[goMac]

Originally Posted by Mac User #001 

It looks like it uses the Command & Conquer 3 SAGE Engine.

Speculation or has Blizzard said so? Blizzard seems to like producing their own engines in house. Honestly, to me it looks like an upgraded WC3 engine.

[rbarris]

While SC2 does use some licensed technologies such as Havok, the graphics engine is developed in-house (as well as AI, gameplay, networking..).

[G Barnett]

BTW, Rob -- pass along my thanks to the artist of that Kerrigan concept piece you guys put up on the site -- it's my new Desktop pic (well, after a little cropping to avoid vertical distortion).

'Tain't much better'n some nice Kerrigan cheesecake, really.

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by rbarris 

While SC2 does use some licensed technologies such as Havok, the graphics engine is developed in-house (as well as AI, gameplay, networking..).

It's not Pay-2-Play, is it? I ing hate Pay-2-Play.

[starman]

Well, I had a feeling it wouldn't be a Diablo-based game. There's just too much of a crossover with WoW. SC probably wouldn't impact WoW much. I personally never got into Starcraft, but I know it's huge. Looks good. I'll definitely be mentioning it on the next show.

[SirCastor]

I was just reading through a Design thing on SCII, and it says that the graphics are going to be based on DirectX 9. This makes me wonder what we're going to be getting on the Mac?

Blizzard talks Starcraft II art design - PC News at GameSpot

[JoshuaZ]

Has anyone else watched the gameplay video on blizzard.com? In HD! Looks nice. Real nice. I was reading that the game is now fully playable for multi-player and that they're just working on single player missions, balance issues, and revamping battle.net. Count me in as someone who'll be ordering this puppy. (Though I'd need a new Mac first. Doubt my 1.33 g4 will handle it....)

[SirCastor]

Originally Posted by JoshuaZ 

Has anyone else watched the gameplay video on blizzard.com? In HD! Looks nice. Real nice. I was reading that the game is now fully playable for multi-player and that they're just working on single player missions, balance issues, and revamping battle.net. Count me in as someone who'll be ordering this puppy. (Though I'd need a new Mac first. Doubt my 1.33 g4 will handle it....)

I actually imagine that it won't be much heavier than WC3, from the look of it anyway. We'll have to wait to see of course, but My Guess is that it'll run on a mini, which means that it'll probably run on my G4/1.5
Video Card is the key.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by rbarris 

While SC2 does use some licensed technologies such as Havok, the graphics engine is developed in-house (as well as AI, gameplay, networking..).

You guys are so great for finally making our dreams of SCII come true. It looks terrific.

[Gamoe]

Well, I've watched WarCraft and WOW grow and become extremely popular over the years as StarCraft (& Brood War) has aged without a single significant update since, so I'm really happy to hear this. Even though I play primarily on consoles, this might just be the game I pick for my Mac.

Call me jealous, but I hope the Windoze folks don't get any fancier graphics than we do. I applaud Blizzard though, for consistently and continuously not only supporting our platform, but giving it the same importance and status as the Windoze version.

The only thing I'm a little disappointed at is the lack of talk about a new race or two. I was really hoping we'd have some new races to explore this time around. Of course, I have no clue whether this might be revealed later or not.

[mr. burns]

Originally Posted by SirCastor 

I actually imagine that it won't be much heavier than WC3, from the look of it anyway. We'll have to wait to see of course, but My Guess is that it'll run on a mini, which means that it'll probably run on my G4/1.5
Video Card is the key.

it's way more complex than WC3. the units, graphics, just everything is extremely more detailed. i still play dota on wc3 and even with all the settings turned up, everything is pretty low on the polygon count. zoomed out SC2 may look similar, but when you really get in there and take a look, it's really detailed.

i could see them using this graphics engine to make diablo III. that'll be sweeet :]

[goMac]

Originally Posted by mr. burns 

it's way more complex than WC3. the units, graphics, just everything is extremely more detailed. i still play dota on wc3 and even with all the settings turned up, everything is pretty low on the polygon count. zoomed out SC2 may look similar, but when you really get in there and take a look, it's really detailed.

I play WC3 at 1080p and it honestly doesn't look great. I hope SC2 looks better.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by SirCastor 

I was just reading through a Design thing on SCII, and it says that the graphics are going to be based on DirectX 9. This makes me wonder what we're going to be getting on the Mac?

