Black Mesa mod for Mac

I was surprised no one really asked this question here yet. You may be aware of "Black Mesa", the complete re-creation of Half-Life 1, to be available as a Half-Life 2 mod. The mod is in its final stages of development and we can expect it to be released sometime in the relatively near future.

For information about the mod, here's their website:
http://www.blackmesasource.com/

On the Black Mesa website, there is a lot of discussion about whether the mod will work on Steam for Mac. It seems quite obvious at this point that the mod won't work on Macs right away, since it needs to be ported to the Mac version of the Source SDK, and that some other things might need to be changed.

I don't know much about the technical stuff, so I don't know how much work it may be to port the mod to the Mac, but as far as we know now, the developers of Black Mesa don't have the intention to convert their mod to the Mac once it's released, which makes sense after 6 years of hard work.

So what I would be interested in figuring out is whether it's possible that a possible future version of Steam, or some action from Valve's side, would be able to make Black Mesa work without any modification on Macs. Would it be possible for an "official" solution in order to play Black Mesa on a Mac, without emulation (Cider, Crossover) and without Windows?

The only way an unmodified version of Black Mesa would work on Mac OS X without a Mac port and without emulation is if Apple turned Mac OS X into Windows.

[d10sfan]

If the team releases a version of their mod for the mac, then itll work. Otherwise, youll probably have to use wine.

[psihomir2]

From an unrelated discussion at the HL coders list:

Mac builds will require a Mac to do them on, you need to use the Mac compiler (a GCC 4.2 with apple patches). We will be releasing appropriate makefile skeletons to get you guys up and running.

Soon you won't need a Mac to do Mac development...

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/s...4/daily79.html

"Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has been given seven minutes during Jobs'
keynote to talk about Visual Studio 2010. Chowdrey said that a new
version of the development tools software will support native
applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS."

Sweet!

So by the looks of it, it'll be all possible and they won't even need to have a Mac to build it on - which is great news!

Ballmer won't be speaking during the WWDC keynote. I'm not sure if everything Microsoft was a hoax, but Ballmer's seven minutes were.

[nano....]

It uses the Orange Box engine, so it would only need to be compiled for OS X binaries.

That is, when it comes out...

[vicegold]

Originally Posted by psihomir2

From an unrelated discussion at the HL coders list:

So by the looks of it, it'll be all possible and they won't even need to have a Mac to build it on - which is great news!

Microsoft has already disclaimed that:

Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding in the Belmont. Just FYI.

http://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/14850981422

[psihomir2]

Originally Posted by vicegold

Microsoft has already disclaimed that:



http://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/14850981422

This is already covered in the link I gave in my post, and it doesn't invalidate the statement about VS getting Mac support, it just means they won't announce it during Apple's keynote.

[MaacK]

I doubt this mod will ever be released. It's been in development for what? Six years? I gave up on it.

[nano....]

One of the perks of making a free mod is that you don't owe anyone squat.

They'll release it whenever they feel like it.

Also, speaking of Source HL conversions, you guys may want to give http://www.obmsource.com/ a look see.

Yes Black Mesa has been in development for a long time, but they're still at it so lets hope they'll eventually release it. They say they already have a secret internal release date set (to avoid disappointment if ever they don't make it).

So as I understand it, the mod developers will have to do something themselves if they want it to be natively available for the Mac, and that is quite unlikely!

I can play it on Crossover, but having two copies of Steam on the same machine can be annoying. I don't know whether I would have to have an installed Orange Box game to run Black Mesa, or whether it's enough to just own one and have the SDK installed? Because then, I could have a version of Steam running on Crossover with nothing on it (hogging disk space) just Black Mesa, then I could have the native version of Steam with everything else...

[d10sfan]

One of the posts on their site makes it seem like a possibility for them to release a mac version. If they dont use any Windows-specific stuff, it shouldnt be all that difficult. If they dont release it for mac, Ill probably use crossover or wine and just have steam in offline mode. Hopefully all you need is the SDK Base.

The Devs are using Visual Studio for the C++ so i doubt that we will see a native Mac version unless they release all the source code and some other team recompiles it for the Mac. I guess they want to be done and over with it. Can't blame them. I know that they just want to get it done and release it.

[DJ Thunder Face]

I remember one of the devs posting on the Black Mesa forum that the other head programmer just got a Macbook Pro. Does that mean anything? No, but it's at least encouraging.