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Back in 2007, games developer Valve’s Gabe Newell said:

“We’d love it if (Apple) would get serious about (games). But they never have…It seems bizarre because it’s like one of the biggest things holding them back in the consumer space. If you look at a Macintosh right now, it does a lot of things really well compared to a Vista PC, but there are no games.” He was right, it was bizarre.

And it continued to be bizarre until the March of this year, when Valve announced it would be releasing its Steam digital download service for games on the Mac – which accounts for 70% of online games sales – as well as releasing all its past and upcoming Source-engine games.

Why the change? John Cook of Valve: “The Mac is a very attractive platform for entertainment as a service.” But it’s been around since 1984. Why wasn’t it attractive before?

For years gaming on the Mac was possible, but undesirable; the user base relative to the PC was low, almost no-one had a graphics card that was designed for gaming, and because of compatibility issues games had to be made from scratch rather than ported.

Moreover, where Linux always shared the same IBM architecture and had a devoted network of hardcore volunteer programmers, the Mac had too many obstacles to overcome at once, and not enough people willing to meet the challenge.

The advantages it did have were standardisation and an untapped, relatively wealthy market, enough to tempt only a few intrepid developers. However, with the shift from the PowerPC architecture in 2006 to Intel architecture, every Apple’s innards suddenly became functionally equivalent to those of a typical Windows PC.

Gavriel State, CTO of game-porting experts Transgaming, explains: “The biggest (remaining) hardware difference is on the desktop side, where most PCs use add-in cards for graphics, while only Mac Pros have upgradable graphics cards on the Mac side.” So developing on the Mac was easy but apparently not desirable for Apple.

Newell again, pre-2010: “I just don’t think they’ve ever taken gaming seriously. And none of the things developers ask them to do are done. And as a result, there’s no gaming market there to speak of. We’d love it if they would get serious about it. But they never have, and can’t even follow through on any of their commitments for game developers.”

Apple was interested, but gaming was never a focus. Perhaps wisely, its longer-term plan was more concerned with securing its current market – whether that was music or mobile phone – rather than pushing the Mac into a direct competition with the next generation of consoles as they launched.

Four years on, those ‘new consoles’ are starting to look weary in comparison to what a specced-up Mac or PC can handle, and suddenly the Mac looks attractive.

Instead of £40 games that require systems worth hundreds of pounds, now you can get quality games for pennies. Indeed, you can get exactly the same version of Football Manager on your iPhone for £7 that costs £25 on the PSP – and that’s regarded as overpriced!

Indie developer James Brown, of Ancient Workshop, makes the key point, though: “The real change that’s happened here is not so much the hardware as the general resurgence in Apple’s fortunes. It’s no longer a niche; it’s something you develop for as a matter of course.”

The glorious success of the iPhone is really bleeding over onto Apple’s main systems, at exactly the time its putative rivals have stumbled.

Whatever the reasons, Mac gaming has started to boom. Despite the advent of this new age, it’s still hard to find publishers who are willing to talk about it – expertise seems thin on the ground and nearly all developers, even longterm Apple aficionados, have developed almost exclusively for PCs, and Windows PCs at that.

Many still employ porting-houses to transfer games across, or use Transgaming’s Cider tools – EA has used this to port all of their recent triple-A games, from Spore to Red Alert 3 and The Sims 3. But just how easy is it to develop for the Mac?

THE SIMS 3: The perennially popular Sims series already has Mac status

Ex-EA and Lionhead developer James Brown continues to develop his Ancient Frog game simultaneously for iPhone, Mac and PC; “Games are probably the easiest type of application to adapt from PC to Mac. Where you run into difficulty porting an application from one platform to another is in the user interface. And a game pretty much is a user interface – it exists solely as something to be interacted with, and that interaction is something which shouldn’t be shoe-horned into the platform’s general look and feel. Imagine writing a puzzle game that conforms to the Mac OS human interface guidelines; it would just show you the completed puzzle.”

Industry veteran Dallas Snell, who worked on Ultima 1 to 8 and now works on social games and MMOs for Portalarium, says that the hardware isn’t the problem: “The real magic is keeping everyone’s social graph interconnected with our back-end infrastructure that spans multiple clients, multiple devices, multiple operating systems, multiple browsers and multiple social networks.”