My guess is they'll probably have an equal rendering path working in OpenGL. Blizzard is pretty good about that, and it makes WINE based clients more compatible.

[rbarris]

Firstly, neither the official release date or system requirements have been released or decided.

The engine in this game is much richer than the one in Warcraft III, both from a graphics POV as well as other areas such as pathing and AI.

As a result we don't have any plan at present to support G3 or G4 processors, mostly due to clock rate and memeory speed limits. If SC2 does come to PowerPC Mac, it's likely that the minimum would be G5 based and possibly even dual G5 based in order ot take advantage of multi-threaded OpenGL under Leopard.

[SirCastor]

looks like it's time to start saving!

[Lateralus]

Originally Posted by rbarris 

As a result we don't have any plan at present to support G3 or G4 processors, mostly due to clock rate and memeory speed limits. If SC2 does come to PowerPC Mac, it's likely that the minimum would be G5 based and possibly even dual G5 based in order ot take advantage of multi-threaded OpenGL under Leopard.

Now that's crap.

The final G4 Duals (Dual 1.25 and 1.42) given ample RAM and an up to date graphics card would have sufficient processor power to run the type of game you've showcased thus far. In fact, both the Dual 1.25 and 1.42 would be significantly more capable of running SC2 than either a 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz single processor G5.

*Sigh*

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

Now that's crap.

The final G4 Duals (Dual 1.25 and 1.42) given ample RAM and an up to date graphics card would have sufficient processor power to run the type of game you've showcased thus far. In fact, both the Dual 1.25 and 1.42 would be significantly more capable of running SC2 than either a 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz single processor G5.

*Sigh*

The G4's all have a woefully inadequate system bus. Obviously I don't work for Blizzard, but for memory intensive operations, the G4 just won't cut it.

[Lateralus]

I don't really get where you're going? The G5 did have significantly more memory bandwidth than the G4. But, as I said, the final G4 Duals were more powerful across the board than the single processor G5s. Meaning memory bandwidth is only part of the equation. So I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make?

I'm getting at the fact that not supporting a G4 machine when it is more capable than a G5 machine you are supporting doesn't make much sense. Especially when you'd have to intentionally limit that machine from being able to run the game.

[SirCastor]

We're talking system bus though. In the end, the G4s never got beyond 167mhz bus IIRC, and that's the only thing frankly that keeps them from playing on par with the G5 systems. The G4 chips in the end were fantastic, they just couldn't move data between components fast enough.

[Lateralus]

I give up.

[butterfly0fdoom]

rbarris, will GMA be supported, though? That's bound to be a big concern for everyone who's bought a MacBook.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

I don't really get where you're going? The G5 did have significantly more memory bandwidth than the G4. But, as I said, the final G4 Duals were more powerful across the board than the single processor G5s. Meaning memory bandwidth is only part of the equation. So I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make?

The processor can't process fast enough if it can't pull data from RAM fast enough. If you have a game making complex calculations that constantly pulls stuff from RAM, you're going to run into problems with the G4, no matter how fast the clock speed is on the chips.

[Lateralus]

Hence the large L3 cache and low latency memory controller...

Again, I don't think you're understanding what I am saying; there are many G4 machines that are more powerful than G5 machines. So why keep them from being able to run a certain application strictly because of their moniker?

I don't know how else to explain that and really shouldn't need to.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

Hence the large L3 cache and low latency memory controller...

Which will help to a point. If you're transferring large textures from main system memory to the CPU for processing, or transferring textures back to the GPU, that system cache is going to make little to no difference.

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

Again, I don't think you're understanding what I am saying; there are many G4 machines that are more powerful than G5 machines. So why keep them from being able to run a certain application strictly because of their moniker?

The G4's can keep up with the G5's until you bring the system bus into the equation. Then the G4 falls flat for operations that work with larger data sets.

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

I don't know how else to explain that and really shouldn't need to.

Level 3 caches help when you're dealing with smaller data like ints and arrays and such. They fall flat when dealing with larger amounts of data such as textures. Depending on how you process textures, the L3 cache probably won't even come into play at all and you'll be relying on how fast the machine can pull from RAM, which in the case of the G4 is an anemic 166 mhz.

[Lateralus]

*Scratches head*

I think you're letting your dislike of the G4 distract you from the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Consider the fact that if Blizzard had come out with minimum system requirements that stated a Dual 1GHz G4 or higher, we wouldn't be having this conversation. And we wouldn't be having it because that requirement wouldn't have come as that much of a shocker.

