Thoughts about Mac and PC

DeadPixel · 9:09am 15 Feb 2014

Hi guys

please see the title before you flame me :) im asking your opinions regarding Mac vs PC not which is better or anything like that...

ok so i would like to know what your guys thoughts are regarding mac and pc for game development/design
the reason im asking this is because i have used windows for a long time, and i have a mac book pro running mavericks.
and 2 days ago i built a hackintosh out of my gaming pc which took a bit of fighting but i got it working nicely (only 1 issue im still fixing)
so i would like to get some info from others in the game dev scene about the 2 different systems.
now i know that unity works fine on both systems but what about the other stuff? how do you guys feel about the 2? which would you chose to develop on?

thanks

Rigormortis · 10:14am 15 Feb 2014

I think the short answer to this is: Whatever works for you.

Personally I haven't worked on Macs a lot since my background exposed me to lots of PC's and because I'm comfortable with them and windows I've never really looked for another/better solution. I have heard good things about Mac though. In most cases people have told me that there is a lot less waiting time, as in waiting for windows to boot up or shutdown. I've also heard that Mac's support better battery life on their notebooks(or whatever you call them). But this all comes at a hefty price tag.

PC's mains strength in my eyes is the fact that you can rip apart whatever is inside. You can add, change the system to exactly what you want, and build a streamlined beast that doesn't cost you an arm and a leg. BUT, when you use a car to get to and from work, you don't necessarily care whats under the hood as long as it can get you there reliably.

So yeah, maybe some other people have better concrete examples. To me though it feels like it doesn't make a difference. It's actually awesome to have both for testing purposes.

rustybroomhandle · 11:06am 15 Feb 2014

As Rigormortis said, it all boils down to personal preference. There's no "better", just what you like.

I'm a Linux guy meself, but have thus far been forced to use Windows due to Unity3D being my IDE choice. This changed yesterday though, since I have it working under WINE. It's good to be home! :)

DeadPixel · 11:10am 15 Feb 2014

Nice man :) i think thats one of the reasons i do like mac is because it runs on a unix, and i like the fact that things also do run faster on mac, not sure why but it just seems that way :)

dislekcia · 2:27pm 15 Feb 2014

We have to use both at the moment. Personally I find Mac frustrating and annoying, mostly because it makes assumptions about what I really want to do instead of listening to me - example: not being able to run multiple instances of photoshop so that one can churn through batch ops while I work in the other. Mac extensions are annoyingly expensive (hahahahaha, free ones) and often require significant hackery to get them to work - getting version control working in Finder and making Synergy function both involved some pretty hectic crash-inducing forays into the wilds of "edit this random unix config file, NO NOT THAT ONE! YOU USED THE WRONG LINE BREAK WE'RE ALL FUCKED! AAAAAH!"

Also, the whole iOS rigmorale is a hassle and exporting to Steam via Mac takes longer. I only very briefly entertained the idea of making my new upgrade laptop a Mac.

SkinnyBoy · 6:40pm 15 Feb 2014

The rules are simple. Apple and Microsoft are enemy's, so they don't support one another. Mac won't run DirectX, that means windows phone won't run on mac, but wait, iTunes can run on PC, on exception will be the development tools since they use that nasty language called objective c. I think this was an evil strategy to force developers to buy mac computers. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry can make an app, just buy a mac and you are ready to make apps. Remember b4 2008 apple was on the dead end and then came iPhone, then everything changed, Microsoft did not see it coming, as they were always dominating on pc's and BlackBerry were dominating your pockets. I mean things might change in the end, we just have to wait.

In conclusion I'll say if yr projects don't involve DirectX, this might also involve Xbox 1 and 360. Then mac is okay. Otherwise if you want the latest direct 11 shader then stick to PC, 90% of AAA companies develop for pc. If you hate bill gates or Steve jobs, then you got a Linux, anything that does not belong to both companies will work on both machines.

there's something that's still bugging me, "why do they always use Macs on movie scenes"? And I heard that bill gates will be featured in apple stores pushing the "hour of code" series. Scary stuff

Tuism · 6:51pm 15 Feb 2014

I'll need a laptop soon, and I've always leaned towards getting a mac, because I'll need to use the dev environment someday.

