[BobK]

Has anyone found a place where I can get Return to Castle Wolfenstein ? Back ordered at outpost.com for about 3 weeks, just recieved a email today saying "can't give a date"
WTF?

[G4ME]

Don't think it has shiped yet, or even gold yet. I hope they improve the osx support.

[Jansar]

That's too bad. I remember the time when someone claimed that it was going to ship FEBRUARY 1ST.

[walrusjb]

It's been stalled at Final Candidate for a while - check the Aspyr website and click on the Release Status link.

My understanding is that ID is causing the delay - Aspyr/Westlake can't put it out until ID signs off... but that work has been done for a while. Rumor status, though - I'm not sure this is accurate.

[Leonard]

Yeah, it's mid-March and we're still stuck using the demo. I've been patient since January, but now I'm getting a little inpatient - it's time to kill some Nazis and try out a few other maps.

[BobK]

WTF?
I hate this whole thing of announcing something (ie Photoshop &Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the new iMac ) and not having it come out for 2 months! Drives me nuts!
I am not a camper, I hate to wait!

[a2daj]

Products are announced before they're released all the time. Movies, software, cars...

Would you rather no one announce any games until they're final and shipping? Then we'd have Mac gamers whining for ages about how no games are coming out. People flooding boards begging and bitching for games to get ported. The complaining would be enough to drive everyone away from Mac users. As a long time mac gamer, I'm used to the porting delays. It seems that all of a sudden Mac gamers have become spoiled and expect 'their' games to come out within weeks of the PC version. Sure, that's happened in a few cases, but the porting work for those games are usually started months before the PC version ships (such as Diablo II and Deus Ex). Unfortunately, that strategy can increase porting costs tremendously as the Mac porters have to keep up with all the code changes the original developers do, which is more frequent than the occasional game patches. AFAIK, the official Mac port of RtCW (Aspyr's) didn't begin until after the PC version shipped. Mac ports started after the PC version typically take 6 or more months.

Delays happen. It's a fact of life. It's not uncommon for a game to sit in the Approval stage for awhile. From what I've heard Spiderman and Alice both were stuck in Approvals for a long time as well.

[BobK]

Products are announced before they're released all the time. Movies, software, cars...
No Sh*t! Thanks for the insight.
To me it just seems like it has been happening a heck of a lot more lately. This is the kind of stuff that keeps people in fear about moving to OSX. They see the products announced and then delayed, delayed, delayed- What is the first thought "there must be problems" Apple must be having problems........
What I am saying is 10 days, take preorders and ship..... not 2 months, this is stupid and it creates fear about OSX. If I go to a website, order a product (give my Credit card #) I expect to get the product in a resonable amount of time, 10 days, 2 weeks OK- 2 months no way!

[LT]

Offering games for pre-order before they're actually available is something that happens on all platforms, not just OSX. Check out this preorder page on EBGames for a PC game that isn't scheduled to ship until March 2004.

If you don't like ordering games you have to wait for, then don't pre-order. Wait until the vendor says they have it in stock before placing an order.

[Leonard]

Originally posted by BobK:
<STRONG>Products are announced before they're released all the time. Movies, software, cars...
No Sh*t! Thanks for the insight.
To me it just seems like it has been happening a heck of a lot more lately. This is the kind of stuff that keeps people in fear about moving to OSX. They see the products announced and then delayed, delayed, delayed- What is the first thought "there must be problems" Apple must be having problems........
What I am saying is 10 days, take preorders and ship..... not 2 months, this is stupid and it creates fear about OSX. If I go to a website, order a product (give my Credit card #) I expect to get the product in a resonable amount of time, 10 days, 2 weeks OK- 2 months no way!</STRONG>

Depends on what you mean by "announced". Nowadays, they announce when they've started designing a game. We now know one year in advance (at least) what games are going to be coming out in a year. I don't mind that. It's interesting to see what they are developing.

I have to agree this pre-ordering may be getting a little out of hand if your pre-ordering months ahead of time. I personally haven't preordered anything yet.