SC2 looks to offer some impressive bits of technology. But it is looking to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Take into account the fact that there are RTS games that have been on the market for a while that appear to be very similar graphically to what we've seen of SC2 thus far, and they run on mid-range G4 machines perfectly fine.

Please stop trying to turn this into a nerd war and realize that if Blizzard doesn't end up supporting higher end G4 machines, it's because they didn't want to. Not because said machines were inadequate.

And for the record, Doom III and Quake 4 run rather well on my system. And I'd bet the farm that their engine does a hell of a lot more work on the bus treadmill than any RTS in the near future will.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

Consider the fact that if Blizzard had come out with minimum system requirements that stated a Dual 1GHz G4 or higher, we wouldn't be having this conversation. And we wouldn't be having it because that requirement wouldn't have come as that much of a shocker.

No, we wouldn't. But that doesn't seem to be what the minimum requirements will be.

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

SC2 looks to offer some impressive bits of technology. But it is looking to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Take into account the fact that there are RTS games that have been on the market for a while that appear to be very similar graphically to what we've seen of SC2 thus far, and they run on mid-range G4 machines perfectly fine.

Such as?

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

Please stop trying to turn this into a nerd war and realize that if Blizzard doesn't end up supporting higher end G4 machines, it's because they didn't want to. Not because said machines were inadequate.

If they're potentially supporting the G5, the same code would work on the G4 for free. If they're not supporting the G4, it's because the hardware is slow.

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

And for the record, Doom III and Quake 4 run rather well on my system. And I'd bet the farm that their engine does a hell of a lot more work on the bus treadmill than any RTS in the near future will.

Rbarris said they are only really considering the high end G5's. Your G4, no matter how upgraded, wouldn't be able to keep pace with those machines. Doom III and Quake 4 don't use Havoc, and they are able to optimize their games based on having control over what happens. Starcraft 2 will deal with hundreds of units and a much more complex computer AI.

Honestly, I'd be surprised if they support the G5. PowerPC users need to move to Intel now, especially gamers. By the time Starcraft 2 comes out, the PowerPC is going to be pretty well done for the Macintosh, and I would be willing to bet Starcraft 2 wouldn't be the only thing Intel only.

If Rbarris says it's not going to work on the G4, it's not because they're lazy. Like I said, if you've got code that will work on the G5 (assuming you're not compiling 64 bit), the same code will work on the G4. If Starcraft 2 doesn't come to the G4, it's a performance problem, plain and simple.

[Lateralus]

I'm glad you agree that having SC2 not run on the G4 would be an intentional decision. That was my original point.

I'm not disagreeing that a Dual 2.7GHz G5 will/would run SC2 more favorably than a higher end G4. Obviously. That goes for any piece of software. But the question isn't whether or not a G5 would be more capable of running SC2 it's whether or not a higher end G4 would be capable enough. And I sincerely believe that to be the case.

There are reasons why many games have *minimum* and *recommended* requirements for installation. Let the user decide. Don't tie their hands. Especially when, as you said, the code would not need any tailoring. If they're doing a PowerPC port of the engine, might as well open up the installation of the game to more than one generation of PowerPC machine.

As for modern RTS games; WarCraft III, Command & Conquer Generals, Age of Empires 3...

I also find it funny how quickly you cast aside the demands of the Doom III engine in order to make your point about SC2. Newsflash; Any RTS game you come across is going to make the same type of AI demands in the form of large numbers of units and wide ranges of landscapes. It's nothing new.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

There are reasons why many games have *minimum* and *recommended* requirements for installation. Let the user decide. Don't tie their hands. Especially when, as you said, the code would not need any tailoring. If they're doing a PowerPC port of the engine, might as well open up the installation of the game to more than one generation of PowerPC machine.

The problem is that if Blizzard commits the time to do a PowerPC port, the only people who are going to be able to run that PowerPC port, especially when Starcraft II comes out, is going to be a very small bloc of users. Is it worth the time and effort to even port to PowerPC when the return is going to be so small? Because honestly, doing the swapping for PowerPC is one of the biggest parts of moving a game to the Macintosh. Take the PowerPC port out of the equation, and Blizzard's got things pretty easy. Maintaining OpenGL parity is still a problem, but it's not that big of a challenge all and all.