EXCEPT for the price to spec ratio... Omg macbook pros are so insanely expensive for the spec. If I'm gonna get a machine I may as well get something relatively future proof, which in the mac family is like, shoot-your-brains-out expensive.

So now I'm leaning towards a windows laptop, and get a mac mini somewhere down the line to compile stuff.

Is that a huge hassle?

Fengol · 9:33pm 15 Feb 2014

SkinnyBoy said:
Apple and Microsoft are enemy's, so they don't support one another.

What about Microsoft Office for Mac? There's also a list of Mac software published by Microsoft.

AngryMoose · 11:20pm 15 Feb 2014

Once you go Mac, you never go back.

Karuji · 11:58pm 15 Feb 2014

AngryMoose said:
Once you go Mac, you never go back.

Or you install bootcamp and never bother with the silly OS again ;)

Squidcor · 10:46am 16 Feb 2014

AngryMoose said:
Once you go Mac, you never go back.

I went Mac for a few months, then promptly went back.

We use both at work, but my experiences with Mac were similar to @dislekcia's, I struggled a lot to make the Finder and the window management do what I wanted. I had to resort to the terminal to do seemingly basic things far more often than I would have liked. I also had issues with graphics drivers on my Mac, and if Apple doesn't feel like putting a new driver in an official OSX update, you can be screwed.

As far as dev environments go, for me there is little difference because they both run Unity just fine. I do however find Visual Studio much more enjoyable/stable than Monodevelop or Xamarin.

TheFuntastic · 12:33pm 16 Feb 2014

This question used to keep me up at night. Especially when I was younger and felt compelled to have a Mac because everyone else did but I couldn't afford the price.

Several years later having used both, comparing differences is a straw man argument. They are both computers. Beyond the file system your productivity happens in applications and those are near identical on both platforms. Given enough time you will be equally productive on both.

The only major difference comes when you encounter a program or task that will only work on one. Eg visual studio is in my opinion the best IDE and only works on windows. You can only compile for iOS from unity on a Mac.

Result: I have both a Mac and a PC.

TheFuntastic · 12:37pm 16 Feb 2014

@tuism nah, not really. That's my setup, and with team viewer it works pretty well. The only thing though is a decent PC laptop plus Mac mini puts you in the same price range as a MacBook anyway. I actually found myself very glad to have the mini though when I needed to setup a win 8 dev machine and could leave my win 7 lappy untouched ;)

EvanGreenwood · 3:21am 17 Feb 2014

I used Mac for a few years while I did IOS development. I ran Visual Studio in Parallels and that worked fine.

Finder is nearly as bad as Windows Explorer 7. Windows Explorer gets the edge for me because it reliably returns results. Finder sometimes simply doesn't find files, even if it is much faster and easier to use when not finding things.

I find both Windows 7 and MacOSX impossible to customize the way I want them.

I found that MacOsX was less resource hungry than Windows 7, and more stable for longer. I found that buying a Mac was less of a risk than buying a PC, because sometimes you just get a dud PC.

But I currently use a PC, it makes sense for the whole office to use one operating system and Windows was the one most of us were already using.

DeadPixel · 10:30am 17 Feb 2014

Thanks for the comments guys :) im enjoying my mac so far :) its fun, now im going to use it for awhile and see what i like using more and what works better for me in what i want to do and decide :)

rumor · 11:57am 22 Feb 2014

I have worked on both, and own both. There really is nothing different. A fan boy will say one is better then another, but depending on the tools you want they both run as well, each have there pros and cons.

If your using unity on a Mac you can develop on either for iOS, and android, but if you want to dev for windows phone or win8 store you will need a windows8 install, for this you can run virtual OS software on a Mac. I have found its easier to run windows on a Mac, then Mac on a PC XD.