[Jansar]

If you're really bad and you like sniping your own betas, there are mac beta versions of RTCW slipping through the net. (Shhhh!)

[G4ME]

email me with more info please please please if you have any

[BobK]

Please send me an email about RTCW.
Here is what I am talking about, I see RTCW is listed(on the Apple site)- when I order it it says there is a delay of a week, OK( Of course I want it today!) I go to outpost.com Place the order- no mention of a delay. So I order. Get the standard emails about the order, then a day later I get the delay of a week email, 2 weeks later I get "we can not give you a date". I am pissed. There was no mention of a pre order. I give you my credit card number(my money) I want service.
Same with Photoshop- email from macmall.com, "Order today" not pre order today. I am excited! This means an end to OS9! I order, hmmmmm, when will it be here? Look around at the Adobe site- shipping in late April!
To me this is bull****! Do not take my money if you can not provide the service! If you say "pre-order" and I give you my money that is on me!

[Leonard]

Yes, Bobk, I agree with you, that's bad advertising. They should be specific that it is a pre-order. Not everyone reads rumor forums and knows it's delayed.

By the way, Aspyr seems to be saying that RTCW is delayed in the final candidate stage at Activision the original license holder. Aspyr says they think it will be out by the end of March. see the last paragraph at http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0203/14.moh.php

[ 03-14-2002: Message edited by: Leonard ]

If Glenda Adam's working on RTCW (and I think she is) it's no wonder the game is late. I'm sorry I'm a pain in the ass but, hey, that's my job.

I think that rewrite of RTCW to carbon was unnecessary and a waste of time. I doubt rewriting to carbon gave any speed boosts or any benefits to the game. The RTCW demo worked really well (speedy and didn't crash on my G4), I would have thought the game was pretty much done (or at least the multiplayer aspect of it, which is probably the more complicated part), I would have guessed that the game would have been released 2 weeks after the PC version. Then I saw that Westlake had taken over the project. I cringed!

I know Westlake has absolutely no knowledge of and no interest in Cocoa. I had guessed they would start rewriting the whole thing in carbon. Shame. Time wasted for what? Nothing!

Bye.

[Jansar]

Originally posted by Jansar:
<STRONG>If you're really bad and you like sniping your own betas, there are mac beta versions of RTCW slipping through the net. (Shhhh!)</STRONG>

To find them you need d/l programs like hotline or carracho and stuff, and then you'll probably run into one.

[Brad Oliver]

Originally posted by &lt;Guy Incognito&gt;:
<STRONG>If Glenda Adam's working on RTCW (and I think she is) it's no wonder the game is late.</STRONG>

She's not - Duane Johnson did the port. If you'd like to offer up an apology, I'll be sure she sees it.

<STRONG>I doubt rewriting to carbon gave any speed boosts or any benefits to the game.</STRONG>

Those MacOS 9 users might disagree. Conversely, there's no inherent advantage to having it in Cocoa - performance-wise it's a wash with Carbon, and it excludes classic MacOS users.

<STRONG>I would have thought the game was pretty much done (or at least the multiplayer aspect of it, which is probably the more complicated part)</STRONG>

You would have thought wrong. The single-player engine contains many scripting and AI modules that aren't in the multiplayer app. In fact, there's quite a bit more code in the single-player engine in general. In this respect, it's similar to Elite Force.

<STRONG>I know Westlake has absolutely no knowledge of and no interest in Cocoa. I had guessed they would start rewriting the whole thing in carbon.</STRONG>

Unfortunately, you're not doing so hot on the guessing tonight. We use Cocoa when it's the best tool for the job, for example the upcoming Civ3 editor is in Cocoa because of the heavy-duty GUI.

As for rewriting RtCW, I'm not sure what you're imagining would be "rewritten", but Duane had the MP app up and running within a day or so with the Carbon Q3 core as the MP RtCW app itself had already been mostly debugged on the Mac by Graeme. The rest of the work was on the single player app, for which almost no Mac work had been done at that time. And now it's finished and has sat in approvals at id and Activision for coming on two months, and Duane has since moved on to Medal of Honor.

