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

Comments

[andrew7782]

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

[athauglas]

[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 :}

[giza]

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.

[aureth]

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