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Sanctum Mac Beta, more UDK for Mac!
It's now about 9 months since Unreal Development Kit (UDK) was released with support for building games for Mac. This should be paving the way for easier and better native porting of Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) games to the Mac platform. For those of you unfamiliar with UE3, if you own a few major games, I'm pretty sure that you own at least one UE3 game, because the list is extensive: Borderlands, Mass Effect 1-2-3, Batman AA-AC, DC Universe, Gears of War 1-2-3, Dungeon Defenders, Medal of Honor (2010), Spec Ops: The Line, and many more.
Read on for more info
As far as I know, Dungeon Defenders was the first game available for Mac OS built on UDK, and was available in beta form less than 6 months after UDK was announced for Mac. The birth of the mac version of DunDef was rough, with quite a buggy client with performance issues, but after about a month on open beta on steam the game has at least for me became very stable and one of the better mac ports of games available.
When I saw UDK released I was thinking about which games would be available for Mac, and my first bet was Mass Effect 3. It was a big title, it was UE3 built and EA has shown some interests in the Mac market with Cider ports of games like Dragon Age 1 and 2. Surely with UDK available for mac this should be piece of cake? This was not the case, EA forgot about the Mac and ME3 was announced as PC, PS3 and XBOX360 compatible.
So far it seems that the only one caring for the Mac market are the small Indie developers.
When I heard Trendyent was gonna make a native Mac client for DunDef I was very exited, and a bit skeptical. Trendyent is not really one of the big guys, and how much resources could they spend on a Mac version? After playing the game for awhile (I've logged about 11 hours), I'm pretty impressed! The port is really good!
The second release was even more unexpected, Coffee Stain Studios is releasing Sanctum for Mac.
Sanctum is a First person shooter - tower defense game, with up to four player co-op, much like DunDef. Where DunDef has old school weaponry like ballistas and crossbow, Sanctum has gatling lasers and sniper rifles.
I'm not gonna review the game, because there are plenty of reviews online:
http://www.bit-tech....anctum-review/1
http://www.gamespot....review-2532865/
The port, however still in beta, is pretty impressive so far.
Keep in mind I have only played this for a few hours (Mac beta), but I've plyed some Sanctum before so I already know the game somewhat.
The game is very customizable, with adjustable graphics and FoV (!). It seems that details is resetting to low on my system after quitting the game, but other than that it seems fine, except maybe Bloom, which I feel is a bit too "bloomy".
The performance is quite good, and when not recording is going on it's running at 60 FPS or close to 60 on my NVidia GTX 285.
Performance drops quite a bit when recording and for some reason the recording doesn't seem so fluid (like 20 -25 fps) even though the game feels ok to play while recording. This might be because I have a crappy dual core CPU and not a modern quad core.
I'm pretty impressed by Trendyent and Coffee Stain Studios, which are such small companies and manage to release native Mac games.
In 2011 Coffee Stain had 10 employees, and companies with hundreds of employees (EA + Bethesda = lazy bums) do not manage to put out a Mac port, even tho they use the same game engine.
Let's hope we'll see more developers do the same, when the 10 people at Coffee Stain Manages to make a Mac port, then others should be able too!
The Coffe Stain Studios team is also very active on twitter and Anton Westbergh is answering all your questions on twitter, go give him a thumbs up!
Sanctum is available on Steam for $9.99, €9.99 or £6.99
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Still WiP, I wan't some feedback before it goes to the front page.
Feel free to comment and make corrections before it gets posted!
-cluthz
On the rooftops there was like 1-3 fps 
