous posting here.

Besides that, IMO a native solution is definitely preferrable - it's going to be faster usually.

[Phx_01]

I am not sure how the various packages are intertwined, but the way I understand it is that X11 is some sort of Linux window system.

Does one need to rely on SDL or something else when using X11? If not, then I agree with Crass Spektakel that every Mac comes with X11 (not necessarily already installed, but simply done).

Some cross-platform productivity software relies on X11 like Gimp, Inkscape or OpenOffice. While those are rather productivity applications and not games, I do not know what else would be required for a 2D game like OpenTTD or if X11 is too slow to render it.

[Rubidium]

How often do I have to repeat that changing the video backend does not magically fix all bugs; most of the bugs are NOT related to the video backend and as such changing the video backend does NOT fix those bugs.

Again I have to stress that supporting X11 (or any other video backend) directly requires that some writes that backend. Given that nobody seems to be interested in developing OpenTTD for Mac OS X, what is the incentive to write another video backend? Especially when that video backend would make OpenTTD harder to install. Also do not forget that adding any libraries (such as the X11 libraries) means that the compile farm needs to be updated, that binaries need to be tested, etc... all of which requires a developer who knows Mac OS X and has the interest and time to work on OpenTTD.

So what does adding another video backend change from the current situation?
- more changes to the compile farm
- more Mac OS X developer time required
- more bugs because of a brand new video backend
- more difficulty getting OpenTTD installed, so more support requests/complaints/annoyances

And what doesn't it change?
- the number of bugs (most Mac OS X bugs are not due to the video backend)
- that we require a Mac OS X developer
- the chance that the port remains 'supported' (it might actually make the chance lower)

[pseudoprometheus]

Hm, I'm quite disappointed that things have come to this. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, given the points put forth, but OTTD's such a great game so I'm going to miss it.

Perhaps we could publicize (or ask others to publicize) our need for Mac-specific volunteer devs in other places, particularly those frequented by Mac devs? Places like iDevGames come to mind.

Anyway, regardless of what happens to support for the OS X port, I do want to thank you for all the hard work you've done to help us Mac players, Rubidium. It hasn't gone unappreciated.

[Phx_01]

How often do I have to repeat that changing the video backend does not magically fix all bugs; most of the bugs are NOT related to the video backend and as such changing the video backend does NOT fix those bugs.

Sorry about my ignorance, but either it has not been stated clearly enough before or we misinterpreted it. In other words: You do not. You just needed to state it clearly once.

Due to my lack of understanding, I was taking X11 as a window wrapper (something similar to an emulator of some sort). Hence, I drew the line from Linux over X11 to Mac.

Since you now explained that this is merely a video backend and not like an emulator, I got enlightened once again and do now understand why this is not feasible to use.

[Tygernoot]

Hi guys,

I don't read here very often, nor update the game a lot . The last version I had installed on my Mac was 0.5.2. Since I was out of internet (and wife ) at home for a few weeks, I launched OpenTTD again. It ran fine under Snow Leopard. A few days ago I downloaded the latest version (0.7.2 I think) at work and installed it at home. All of a sudden the animations were a little bit choppy. Like one out of every 20 frames was skipped.

I decided to check out the forum about the issue, and so I just read how the Mac ports are in difficulty. I'm a bit sad to see the Mac support possibly being dropped, although I can understand it. I was actually amazed you were able to compile the binaries without a Mac!

It's quite amazing to see support for this very old game still going on. I guess it simply proves that the game has never been equalled by any other in all these years. I don't think I played it enough to become really good at it, but I can still enjoy it from time to time. It reminds me of my (even) younger days when I first played TTD

Being a software engineer, avid Mac user and having some OSX/iPhone programming knowledge I would be pretty interested working on the Mac port. It sounds like a good and fun challenge with lots of things to learn from it. However, I just moved to another country for my new job which is taking up a lot of my time and I'm involved in another pretty huge 'hobby' software project as well. So I doubt I would have enough time to fully dedicate myself to the project, which is a shame as it sounds like an excellent experience. Perhaps if I can liberate some time in the nearby future I can take a look at the source code and bug tracker to see what needs to be done. But for now I'm pretty limited in spare time.

As you discussed already, something to consider is that there are other solutions for OSX users. Why not simply use VMWare (or Parallels), launch a small Windows image or your Bootcamp partition and play the game. VMWare has a 'union' view where you can just have your Windows windows next to your OSX windows. It's like running it natively (well, almost ). The amount of PPC users is dropping quickly anyway so almost everyone can do this. Considering the % of OpenTTD users on a Mac, is it really worth it to have a native version? Of course it's a bit nicer not having to boot a virtual Windows, but consider the effort of doing a few clicks against a guy programming his brains out to get everything to work properly

Another solution would be to create a cider or crossover port. I have no experience using those tools, so I can't say how well that works. But it might be worth looking into before starting a full OSX port. I read a bit of the discussion above about people that don't like them or their results, but it's worth a try before throwing the idea out of the window.