I also wish they would release a linux version, as I started using linux a year ago and its really fun.

but in the end I suppose it comes down to your wallet and how much you have to spend.

Fengol · 1:09pm 22 Feb 2014

@BlackShipsFilltheSky have you tried Everything by VoidTools on Windows? I've found it a far better search tool than Windows Search. Also, with just a little setup, you can search remote machines as well.

EvanGreenwood · 10:41pm 22 Feb 2014

@Fengol TheFuntastic just told me about the Everything tool. Apparently I've been doing Windows wrong.

roguecode · 10:04pm 23 Feb 2014

Fengol said:
@BlackShipsFilltheSky have you tried Everything by VoidTools on Windows? I've found it a far better search tool than Windows Search. Also, with just a little setup, you can search remote machines as well.

I've found the Windows 8 search (in the side charm) to be really good and pretty much instant. You can tell it what to index too. So either it is good, or I just haven't been searching for something obscure that it doesn't like.

TheFuntastic · 7:52am 24 Feb 2014

I got the feeling Win 8 search still tries to be intelligent. "Everything" is based purely on string matching. It's a simple honesty that works well. Especially when you're looking for system files or hidden files.

dislekcia · 12:57pm 24 Feb 2014

I've always used Agent Ransack for searching - it's got a bunch of really neat options like allowing searches through file content or matching on regexes. Great for hunting down code that you've forgotten the exact location of and it saved my life a few times when I ventured into the horrible halls of web dev.

DeadPixel · 8:31am 25 Feb 2014

ok well after using a hackintosh for about a month now i have decided to go back to windows.
there are to many issues with using OS X on a pc so i am moving back to windows :)

mattbenic · 9:31am 25 Feb 2014

AngryMoose said:
Once you go Mac, you never go back.

Fanboy! Oh wait.. so am I :P Also, there's going full Mac, and there's going Mac but trying to make it Windows - which will always lead to frustration.
I generally prefer OSX, though Finder is pretty irritating in some ways. As hardware goes, I've never been happier with a computer than I have been with my macbooks-and that holds for Windows as well. My original white MacBook, and now my MacBook pro are the best windows machines I've ever owned or used.

That said, the question is about game dev, and assuming you're using Unity, you really could go either way. Personally I've had a better experience with Unity on Mac for the most part (I found it slightly less prone to issues when debugging). The one thing I really, really miss on OSX is Visual Studio (no, I haven't tried running it through Parallels).

Ultimately IMO it comes down to two things:
1) What platforms do you want to target? If you want to hit iOS (or OSX) devices, you obviously at least need to have a machine running OSX available to build and deploy from-that doesn't need to be your primary though. If you don't, then you can just look at it from a cost point of view.
2) What's your budget? Mac hardware is undoubtedly way more expensive, but it is great hardware, and having everything on one machine through dual-booting/parallels is great. Alternatively, you could go for any windows machine as your main dev machine, and get the cheapest viable Mac Mini or secondhand MacBook you can get your hands on. Just FYI, when considering buying Mac hardware, be sure to consider buying through FNB or DigiCape. FNB has some macs on the same two year payment plans as other devices, so it costs the same as retail but can be paid off interest free. Digicape sells them with Vodacom contracts, so you can pay them off but it will cost more than buying cash.

Tuism said:
So now I'm leaning towards a windows laptop, and get a mac mini somewhere down the line to compile stuff.

Is that a huge hassle?

Might be worth pinging @GarethF about it, that's how he works. It shouldn't be though, just remote from one to the other, or use something like Synergy. It would seem though that unless you're talking about building a windows PC (as opposed to buying a high spec Windows laptop) and using the mini, cost wise you may as well have bought a mac laptop.

dislekcia said:
example: not being able to run multiple instances of

You can run multiple instances of some applications, like Unity, by duplicating the entire application (yeah, PITA and eats disk space) and running that copy. I haven't tried this with Photoshop, but it should work.

garethf · 10:07am 25 Feb 2014

Yeah, I work on windows, have a mac mini to test the mac build.