Brad

[maximage]

I just want to show some support for the guys at Westlake, at least Guy Incognito realises that he's a pain in the a$$, so there's some hope for him yet. I too have been hanging out for the Mac version of RTCW, since I've had to pass up on the chance to go to a couple of 50+ people LAN perties with some of my best mates, since I use a Mac, along with 5 of my best mates. Do you really think, Guy, that Westlake are intentionally holding up the release of thye game? The longer they wait, the more money it costs them, which is not the way to run a business, so think about it, I'd say they're doing the best they can. Deal with it. You use a Mac, sometimes you make sacrifices, sometimes you have wins. And atleast this way with an OS9 version, Ill be able to let a mate use my iBook 600 while I use my G4 800DP when we do the odd LAN party. Which all adds to getting the Mac name out there.

[GnOm]

Originally posted by Brad Oliver:
<STRONG>it's finished and has sat in approvals at id and Activision for coming on two months</STRONG>

what the f**k are they doing with it?!?
Two month for "approval", I mean come on.

*add your favourite four-letter- words here*

bye.

[Guy Incognito]

Originally posted by Brad Oliver:
<STRONG>

Unfortunately, you're not doing so hot on the guessing tonight. We use Cocoa when it's the best tool for the job, for example the upcoming Civ3 editor is in Cocoa because of the heavy-duty GUI.

As for rewriting RtCW, I'm not sure what you're imagining would be "rewritten", but Duane had the MP app up and running within a day or so with the Carbon Q3 core as the MP RtCW app itself had already been mostly debugged on the Mac by Graeme. The rest of the work was on the single player app, for which almost no Mac work had been done at that time. And now it's finished and has sat in approvals at id and Activision for coming on two months, and Duane has since moved on to Medal of Honor.

Brad</STRONG>

I'm glad you're supporting OS 9 users with a carbon RTCW, but let's be honest here, it takes a fast computer to run this game. Most people that have a fast computer are the ones that bought an iMac or a G4 in the last 6 months. Those computers come with OS X. A lot of people that didn't have OS X made the conversion awhile back also.

I think you'll agree with me that you need an excellent videocard and a G3 running at least 600MHz or a G4 running at at least 500MHz just to get decent performance out of the game. Probably 75% of those computers are running OS X as their primary OS either because they shipped with it, or people want to get the most out of their computer and decided to buy OS X. While I know there are some people that do want to run it at 2fps on their old Beige G3 or Rev A iMacs (yeah right, it's a lost cause for the old iMacs) computers that probably wouldn't want to run RTWC anyways. I can't imagine why one would keep supporting OS 9 when the new Macs come preinstalled with OS X and the old Macs that probably are still running OS 9 probably couldn't run RTCW anyways.

Such wasted efforts on Westlake's part.

As for scripting modules...you don't need to port that. That's as silly as saying you have to convert the textures for the in-game 3D models so that Macs can use them. You just need to port the way the modules are accessed. Stop feeding me horseshit.

Surrrre...you guys are waiting for Activision and iD approval. :rolleyes;

[ 03-15-2002: Message edited by: Guy Incognito ]

[Leonard]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
<STRONG>

Surrrre...you guys are waiting for Activision and iD approval. :rolleyes;

[ 03-15-2002: Message edited by: Guy Incognito ]</STRONG>

Yes, they are, Aspyr has stated this. You must not have read my link. Whether it's been waiting for approval for 2 months, I don't know. But I definitely think it's been waiting for approval for over a month now.

I for one thing wouldn't be flaming Westlake for the delay, but ID and Activision. Why is it taking so long for them to approve?

Originally posted by maximage:
<STRONG>
at least Guy Incognito realises that he's a pain in the a$$, so there's some hope for him yet.
</STRONG>

Yeah, he's a pain in the ass, but he makes the forum interesting. If we didn't have someone making some noise around here, it would be dull. If he goes too far on his rant, I just try and ignore it.

