Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

xyber233 · May 30, 2002, 03:39 PM

w00t
<a href="http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=5512" target="_blank">http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=5512</a>

SteevAK · May 30, 2002, 03:45 PM

Darn you, you beat me to it, but I'm going to do it anyway.

<a href="http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=5512" target="_blank">http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=5512</a>

(Yes, it is the same link.)

Leonard · May 30, 2002, 03:45 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by xyber233:
w00t
<a href="http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=5512" target="_blank">http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=5512</a><hr /></blockquote>Yes, that's good news for Mac Gamers... I'll have to take a look at this one.

Phranken9 · May 30, 2002, 06:46 PM

yay! I've been playing on my roomate's PC, getting really frustrated as it would crash after about 5minutes of online play. Hopefully it is a little more stable than it is on his computer.

voice- · May 31, 2002, 02:54 AM

This and the RtCW 1.32 patch and I'll rule the next LAN party...damn, I wish I had CS on my Mac too...

alien · May 31, 2002, 06:04 AM

Great!

The specs requirement seem moderate with regard to processor and MHz. Does anyone know what graphics accelerator is needed for the best experience? (Will it play well on iBook 2001?)

willed · May 31, 2002, 01:18 PM

Well for the best experience obviously a G Force 4 Ti is preferable... I hope this game is playable at least on iBook 500, as I can't afford to upgrade for some time...

edit: the official stats for the PC on the Lucas Arts site say a 16MB card is required

no Jedi Knight 2 for iBook 500 / 600.

[ 05-31-2002, 02:26 PM: Message edited by: willed ]

Guy Incognito · Jun 1, 2002, 12:07 AM

Westlake's doing the port. I'm expecting lots of bugs in the OS X version...and I'm expecting an OS 9 version. Thus the port might take a very long time.

Not sure if it's because I'm not sober right, but I truly believe Westlake has no clue how to port to OS X. No offense Westlake dudes... I know, I'm not a programmer and I know nothing about porting but I'm not pleased with any of your OS X ports. So I don't really care what's going on behind the scenes right now. All I want is a decent port...decent performance...no crashes...SMP support.

Fruitz of Dojo and Omni should teach you a lesson or two about porting to OS X.

juanvaldes · Jun 1, 2002, 01:22 AM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
drivel...I know, I'm not a programmer...drivel<hr /></blockquote>[rant]
then shut the **** up!

Unless you know what the **** you are talking about don't spout your mouth off, if you feel the product is not up to snuff enough for your higher then mighty ass don't buy it.
[/rant]

Guy Incognito · Jun 1, 2002, 08:26 AM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by juanvaldes:
 <blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
drivel...I know, I'm not a programmer...drivel<hr /></blockquote>[rant]
then shut the **** up!

Unless you know what the **** you are talking about don't spout your mouth off, if you feel the product is not up to snuff enough for your higher then mighty ass don't buy it.
[/rant]<hr /></blockquote>Yeah...that's what I'm doing right now. I'm not buying Westlake ports. But I'm not sure why I should shut up. Don't you want quality ports too juan? If I don't say it? Who will? Westlake will continue to make sh!tty OS X ports unless someone gets on their ass about it.

I used to be a very good customer to Westlake back in the OS 9 days...I bought many, many of their ports. I'd hate to see that change.

Maybe I should have told you to shut up when you mentioned that Abuse was a Bungie game.

[ 06-01-2002, 09:30 AM: Message edited by: Guy Incognito ]

xyber233 · Jun 1, 2002, 01:28 PM

What ports have problems?

Brad Oliver · Jun 1, 2002, 05:29 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
Fruitz of Dojo and Omni should teach you a lesson or two about porting to OS X.<hr /></blockquote>Yeah, we could always ship it without network support. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

Brad

mgl · Jun 1, 2002, 06:52 PM

Jedi and SimCity 4 are the remaining games I want this year. I'm glad to hear Jedi is being ported.

Chimpmaster · Jun 1, 2002, 08:05 PM

The game will probably load up on an ibook 2001, but for decent performance youll need at least a fs imac.

From what i have heard, it has higher operating requirements that castle wolf, and that runs like crap on my fw indigo ibook with 320mb ram.

Guy Incognito · Jun 2, 2002, 01:34 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Brad Oliver:
 <blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
Fruitz of Dojo and Omni should teach you a lesson or two about porting to OS X.<hr /></blockquote>Yeah, we could always ship it without network support. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

Brad<hr /></blockquote>Like RTCW? Yeah...you could always ship it crippled in a way that Mac users can't play with PC users on the internet.

