Cider and TransGaming

This generally isn't relevant to Unity, but may affect some developers out there and poses and interesting question to OTEE about the direction of the company.

The company TransGaming recently announced that they have a new technology called Cider that they have developed that allows a PC game to be played on a Mac without a port being made. This apparently works by running the PC executable in a wrapper and remaps libraries on the fly.

Tuncer Deniz recently interviewed Gavriel State from TransGaming about Cider: http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/view.php?ID=467

Certainly this is an interesting technology (if it works) and significantly changes the landscape for Mac games and theoretically, other PC applications. It will be interesting to see how PC publishers and Mac publishers deal with this.

 

And does it automatically port HLSL code to GLSL? I mean come on, nothing is a magic bullet and it's hard to get a technology like this close to 100%. And if it isn't near that, then it'll be too annoying to use.

I'd be surprised if it was that big of a player.

-Jon

 

There must be restrictions to what libraries you use that will port using Cider, especially since the website claims

Cedega on the other hand, is for playing Windows games on Linux, and seems to have limitations as well:

I would imagine that Cider would see some kind of performance hit when compared to the native Windows executable, since it appears to map between Windows and Mac technologies. There certainly are limitations to what technologies your Windows game uses that would translate to a Mac:

Unless they can really make this a "magic bullet" then you're right Jon, it won't amount to anything. The current claims are rather bold so it will be interesting to see a game that actually uses this.

The other possiblility is other virualization software, which seems to be a hot topic at the moment. If TransGaming can beat Parallels ( who are also trying to reach this market), then they may win the whole market with first-mover advantage.

 

I haven't seen "Cider" yet, but I do have experience with Wine, DirectX for Wine and Cedega (Transgaming's other projects) under Linux. Unlike "Parallel", a copy of Windows is not installed on your system and the Windows OS is not emulated. In theory there isn't any performance hit, in fact, some applications can run faster than they would under Windows.

That's the theory. In reality Wine, DirectX for Wine and Cedega only work with a limited number of applications. Some applications (like Notepad and Microsoft Word) work seamlessly, while others (like Photoshop and some games) work but have "problems" (usually graphical issues with screen elements).

I guess we'll see just how far Transgaming has been able to improve their technology when Cider starts to hit the streets.

 

I don't think its a magic bullet by a long shot, but if it can reduce porting time by 50%, that'll be fine.

Having to rewrite all HLSL to GLSL is peanuts compared to the many, many places that games make arbitrary DirectX calls.

 

I'll take your words on that for HLSL -> GLSL

I'd like to see a Windows build of a Unity game ported to Mac using Cider.

Then I'd be impressed, especially if it was fast... and worked.. It would be fun to do a side by side comparison at least.

-Jon

p.s. Another line with a smiley! (WWDC is good!)

 

Although I haven't seen Cider, I'm guessing it has alot of Cedega and Wine code/technology in it. If that's the case, then you wouldn't need to "translate" any of your HLSL shaders to GLSL. What they've done is to get DirectX to work under Linux without the Windows operating system. Take a look at this:

http://directxwine.sourceforge.net/