Honestly, I think what rbarris was expressing was that if so few PowerPC machines are going to run it acceptably, it might not be worth it to do a PowerPC port.

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

As for modern RTS games; WarCraft III, Command & Conquer Generals, Age of Empires 3...

No disrespect to Blizzard, Warcraft III was awesome in it's time, but Warcraft III is hardly a modern RTS game. I play it on my 1080p TV, and it just looks like garbage. That's not to say it's not nice to get a bigger view, but it's really not designed to take full advantage of modern systems.

Command and Conquer Generals always had tons of performance issues on my G4 Powerbook. I realize your G4 is probably a lot more hefty, but again, it doesn't look graphically on par with Starcraft II. Starcraft II has a lot of lighting and shadows C&C doesn't, in addition to Starcraft II having to handle more units. The last thing anyone wants is a G4 joining a 4 vs. 4 match, only to find out that the G4 can't handle all the units and lags out.

Age of Empires 3 does the physics but it doesn't really do the lighting and shadowing that Starcraft II does.

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

I also find it funny how quickly you cast aside the demands of the Doom III engine in order to make your point about SC2. Newsflash; Any RTS game you come across is going to make the same type of AI demands in the form of large numbers of units and wide ranges of landscapes. It's nothing new.

FPS's can do all sorts of tricks that RTS's can't. They can load levels in the background. They can intelligently take shortcuts when you're in one location because you can only move backwards and forwards. The AI in RTS games only has to manage a dozen or two units. Meantime, RTS games are more freeform. The game engine can't optimize itself based on what is going to happen next because it has no idea what you are going to do or where you are going to go next. And each AI player could have 200 units to manage, far more than the few dozen AI units total in an FPS.

An RTS can push a computer differently than a FPS simply because of the huge scale of an RTS. A FPS has to manage the room you are in. An RTS has to manage an entire battlefield of units.

[Gamoe]

Originally Posted by butterfly0fdoom 

rbarris, will GMA be supported, though? That's bound to be a big concern for everyone who's bought a MacBook.

Yes, that's something on my mind, too. To put it simply: Will it run on a current MacBook (non-Pro)?

[Peter]

I reckon this'll be out late 2008 - early 2009, by then think about how antique the G4/G5s will be...
If you think about the MacBook, it struggles with some of the games on the market, /whine at Apple.

Starcraft is my favourite game ever, can't wait for the closed beta

[zerock]

my favorite game too. if i need to upgrade to a better computer for it, i will definitely will

( i have a macbook, if need be i will get a mbp )

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by Peter 

I reckon this'll be out late 2008 - early 2009, by then think about how antique the G4/G5s will be...

G5? Antiquated? Ridiculous.

I don't want to put any undue pressure on the fine people at Blizzard, but if SCII is Mactel only, I'll have to cancel my subscription to WoW.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

I don't want to put any undue pressure on the fine people at Blizzard, but if SCII is Mactel only, I'll have to cancel my subscription to WoW.

That makes a lot of sense...

Blizzard would actually be one of the last game developers to support the PPC. Aspyr has already started to dump the PPC, Freeverse has too. I guess MacSoft still does PowerPC stuff.

[butterfly0fdoom]

Yeah, I think Blizzard would continue supporting PPC, at least until Apple stops supporting PPC.

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

G5? Antiquated? Ridiculous.

I don't want to put any undue pressure on the fine people at Blizzard, but if SCII is Mactel only, I'll have to cancel my subscription to WoW.

I am happy that current games run on my G5 iMac. I would not expect many future games to do so. That's just the nature of games really. There's no real need to support x year old hardware the same way productivity software has to.

In fact I am more annoyed at all the great games that gets left behind without update for newer hardware. I would love to see a UB OS X Deus Ex for instance. But even recent games have been slack in updating to UB, like say Rise of Nations.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

G5? Antiquated? Ridiculous.

Were you upset that Macs made in 1996 couldn't run OS X? Because if it's released in 2009, we're talking about the same kind of age gap.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Were you upset that Macs made in 1996 couldn't run OS X? Because if it's released in 2009, we're talking about the same kind of age gap.

Actually, for a long time I was indeed very angry - no, livid - that my 8600 wouldn't be on the official support list of OS X, since it was one of the only supported systems under Rhapsody. However, by the time 10.0 rolled around, and we all saw how it ran (like dreck) on supported hardware, I gave up on that campaign.

