The response has been fantastic and we’re incredibly excited to make our game available to the Mac community.Vikas Gupta, CEO and president of TransGaming, in separate statement, noted that “Perfect World has created Star Trek Online to be the ultimate sci-fi MMORPG, providing players with a rich and vibrant world true to the Star Trek franchise, and we are thrilled to have it join the catalog of AAA games our technology has brought to Mac gamers globally. After a couple of months of internal testing we were able to get it up on our test shard. We stocked up on a few Macs with the spectrum of our recommended operating systems and they went to work. Once that was complete we were finally able to get this delivered to our internal QA team. This task was something that is easily overlooked but becomes pretty necessary when crashes start rolling in with no dumps. In addition to game-side changes, we also had to create a brand new interface for Cryptic’s error handling and reporting software since those were dependent on Windows functionality. This phase was truly collaborative and both sides had to make changes and be flexible to get this critical side of the process finished. Now the game works pretty much "out of the box" on Linux under WINE. This was a major sticking point for WINE users on both Linux and Mac that made the game difficult to install. One of the nice parts of the Cider port is that we dropped the Internet Explorer dependency for our launcher. Transgaming actually had to update some parts of their engine for our conversion to reduce some Windows systems dependencies. Right now, we always compile a small set of vertex shaders on the user's machines as well. Though, we do end up hitting those fallback cases quite often. We've tried to compile almost all the shaders we think we need on the builders, but with with the DirectX compiler as a fall back just in case. We compiled some shaders on the fly for both Windows and Mac and, if all goes correctly, it should be the same set of shaders for both. On the Cryptic side of things, we had to adjust some of our rendering code to work on the Mac as they use OpenGL and Cryptic utilizes DirectX. We decided to work together and we spent months collaborating on the conversion process. It acts as a translator from Windows-specific functions to instructions that the Mac can understand, and they customize this for each game port. We began to look into third-party companies that assist with these sorts of updates and came across Transgaming who makes a windows “interpreter” called Cider. While we knew that we wanted to convert our game to run on Macs we lacked the Mac architecture expertise internally to actually completely convert the game on our own. Once we were well past free to play and we realized we were in a position to actually make a proper conversion happen the team jumped at the opportunity. We knew there was a market since people took it upon themselves to make their own version of a client that ran on Mac, and we knew that going forward we’d want to support Mac as a company. Cryptic has wanted to get a Mac client up and running since STO launched.
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