TF2 For Mac!

It is here! At last! And! It! Isn’t very good.

I mean, it works. I’ve played a few rounds. But it just doesn’t run well. I am trying to play it on a brand new MBP with the 330M card. This is not a stellar card but it isn’t so bad that the game should jerk around a lot at native resolution with all of the settings at the lowest. But it does.

One of the things I figured out not to do for the moment is enabling the Steam overlay. The overlay is one of those things that makes Steam kind of awesome but it kills the Mac. When enabled, the game dragged down to a crawl. It is worth ignoring the annoying window about needing to enable such and such to get the overlay.

In game it still needs some work. Changing settings doesn’t trigger everything to reload that needs to reload leaving some stuff wonky until a full re-opening of the game. Another thing is when Valve built the Source engine they did not build in any kind of strong font system. This kept the engine open to using system fonts but it means that now over on the Mac it feels like they are resorting to bad fonts; some are barely visible in game. Unfortunately, this held true over in HL2 also.

I’m super stoked to have Steam over on the Mac and to have Valve porting their games. I’m even stoked to have this buggy release. I just hope they fix it. They sure have enough downloaders.

- Loren