Mac/Linux Support on its Way to Quake Live!

February 27, 2009 14 comments Article

You’ve been asking for it since day one of the Closed Beta. John Carmack has been listening. In an interview with joystiq he let the world know that support for the other two operating systems was “pretty high on [his] priority list”. He went on to say that he hopes that they’ll be able to achieve “(…) a handful of milliseconds better than you can actually get on Windows.”

Marty Stratton, producer of Quake Live, was also present during the interview. Elaborating on browser support outside Internet Explorer and Firefox, he told joystiq that, “I suspect we will get Chrome supported as well.”  Marty, a Mac user, currently uses Boot Camp in order to play Quake Live. There was no word on Apple Safari, although its support is probably implied.

While many out-in-the-cold Mac and Linux users can now sigh in relief, when the support will actually be enabled is still unknown. During the interview, Carmack mentioned that a 3rd party is working on it “right now”. Considering that the Open Beta has only just begun, it’s very possible that it might be ready for Quake Live’s official release.

Joystiq will be uploading the entire interview later today. You can read the original article here.

14 comments

  • <cite>!nFerNo</cite>

    If you quote articles from other sites, quote them right: a handful of milliseconds on MAC as opposed to a PC. (PC’s being Windows, Linux, BSD’s, etc.)

    And milliseconds faster.. did they literally say ‘ping’? Could be the network stack being handled in a slightly different matter, or it might be the hardware and the game just runs faster (locally, more FPS)

    • <cite>BootGuyJoe</cite>

      I chose to add in ‘ping’ for a reason. Whenever I, or most people I talk to on a daily basis say milliseconds, or ms for short, they’re usually referring to this their ping. Except those are gamers… beginners would have no idea what they were talking about. Since this is a website primarily for beginners, I felt it was more essential to clarify what they probably mean by milliseconds.

      Secondly, I DID quote them right. The [on Mac OS] was inserted by joystiq to clarify what they (probably) meant. That’s why I didn’t have a problem with changing it; John Carmack, in that quote, never actually said “on Mac OS”. Until the full interview is released, we won’t know for sure if he ever said that at all. I was using the same technique joystiq used…there wasn’t anything wrong with that.

      • <cite>Malice</cite>

        I it’s fine as it is.

        But I do think Inferno has a point when talking about what kind of miliseconds are actually meant. It could either be the game code responding faster or the ping being lower.

        Quake Live, compared to Quake 3, has been said to be a lot more responsive in the game code (said in the marty stratton interview @ SK Gaming).

      • <cite>!nFerNo</cite>

        I must add: everything from clicking the mouse to pushing a button takes some MS. If *nix handles these more efficient, this could of course result in being a few ms faster 🙂

        About MAC OS vs PC. Mac hardware, being x86 lately is still better tuned in with the OS as Apple selects and finetunes this. PC is a little bit different. You can throw anything in a case and it will work. I can bet that the exact same hardware in a mac and pc, a mac will run faster, because Apple will adjust it’s OS to the hardware.

  • <cite>filo</cite>

    well all i know is that if u had a dedicated server on windows and in linux players had less ms to linux server. I dont remember for sure how big was the diffrence but i think it was around 10ms.

  • <cite>debian_wolf</cite>

    In regards to network performance and comparison between various OS’s, I would argue that UNIX based operating systems such as Mac and Linux are going to perform better on average when stacked against any of the Microsoft Choices. There are many reasons why a unix-based box would be faster for online gaming or otherwise, some of which could be: Far less malware to slow down your system in UNIX (almost no malware at all actually…), A streamlined method of handling TCP/IP compared to the rather inefficient windows method (google linux vs windows network benchmarks to see for yourself), the UNIX/linux kernel is far better suited for automatic hardware detection/support (in linux for example you would nearly never have to find or install any device drivers in a modern distrubution like ‘Ubuntu’), and lastly Video Acceleration and 3d support is reported to be up to 10X faster in linux than windows( source: http://graphcomp.com/pogl.cgi?v=0111s3B0&r=s3m3 ). These are just a few of many reason why a UNIX/LINUX based system would be better or faster for gaming….. not to mention one nice thing about Linux is that all software and updates and free of charge for life.

    Regards

  • <cite>Lashknife</cite>

    well not to start a linux/windows bash but updates are free for windows too :p lol

    and to talk about malware… even tho windows is of course a well known much larger target than linux/mac os are, I still say: no user action = no spyware. Stuff does not come on automatically, there is always a (whether on purpose or not) user action that allowed it to come in.
    If you run a server for a game, you generally don’t even touch it as long as the server is running properly. As such, I find the malware argument a bit out of place.
    networking benchmarks speak for themselves ofcourse, and it’s well known that the larger part of gameservers are linux servers.

    on topic: this is awesome news for both OS communities, as it would only enlarge the number of QL players. (Let’s hope we don’t have to queue up when those guys want to get in when it is released for mac/linux 😆 )

    • <cite>!nFerNo</cite>

      As long as not many people use it and not many malware is written for linux then it still IS better. Just because of that. And he said software and updates are free. Pay attention to the first word: software. He didn’t just mean updates.

      Windows is still building on a very old base. Even though they tried starting fresh with NT, they were still compatible with the older (inferior) versions. They should just scrap backwards compatibility for stability’s sake, but that is actually one of the better features about Windows if you think about it.

      And about the queue, many people dualboot, just to play QL, so it won’t make any difference 😉

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