Oh, the games people play... or don't play, as the case may be. The latest word from WWDC doesn't sound very pleasant as far as the future of games on the Mac is concerned. According to a ZDNet article, Apple quietly announced that support for Game Sprockets in Mac OS X may not live up to earlier expectations; certain Sprockets will only be partially integrated, and others won't make the cut at all. That doesn't bode well for developers who wrote their existing Mac games with Game Sprockets assuming that, as hinted earlier, the APIs would be supported under Carbon, thus making a Mac OS X-native "tuning" much easier. Worse yet, there's some concern that the Sprockets-reliant games of today might not even function properly in Mac OS X's Classic environment.

Game Sprockets, for the uninitiated, are Apple's guts-level APIs that do lots of the heavy lifting for game programmers. By using them, a developer can spend less time figuring out how to integrate network play or add 3D stereo sound and more time crafting the perfect spurting arterial blood effect when a character's head gets torn off. Mark Adams, the one-man wrecking crew at Westlake Interactive responsible for single-handedly bringing dozens of games to the Mac, is "very disappointed and worried" about Apple's change of direction. "We were told Sprockets would be in Carbon," says Mark. "That would have made our lives a lot easier." Indeed, Apple's spent the last couple of years trying to convince games developers that the company is now striving to become the premiere gaming platform-- but actions like axing Sprockets are speaking louder than words.

On the other hand, it's not unlikely that ZDNet is playing a game of its own, and kicking up panic and angst unnecessarily. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) An article at X Appeal paints a far less dire picture: "while Game Sprockets was some kind of add-on (or a kind of wart) to the real OS, the facilities that Game Sprockets provided in OS 9 will just be built into Mac OS X and available to everyone, not just for gamers." So everything that Sprockets does will somehow be addressed in Mac OS X; for instance, InputSprocket's functionality will be taken over by the HID Manager, which will allow a wider and more flexible range of input device support. So there's probably no reason to panic-- though we certainly sympathize with those developers who are now going to have to rewrite a lot of Sprockets-specific code.