Transgaming’s States points out: “One nice advantage to developing for the Mac is that there are few system configurations that must be supported compared to PCs. Most Mac gamers are quick to adopt the latest OS updates, especially compared to what happens with PCs. On the flipside, because the Mac OS is so tightly integrated with hardware, Mac users only get new updates to video drivers as part of the OS.”

Are these porting houses still necessary then? “If you’re a Windows developer making Windows games, then a porting house will save you an awful lot of work.” says Brown. “But you’re paying someone else to do what is really your business, and for your next game you have to get them in again to do pretty much exactly the same work.”

States, CTO of the biggest rival to porting houses, the conversion technology Cider, is even more scathing: “The kind of porting house that was typical of the Mac gaming world is likely to have little place in its future. As the Mac becomes a bigger percentage of the overall PC market, more game developers and publishers are looking at getting into the platform directly, rather than trust IP and profit margins to third parties.”

Transgaming’s Cider engine makes porting a lot easier, dodging problems involving build systems, middleware adaptation and graphics paths, and helping with the difficult UI adaptation.

One of the most annoying aspects of current releases is that the Mac seems to lag behind the PS3, PC and 360 – the Chronicles of Riddick took an extra year to come out on Mac. So are simultaneous releases possible in the future?

“Definitely!” says States. “The easiest way to handle multi-platform development is to make sure you’re building on each platform right from the start.”

And Brown is ahead of the game: “One of the reasons I’m constantly switching back and forth between the Mac and PC is that I catch any non-portable code immediately, while it’s still fresh in my mind and it hasn’t burrowed its way to the heart of the code base. When the game is finished on the Mac, it’s finished on the PC.” Even Valve has committed to releasing Portal 2 simultaneously on all platforms.

There’s a caveat here though – while we’ve been talking about this being a new age for Macs, it’s a more of an age for low-powered gaming. The real platform of the moment isn’t the iPhone, or the Wii or even the Mac. The most played game today, with 28.8 million players every day, three times that of World of Warcraft, is… Farmville. And Facebook is the platform.

Love it or hate it

Yes, ‘social gaming’ is the phenomenon of the moment and hugely profitable – MobWars is estimated to earn $1,000,000 a month from micropayments alone. Developers are cutting their teeth in indie games and then racing from the saturated iPhone market and the heavily restricted console markets over to Facebook. A good, well-integrated game can set a lone developer up for life.

COMING SOON: Diablo isn’t just any old game – the series has a cult following online

Even the big developers, like iD and Firaxis, are porting their games to a free-to-play model. Quake Live is out, the next Civilization game will be Facebook only, and a free-to-play massively multiplayer version of Tiger Woods is available already.

These are the games that are really eroding the difference between Mac and PC, and as these and game-streaming services like OnLive grow, players will no longer have to invest in expensive hardware on any system.

So what does the future hold for Mac gaming? As we’ve seen, the additional cost for developers to develop for the Mac is shrinking, especially with tools like Cider available. So it’s likely we’ll see the Mac taking its place alongside the other platforms, receiving simultaneous releases.

Still, the real gaming, on any platform, is going to be online and free.

View full post on TechRadar: latest computing news

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How sturdy is Apple’s latest gadget, the iPad? Senior Editor Tim Moynihan applied our grueling set of classic stress tests to the device so you don’t have to…

The grep command is a hugely powerful way to search through files. Like many command line utilities, once you’re comfortable using it, you will discover that it is surprisingly fast and accurate.

However, many Linux users only bother to learn one or two grep options and then use them as a kind of one-size-fits-all approach to searching. A little time spent learning what grep can do will pay dividends – and there’s nothing more satisfying than knowing exactly how to use a command to find something in a jiffy.

We’ll start out with the basics and build up a repertoire of ways to use grep, before finishing with some things to check out if you’re still hungry for more.

The examples that follow use the OpenBSD calendar files. These are already installed by default on Ubuntu, Mint, and even the Mac, along with many other distros.

However if you are a Fedora user, and you want to follow along, you can add them manually by selecting the System > Administration > Add/Remove Software option from your desktop. Search for calendar, check the box next to Reminder Utility and click Apply. Or, just run yum install calendar on the command line. Now for the important stuff.