[ 03-15-2002: Message edited by: Leonard ]

[Brad Oliver]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
<STRONG>Probably 75% of those computers are running OS X as their primary OS either...I can't imagine why one would keep supporting OS 9 when the new Macs come preinstalled with OS X and the old Macs that probably are still running OS 9 probably couldn't run RTCW anyways.</STRONG>

Your "probably" is definitely way off. It's roughly a 70/30 split between MacOS 9 and 10 users right now based on registrations from current games. Perhaps you have a more reliable source, like your invisible friend or that voice that talks to you at night when you're trying to sleep...?

<STRONG>As for scripting modules...you don't need to port that.</STRONG>

It's a lucky break for us all that you only play the games.

Obviously the scripts themselves don't need porting, but the scripting engine does. I should have know that when I used the word "module" it would be so confusing to you that you would fail to realize that I was referring to the actual engine code since that was the context in which I was speaking. Surely you realize what that entails - you can't just take a script from Wolfenstein and expect, say, Age2 to parse it. You're also ignoring the AI engine (notice I've changed words just for you) and the skeletal animation engine.

Brad

[ 03-15-2002: Message edited by: Brad Oliver ]

[Guy Incognito]

Originally posted by Brad Oliver:
<STRONG>

It's a lucky break for us all that you only play the games.

Obviously the scripts themselves don't need porting, but the scripting engine does. I should have know that when I used the word "module" it would be so confusing to you that you would fail to realize that I was referring to the actual engine code since that was the context in which I was speaking. Surely you realize what that entails - you can't just take a script from Wolfenstein and expect, say, Age2 to parse it. You're also ignoring the AI engine (notice I've changed words just for you) and the skeletal animation engine.

Brad

[ 03-15-2002: Message edited by: Brad Oliver ]</STRONG>

Hey...how did you know about that little voice?

Anyways...I don't think it'll be a 70/30 split for RTCW...it'll probably be the other way around. You chose to ignore my 'you need a fast computer to run RTCW' comment. I wonder why. Maybe you just realized that I'm right and you're wrong. I don't see people running RTCW on anything less than last year's computers (a lot of them shipped with OS X and those that didn't ship with OS X, the user probably decided it would be best to get rid of the OS 9 bottleneck and put OS X on it.)

As for the porting comment...I've never ported before so I probably shouldn't comment on stuff like that but how much code change seriously is involved in getting the scripting modules or AI to work on the Mac? Be honest.

[BobK]

70/30 registration for games, No $hit -
There are on OSX games.
How many, really? 20 good games? If even that?
All the big sellers Quake, Unreal - who is buying new copies of these?

[a2daj]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
<STRONG>

Hey...how did you know about that little voice?

Anyways...I don't think it'll be a 70/30 split for RTCW...it'll probably be the other way around. You chose to ignore my 'you need a fast computer to run RTCW' comment. I wonder why. Maybe you just realized that I'm right and you're wrong. I don't see people running RTCW on anything less than last year's computers (a lot of them shipped with OS X and those that didn't ship with OS X, the user probably decided it would be best to get rid of the OS 9 bottleneck and put OS X on it.)

As for the porting comment...I've never ported before so I probably shouldn't comment on stuff like that but how much code change seriously is involved in getting the scripting modules or AI to work on the Mac? Be honest.</STRONG>

So he has to comment on everything you post? I didn't know there were any rules to how people should respond.

I know a number of people that run the RtCW tech demo on older machines (G3/G4 350s or G4 400s). The nice thing about the Q3Engine games is that they can be tweaked a bunch to get a lot better performance than the default settings allow. Remember, people that post frequently in Mac gaming forums may be the most vocal, but they may not represent the majority. I personally can't stand Myst and any of it's sequels, but there are a lot more people that do like it.

While I haven't worked much on large scale porting projects, I have worked on some. Porting anything from Windows to Macs and vice versa can be tricky at times. Compilers for the different platforms don't always kick out code that does what you think it should do, especially C++ compilers. Windows Compilers might allow programmers to use all kinds of nifty C++ tricks which Mac Compilers don't allow, or just break when trying to run. Scripting engines can be especially tough since there isn't a very easy cross platform method of debugging them. Script Engines can be as daunting as writing a compiler for a language, since scripting can be a programming language in itself.

