Westlake Interactive's Jesse Spears, Lead Programmer on the Mac version of Escape from Monkey Island, provided games.macnn.com with an update on the game's development since reaching first playable just over two weeks ago:
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Let's see...since First Playable...
Fixed a bunch of Memory leaks. You can now play for as long as you want (at first playable you could only play for a few minutes before running out of memory).
Fixed the Fonts so you can read them (the outlining wasn't showing up correctly, making it very difficult to read anything other than the selected text options). This actually took quite a while to track down (one spot in the code had a 0xff000000 that should have been 0x000000ff on the Mac
)
Full Screen OpenGL now works, implemented via DrawSprockets for most cards.
The Alpha Blending works now...looks gorgeous on the cards that support it (ATI 128's and Radeons, Voodoo cards). The heat effect coming off the Brazier of Hot Coals in the first scene with the Pirate ship rocking on the waves looks incredible...no, really, I'm pretty jaded about computer special effects (seen way too many cut-scenes
, but I was truly impressed by the look they achieved, even more so because it's part of the game, and _not_ a cut-scene
EFMI now works on any monitor (that is, if you have more than one monitor, you can choose which one to play on). This really only affects a very small minority of people (I'd guess less than 1%), but it's very useful for me for debugging purposes (I can try stuff out on my second monitor at full screen so it should look exactly like it does in the release mode
.
So far, I've gotten it working well on: ATI Rage128 (PCI), ATI Radeon (AGP), and 3DFX Voodoo5 (AGP I think...it was Phil's).
We're still looking into making it work with RagePro's and older Voodoo cards (need more testing before we can say for sure what the low end card will be).
The frame Rate looks good on my G4/450x2 (haven't seen any noticeable slowdowns, even in using the Software Renderer). It looks pretty good on Phil's G3 (450?) using a Voodoo5 and his other card (ATI Rage128?).
The framerate looked a little slow on my G3/266 with a Rage Pro (the parts I could try out), but it definitely was playable, and would've looked better with a release version.
What's left before Alpha? Get Sound Working (Phil's working on that now). Get Saving and loading of save games working (what I'm working on now). Need to play the game awhile to see how far I can get (doesn't really sound like work, does it
. Neither Phil nor I have made it off of Melee Island yet, so that's something that really needs to be tested before Alpha (and, no, we don't need any testers for that right now, so please don't ask
I'm sure I've missed some stuff, but that's all I can think of right now...
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