Basic searches

The grep command looks for the following things:

1. Any options you might use to tailor your search.
2. The string (or pattern) you are looking for.
3. A location in which to search – either a file or a directory.

As a quick example, try:

grep first /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history

Let’s examine exactly what’s happening here. We’ve asked grep to find all instances of the string ‘first’ in the file calendar.history.

Bear in mind that grep is case sensitive – compare the different set of results you get if you run:

grep First /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history

If you want your search to return everything, regardless of capitalisation, use the -i option to ignore case.

grep -i first /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history

All good so far.

Now, what if you want to search in more than one file? There are many calendar files we might want to look in, so change the file path to a directory and then use the -r option so that grep searches recursively through all the files and subdirectories it finds under the specified directory:

grep -ir first /usr/share/calendar

Each line of output is now prefixed with the name of the file. Note that the order in which you add options after the ‘-‘ character does not matter.

Sometimes the examples above are exactly what you need; if you’re looking for a letter you wrote to someone called Don Jenkins, and you know that it’s somewhere in your home directory, you can probably find your file with:

grep -r Jenkins /home/faye

However, what if you run your grep command, but you don’t get the results you expect, or you get so many matches that you can’t tell one line from another?

Customise your output

Let’s make it a bit easier to see what we’re doing by turning on grep’s highlighting option. This time we’ll search for ‘war’.

grep -ri –color=auto war /usr/share/calendar/

That’s better, now you can see the actual string you are searching for (if you are running Linux Mint, highlighting is turned on by default).

BRIGHTEN YOUR SEARCH: Highlighting your grep output brightens your terminal and allows you to see the wood for the trees

Next, let’s make sure we aren’t picking up any substrings, since grep will list all matches even if they are part of another word. For example, our search for war is also picking up a line about Rod Stewart.

You can prevent this by requesting whole word matches only, with the -w option. This reduces the number of matches by two thirds. We know this because you can use grep to tally up instances, rather than report them directly, by adding the -c option:

grep -riwc war /usr/share/calendar

You can see that grep outputs the number of matches for each file it searches. If you were searching a single file, it would simply return a single number.

One last thing before we move on: if you want to search for more than one word, you need to use single quotes to retain the whitespace:

grep -ri ‘civil war’ /usr/share/calendar

That’s all well and good, but when I search for something like “$20“, it all goes horribly wrong. What’s happening? OK, there’s something else about grep that you need to know, and that’s the fact that it’s designed to match patterns with regular expressions.

SEARCH EXPRESSIONS: The $ sign is being interpreted here as part of a regular expression. One small adjustment and I can easily find the transactions we’re looking for

This is a huge topic all of its own, but here’s a heads-up. Characters like $*.?+ have their own special meaning, and enable you to search for complex and precise patterns in files. If you are searching for something that contains one of these special characters, you need to ‘escape’ it using a backslash directly before the character:

grep -ri \$20 /home/faye/statement.txt

If you don’t do this, grep will interpret the character as more than just a literal, and the output you get may, or may not, return the results you were hoping for.

Finally, if you want to save a search, you can redirect your grep output into a file as follows:

grep -riw first /usr/share/calendar > /home/faye/search.txt

Beware that if you are saving the file in the same directory, or subdirectory, as the one in which you are recursively searching, you can end up stuck in a loop with grep returning output from the file it is creating. If you do this by accident, just Ctrl+C out of the loop, and make sure that you delete the output file, as it will be massive.

You’ll find grep indispensable as you become a seasoned Linux user, but if you really want to master this command there are a couple of further steps you need to take.

Firstly, make use of the man page (press Q to exit once you’ve finished reading):

man grep

This will give you a detailed reference to all grep’s options. You should also try using the help command:

grep –help

which is perfect for a quick reminder.

They can tell you how to show line numbers (brilliant for source files), display filenames only, print contextual lines above and below matches, and even return everything that doesn’t match what you’re searching for.

Second, if you can invest some time learning how to use regular expressions, you will reap the benefits tenfold – and then the grep world really will be your oyster.

View full post on TechRadar: latest computing news

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