I'm not sure if this is a fair comparison, but you might be able to see scripting engines as Java. Java requires a Virtual Machine that's platform specific as is the compiler. Theoretically, all the VMs for the different platforms should run Java bytecode the same way. The compiler should kick out bytecode that is crossplatform compatible, but the VMs on different platforms may still react oddily, depending on the implementation of the platform's VM. Add in the C/C++ cross platform compiler differences, and you have more crap you have to deal with.

It's funny. It seems that MacRtCW threads all across the net bring out the most uninformed statements and despite being proven wrong, the posters stand their ground. It doesn't hurt to actually learn something.

[Brad Oliver]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
<STRONG>Anyways...I don't think it'll be a 70/30 split for RTCW...it'll probably be the other way around.</STRONG>

Granted it'll probably be different since the 70/30 number I quoted was from a few months back, but I don't think dramatically so - certainly not enough to justify dropping half the potential audience. Six months from now it might be a different story.

<STRONG>You chose to ignore my 'you need a fast computer to run RTCW' comment.</STRONG>

Because it had no bearing on performance in OSX vs. OS9. You're going to see similar speed under each OS, all things being equal. Your statment was made under the assumption that everyone (or most everyone) with a fast Mac would be running OSX, and that's not going to be the case.

You can poll online in various forums to see what OS people are using and see a definite shift towards OSX, but that's very different from the OS everyone is in reality using, mainly because a much larger number of users aren't posting online with any regularity. When you consider the average Mac game sells 15k copies with "hits" pushing 20k-30k to much more, you can start to see the scope of the overall size of the Mac market versus those users who are actively talking about the games online - it's quite a large gap.

<STRONG>but how much code change seriously is involved in getting the scripting modules or AI to work on the Mac?</STRONG>

Not much at all, perhaps a month tops. At any rate, getting that part going is more labor intensive than a switch from Carbon/Cocoa which is at best a day or two's worth of work on a Q3-engine game, mainly due to the excellent way the Q3 engine is geared towards portability. What most 3rd party Q3 games bring to the table are code libraries that enhace the Q3 engine - various scripting engines, skeletal model engines and AI libraries. The Q3 engine is, code-wise, sometimes pretty small in comparison to some of these C++ beasts. Elite Force used a library named ICARUS to control scripting and AI, and JK2 (also by Raven) goes a step further with ICARUS2. Alice used something similar in concept but totally different in design called the "Tiki" library, etc.

As an example of what I'm talking about with the scripting engine, let me use an example from Alice. During the alpha/beta peroid, there was a bug where when Alice walked into the room where you first encounter the banshee - the one where the wooden floor splits in three - the room would only split in two and the final trigger in the script would never be hit. Most other aspects of the game worked fine, so it became an issue of debugging the sript files to determine where it was going wacky.

Now the script files themselves are written in a pseudo-C language and parsed by the script engine in Alice, which was different from Quake C in that it added lots of classes for actors and events that QuakeC did not (e.g. rabbit.say("Hello Alice") or whatever). Furthermore, debugging the script code doesn't work like traditional code debugging because it's an interpreted language. The code I was actually debugging was the script engine as it munched on abstract variables that were parsed in earlier.

So I'd have the actual script text open in one window for reference, I'd break inside the script engine when I encountered the interpreter hitting the first part of that code, then have to debug through the script engine using the script text as a guide to figure out what's going on. The script engine used in Alice (and coincidentally also in MOH:AA) doesn't have an integrated script debugger, so it's not an easy process. In a more general sense, this was the case with Elite Force and also Wolf.

Brad

[x user]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
<STRONG>
You chose to ignore my 'you need a fast computer to run RTCW' comment. I wonder why. Maybe you just realized that I'm right and you're wrong. </STRONG>

Interesting, seeing I run on a iBook 500. (which is comperable to about a iMac DVSE 400 (1999) which would be... 3 years ago. Do the math.