I don't even compile on the mac. Do a mac build from unity on my win machine, dropbox it over to the mac, test it works. Simple enough. If you don't have a mac, you could just ask a friend who does to test it.

Obviously, if you start running into mac specific issues you may need to set the project up on a mac. That's a problem I'll worry about when I come to it. ;)

dislekcia · 1:36pm 25 Feb 2014

mattbenic said:
You can run multiple instances of some applications, like Unity, by duplicating the entire application (yeah, PITA and eats disk space) and running that copy. I haven't tried this with Photoshop, but it should work.

Oh cool, so there is a workaround, thanks! I'll give that a go when next I run into the issue. Right now I'm having a problem getting our Mac mini to connect to more than 1 Move controller at a time... For, uh, serious project testing. Yes. Totally serious.

@garethf: Yeah, we have a very similar setup - it's worth noting that we have to process our builds on a Mac to give Steam the correct structural information for its repository system, so our entire testing process is a little more convoluted, but similar. Also, @Aequitas got VNC working on the mini, so that makes life easier too.

Chippit · 7:51pm 25 Feb 2014

dislekcia said:
mattbenic said:
You can run multiple instances of some applications, like Unity, by duplicating the entire application (yeah, PITA and eats disk space) and running that copy. I haven't tried this with Photoshop, but it should work.
Oh cool, so there is a workaround, thanks! I'll give that a go when next I run into the issue. Right now I'm having a problem getting our Mac mini to connect to more than 1 Move controller at a time... For, uh, serious project testing. Yes. Totally serious.

Aaaactually, I recently discovered there's a far tidier way to do this. You can pass a -n flag to 'open' in the terminal to launch multiple instances. I've only tested this with Unity, mind, but it worked all right there.

open -n /Applications/Unity/Unity.app/

That (or similar, for your application) should do it!

Go me, perpetuating the notion that the only way to get Macs to do what you want is through the terminal.

mattbenic · 10:43am 26 Feb 2014

Nice find @Chippit!

garethf · 10:49am 26 Feb 2014

@dislekcia - cool, thanks for the heads up, I'll remember that when it's time to submit to steam. Soon, hopefully!

dreampunchboy · 1:05pm 26 Feb 2014

I got a Macbook Pro a few months ago. Coming from windows, it took me about 2 months to get used to.
Now that I am I love it. But...

Right now I'm doing Unity3D dev. And with Monodevelop it's just an awful experience coming from Windows development with
Visual Studio. In my humble opinion, there is no IDE out there like VS2012. With Monodevelop there is the constant fixing
of indentations etc. So just for that reason I'm dual booting Windows 8.

So I do all gamedev on W8 with Unity3D and then in OSX I run Maya, Photoshop, Mudbox and all the rest.
I'm kind of enjoying splitting the 2 major jobs between booting. Helps me to focus.

Windows: Game development, logic etc.
OSX: Game design, 3D, environments etc.

I can still access the Unity project from both Windows and OSX.
And this gives you the ability to deploy to Mac and Microsoft platforms.

mattbenic · 1:23pm 26 Feb 2014

dreampunchboy said:
I can still access the Unity project from both Windows and OSX.
And this gives you the ability to deploy to Mac and Microsoft platforms.

Unless Unity 4 has changed incompatible library versions between platforms, that would mean you're (implicitly) re-importing the resources in your project each time you open it in a different OS. That's not a problem for a small project, but for larger ones it can literally take hours.

dreampunchboy · 1:38pm 26 Feb 2014

mattbenic said:
dreampunchboy said:
I can still access the Unity project from both Windows and OSX.
And this gives you the ability to deploy to Mac and Microsoft platforms.
Unless Unity 4 has changed incompatible library versions between platforms, that would mean you're (implicitly) re-importing the resources in your project each time you open it in a different OS. That's not a problem for a small project, but for larger ones it can literally take hours.

Both set on Android, haven't the need to reimport. But might have missed that when opening as it's a very small project.
Will check it out though.

Thoughts about Mac and PC

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