Portal and Steam for the Mac

[giza]

Folks might have heard that Steam is finally available for the Mac and that, for a limited time, Portal is available as a free download. Naturally, I made the most of it, and downloaded Portal on Friday evening, beating it just last night. :-)

Downloading Portal was interesting, I had no idea that the game was on the order of 3 Gigs in size. It was a great way to test out my current Internet connection, which performed pretty well, as this graph shows:



As for playing the game itself, someone asked me how Steam and Portal were on the Mac, out of concern that there might just be some emulation going on. This does not seem to be the case, judging by my CPU usage (gameplay began right after the download):



I'd say that my Mac Mini held its own just fine. :-)

I'll probably be on Steam on occasion. If anyone wants to friend me there, feel free. My Steam ID is DmuthAtHome.

Comments

[andrew7782.livejournal.com]

Apparently the only "emulation" is they're mapping DirectX commands to OpenGL, otherwise it's compiled natively.

[talvinm.livejournal.com]

Have some Cake!

[athauglas.livejournal.com]

[troll]
So wait, how do you shoot the 2nd portal if your computer only has one mouse button?
[/troll]

As far as I know everything is native, but the list of games available for Mac is surprisingly large, so if it turned out that Valve was using a compatibility layer I wouldn't be shocked. Maybe they used a Wine snapshot and shined it up a little? *shrug

HL2 games all share resources to some degree. If your first download had been Half-Life 2: Deathmatch for example, the game would have appeared enormous considering its simple game play, but if you had downloaded it after first grabbing HL2 and the Episodes, you would only need the content unique to deathmatch, which is a few hundred megabytes. The same is true for Portal. The moar you know :}

[aureth.livejournal.com]

I blew through Portal in a couple days after it was released. I don't normally get into the puzzle game genre, but this was a blast. As a bonus, now I understand all the cake jokes. ;P

[giza.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure they didn't use Wine. Open Source geeks would have been all over it if that were the case. :-P

If they're using shared resources, then that's full of win, and explains how they can pump out so many games. I wish more companies with multiple projects used shared libraries/resources and stopped reinventing the wheel for every new project.