How can I say it's comperable? I owned one, and gaming performance was the same...

[Guy Incognito]

Originally posted by x user:
<STRONG>

Interesting, seeing I run on a iBook 500. (which is comperable to about a iMac DVSE 400 (1999) which would be... 3 years ago. Do the math.

How can I say it's comperable? I owned one, and gaming performance was the same...</STRONG>

My condolences to you...it must be painful to play that game at such a low framerate.

Anyhoo...my apologies to Brad, Duane, and Glenda for my uncalled for comments. I learn new things everyday...and I should probably ask someone to explain the things I don't understand fully to me politely rather than force them out of someone using my rude comments.

I still don't understand why iD's sitting on this and not giving the thumbs up.

[blizzard]

A quick question for anyone who might know; is Epic making the new Unreal engines with portability in mind? Or is the engine still built to function in Windows only? I mean, I imagine that the Doom engine will likely be very portable, seeing as how it's iD..but I seem to recall something about the UT engine being a very intensive port, and I was wondering if Epic was addressing this.

[x user]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
<STRONG>

My condolences to you...it must be painful to play that game at such a low framerate.
</STRONG>

Actually with all the settings turned down (except for 32bit) I can manage about 25fps, and when I hit on a good server (&lt;100 ping) I can usually manage to play above the average player. Then I scare all the PC zombies by telling them they were just killed by a laptop

I actually find that I like the trackpad better for playing these games, I tryed on a G4 533 (which LOOKED alot nicer, i'll admit) and the mouse drove me nuts.

[Guy Incognito]

Originally posted by x user:
<STRONG>

I actually find that I like the trackpad better for playing these games, I tryed on a G4 533 (which LOOKED alot nicer, i'll admit) and the mouse drove me nuts.</STRONG>

Trackpad better?

[rampant]

Lots of people play Q3 and RTCW on laptops, I do. Mine gets 95 fps on demo4 @ 800x600 @32bit. It's telling them that you did it on an ibook that will hurt.

[Guy Incognito]

Originally posted by rampant:
<STRONG>Lots of people play Q3 and RTCW on laptops, I do. Mine gets 95 fps on demo4 @ 800x600 @32bit. It's telling them that you did it on an ibook that will hurt.</STRONG>

LOL! 95fps on a PC laptop perhaps. You can't get 95 fps on an iBook or a TiBook @ 800x600 @ 32bit...sorry but you're dreaming.

I can hardly get 55fps on my Dual-G4 800 with GeForce2 @ 800x600, 32-Bit, max settings.

[rampant]

Sorry, I should have clarified. I'm on a Presario 2700.

[Guy Incognito]

Originally posted by rampant:
<STRONG>Sorry, I should have clarified. I'm on a Presario 2700.</STRONG>

That clarifies it then.

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
<STRONG>
I can hardly get 55fps on my Dual-G4 800 with GeForce2 @ 800x600, 32-Bit, max settings.</STRONG>

Just to let you know, here are my specs:

DP 1 ghz
1.5 gig RAM
GeForce 4 Ti

During LAN parties I average 90 fps - top out 110-ish

Online (good server - ping 100&gt; ) I average 80

Its good to have the best

Originally posted by &lt;DP Dude&gt;:
<STRONG>

Just to let you know, here are my specs:</STRONG>

Oh yea, thats at 1280X1024 highest quality graphics

[x user]

Heh, I don't know how familer with the clans you are. But i can usually manage to play with the XoS evenly matched. When you get into their sgt. though I have a few problems.

I'm really wondering though where to get a copy (bootleg, I know I know) of RTCW beta, I'm pretty desprete to get more maps.

[WhackamoleX]

Okay, not that this means anything:

Amazon.com says they will ship in RTCW this friday (and that I'll receive it on the 25th).

COMPUSA.com says they won't have it in stock until April 9th.

Computer Warehouse (by Elite) don't anticipate having it on the shelves for at least two weeks.

Drat, I was hoping to spend my upcoming birthday (as it would be the only day my SO would let me to play videogames all day!) playing RTCW.