However, what we're talking about a here is a different matter. The performance differential between my G5 DP 2.0 and a Mac Pro is small.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

The performance differential between my G5 DP 2.0 and a Mac Pro is small.

You've got to be kidding me.

Benchmarks:
Mac Pro Benchmarks

Dual G5 2.0 gets pwned across the board.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by goMac 

You've got to be kidding me.

Benchmarks:
Mac Pro Benchmarks

Dual G5 2.0 gets pwned across the board.

I don't know what you're looking at, but it's not across the board. A couple of tests, yes; otherwise no.

G5s will not be "antiquated" by the time SCII ships.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

I don't know what you're looking at, but it's not across the board. A couple of tests, yes; otherwise no.

A couple of tests? More like most the tests. The Quad G5 didn't fair too badly, but it still got beat. The DP 2.0 just got wasted though.

[Thinine]

Processor-wise, most any G5 should be able to handle SC2. It's the availability of newer GPUs that would be the problem. PCIe G5s should fare better, but we still have seen many upgrades for those.

What it comes down to is Blizzard's decision whether or not to support PPC as a whole. I think they will, but it's possible they won't. But I'm pretty sure they've been developing it on PPC Macs since the beginning, so dropping the architecture would be a lot of wasted effort.

I don't care if they make it Leopard only though. There are quite a few OpenGL enhancements I'd be glad to have, not the least of which is multithreaded OGL for PPC.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Thinine 

Processor-wise, most any G5 should be able to handle SC2. It's the availability of newer GPUs that would be the problem. PCIe G5s should fare better, but we still have seen many upgrades for those.

Another issue that rbarris noted was multi threaded OpenGL. I don't think multi threaded OpenGL has come to PowerPC Mac OS X yet, but it arrived for the Intels in 10.4.8(?).

And again, the reason I would assume a G5 would have issues is the sheer number of units. So far the demos they've shown haven't had that many units, but if they really intend on the scale of battles rivaling or surpassing SC1, they're going to have many more units on the screen at once. Warcraft III didn't support all that many units on the map at once, and even then it had performance issues from time to time on 1-2 year old hardware.

[rbarris]

One thing to look at is our existing UB games like War3 and WoW. In these cases the advantage of Intel systems (dual cores standard, on-chip 2MB L2 and up, 667MHz memory bus and up) is plainly evident over the G4 generation. It's not a hypothetical gap, it's a real, perceptible, substantial gap in real world performance.

Another thing to keep in mind is we haven't announced a release date yet. The gap described above could get a lot bigger by the time SC2 ships.

[Thinine]

Could be, but to so greatly increase the requirements of the game in that amount of time? Don't give us that. We all know the G4 won't be up to the task, especially without a modern GPU. But for many things the 2.66 MacPro is only faster than the quad G5 because of the slight clock rate advantage it has. So like I said, the only plausible reason (even if it's not very good) for Blizzard to abandon the G5 here (and the PPC altogether) is that it considers such development a waste of time.

I played Warcraft 3 at its release on an iBook 500 with OS X. Couldn't play online well at all, but I beat the single player campaign. I think my G5 should be able to do the same at least.

[rbarris]

Thanks for the feedback, hope to be able to share more details as they become available.

[Peter]

my bet is 2009.
But blizzard is welcome to prove me wrong

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by rbarris 

Thanks for the feedback, hope to be able to share more details as they become available.

You adamently avoided my P2P question. So that leaves me to believe that the redesign of Blizzard.net is going to be more akin to Sony Station.

Damn it to hell I hate P2P games.

[SirCastor]

Originally Posted by olePigeon 

You adamently avoided my P2P question. So that leaves me to believe that the redesign of Blizzard.net is going to be more akin to Sony Station.

Damn it to hell I hate P2P games.

That was totally inappropriate. This isn't freakin' meet the press. Don't pull assumptions out of the air.

[Peter]

Originally Posted by olePigeon 

You adamently avoided my P2P question. So that leaves me to believe that the redesign of Blizzard.net is going to be more akin to Sony Station.

Damn it to hell I hate P2P games.

Try to avoid harassing the nice people of Blizzard, MacNN owes them a lot

[rbarris]

Well there are two kinds of answers to big questions like the one posed, there's the "I know but can't tell you" style and the "Sorry, that topic hasn't even crossed my desk" style. In this case my 100% honest answer is in the latter category.