Just out of curiosity, is there any estimate of the actual amount of (OSX) users?

Greetings,
Edward.

[orudge]

I can't comment on the number of OS X downloads, but so far this month, 87.1% of hits (about 5.5 million) on the forums are from Windows, 6.8% (440K) Linux, and 4% (262K) Mac. The next highest number is 0.1% for OS/2.

[Rubidium]

Statistics about the actual use of OpenTTD are quite hard to get; most do not play multiplayer games or use NewGRFs or use AIs, which means multiplayer and 'bananas' counts are probably far from the truth. Especially because we do not know what percentage uses NewGRFs or AIs.
We had almost 3.5 million 'bananas' downloads since its introduction, over 361 different downloadable items (including different versions of the same) which give ~10.000 downloads of each item (on average). The AI libraries have ~30.000 downloads of each item. One of the AI libraries has been downloaded almost 50.000 times, which would imply 50.000 users (assuming they do trash everything on reinstalls).

Statistics about downloads we have [0], but that does not account for the vast number of tertiary download sites; forums that host our binaries, 'free game' websites or websites of e.g. computer magazines. Also it is quite unknown how much OpenTTD is compile directly from our subversion repository or how many is distributed by fans to their friends.
Generally speaking (based on purely our website) about 40.000 'stable' downloads are made a month of 'latest stable'-ness. 0.6.3 which was the 'latest stable' for 6 months got 230.000 downloads, 0.7.0 110.000 downloads and 0.7.1/0.7.2 80.000 downloads. 0.7.0 is still downloaded 250 times a week!
Given that people in this thread are saying they seldomly update we 'could' just assume that nobody downloads the binary twice (cancels out the people who rarely update). So with 4 releases a year and stable 500.000 downloads a year one could say we have 125.000 users.

So I'd, given those numbers, assume that we have (at least) 100.000 users, so ~6.000 Mac OS X users as 6% of binary downloads is for Mac OS X [0]. Assuming 1 in 5 still uses a PowerPC processor [1] that would give at least 1.000 PowerPC Mac OS X users.

[0] http://www.openttd.org/stats
[1] http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats/pa ... endor.html

[grzywa]

I registered to post in this topic.

As a great fan of TTD it is really bad news about the possible demise of the mac port. Most of us mac switchers are not going back the microsoft windows way, ever. Sadly, I know nothing about programming and I cannot contribute code. If there is any other way to support the project, let me know.

cheers

w.

[andythenorth]

I have tested the following combination
- OpenTTD 0.7.2 for 32 Bit Win 2K / XP / Vista
- Crossover 7.0.2
- OS X 10.5.7
- Macbook Pro (Intel 2.53)

It appears to install and work fine so far. Installs with OpenGFX by default.

To use original TTD graphics, improved start screen, and (I'm guessing) tram tracks, there was some extra work needed providing some missing files...in addition to the 'data' folder that you'll know and love, the Mac OpenTTD package contains another data folder that has files you'll need.

Depending on your install location, the path is something like:

Code: Select all

Applications/OpenTTD/OpenTTD\ 0.7.2-RC2.app/Contents/Resources/data

You can get to these using the context menu on the Mac OpenTTD.app - 'Show Package Contents'
I copied all of the files from that location to the 'data' folder in my Crossover install of Win OpenTTD. There may be an alternative way to do this, I am just describing what has worked for me. The required files were also available in my svn checkout of OpenTTD source.

Performance appears absolutely fine so far, no noticeable difference to native Mac OpenTTD. My typical game is 256x256 game with hundreds of vehicles, so not as demanding as players who like big maps. It's a meaningless number, but top showed OpenTTD in Crossover sucking down about 8% of CPU, not a lot. No scroll lag, no drawing glitches. Opening/quitting the app is much slower though.

Quality wise there are still Mac-related issues with fonts etc, which means this doesn't match up to Rubidium's standards as a solution.

Crossover's not ideal, but it does give me the confidence to carry on with my newgrf projects...I haven't drawn or coded anything this week as it's hard to be enthusiastic when you know the game is dying on your platform.

cheers,

Andy

[andythenorth]

Great, but isn't Snow Leopard the real problem? So far every release worked fine for me in 10.5 but not on 10.6.

Well I have neither Snow Leopard nor Crossover 8 to test with. Anyone else care to try?