Most of Westlake's ports that use the Q3 engine seemed to have lost smp-support after they've been rewritten to carbon. Oh...and how dare you compare a $50 port to a freeware port? Sure, you'll argue that I had to pay for Quake and Quake 2 but I had my share of fun with it in OS 9...the intended platform...and it worked well! Sure, you'll argue that I've been a whiney bitch about the Unreal Tourney OS X port...and you'd be right, I had no rights to whine about a freeware port. But don't start comparing products that I have to pay for and expect to work well to freeware products that I don't expect to work at all.

Please Brad...(you mind if I call you Brad?)...don't take these problems lightly. Are you a programmer or not? How come MacMAME still sucks under OS X?

I'm sorry if I'm being a little bitch but I'm not paying for any more Westlake ports until you guys get your act together...it's not my loss...it's yours!

[ 06-02-2002, 02:45 PM: Message edited by: Guy Incognito ]

Aragorn · Jun 2, 2002, 02:21 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Like RTCW? Yeah...you could always ship it crippled in a way that Mac users can't play with PC users on the internet. <hr /></blockquote>You do realise that the patch came out during the approval status of RTCW. Of course by then it was too late. They almost have it fixed up, they can'just magically snap thier fingers and have the patch appear.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Oh...and how dare you compare a $50 port to a freeware port? Sure, you'll argue that I had to pay for Quake and Quake 2 but I had my share of fun with it in OS 9...the intended platform...and it worked well!<hr /></blockquote> <blockquote>quote:<hr />ow come MacMAME still sucks under OS X?<hr /></blockquote>LOL think before you type. Your whining about a freeware port. Also I don't belive Giants or Sacrfiice was freeware....but they also didn't ship with MP support. Guess you overlooked those.

I could say more but I'll let Brad take it.

[ 06-02-2002, 03:22 PM: Message edited by: Aragorn ]

Guy Incognito · Jun 2, 2002, 05:21 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Aragorn:
 <blockquote>quote:<hr />Like RTCW? Yeah...you could always ship it crippled in a way that Mac users can't play with PC users on the internet. <hr /></blockquote>You do realise that the patch came out during the approval status of RTCW. Of course by then it was too late. They almost have it fixed up, they can'just magically snap thier fingers and have the patch appear.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Oh...and how dare you compare a $50 port to a freeware port? Sure, you'll argue that I had to pay for Quake and Quake 2 but I had my share of fun with it in OS 9...the intended platform...and it worked well!<hr /></blockquote> <blockquote>quote:<hr />ow come MacMAME still sucks under OS X?<hr /></blockquote>LOL think before you type. Your whining about a freeware port. Also I don't belive Giants or Sacrfiice was freeware....but they also didn't ship with MP support. Guess you overlooked those.
<hr /></blockquote>That was the whole point of the MacMAME comment. To show how it's unfair to whine about the problems with freeware. But you were too dumb to realize that. How do you feel being such an idiot?

I don't think Brad, you or anyone can argue what I wrote in my previous post...my opinion is that Westlake OS X ports suck because they're buggy, missing features such as smp, don't make use of OS X features much at all, etc...nothing will magically change my views about this opinion.

Good luck trying to make me believe that I should go the store and slam down 70 canadian dollars for a game that should make use of the second processor on my machine but doesn't anymore because it's been rewritten in carbon for all the OS 9 people.

k thx bye, Aragoon.

[ 06-02-2002, 06:25 PM: Message edited by: Guy Incognito ]

Brad Oliver · Jun 2, 2002, 06:28 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
Most of Westlake's ports that use the Q3 engine seemed to have lost smp-support after they've been rewritten to carbon.<hr /></blockquote>They never had SMP to begin with. There seems to be a misconception that SMP support will automatically work flawlessly in every Q3 engine game, and that's not true. A few moments with the Cocoa RTCW test will show you that.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Oh...and how dare you compare a $50 port to a freeware port?<hr /></blockquote>Actually, I was mainly talking about Giants. Cocoa Q1 and Q2 have net play, so I obviously wasn't talking about them - you must've missed that in your rage to click madly on that reply button. If you want us to start learning from other porting companies... <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

<blockquote>quote:<hr />How come MacMAME still sucks under OS X?<hr /></blockquote>Considering that OSX is a preemptive multitasking system and I can't get as many CPU cycles, I consider it excellent that it runs within 5% of the speed of the OS 9 version. Maybe you believe that there's some magic way that preemptive multitasking is supposed to make games run faster...?

<blockquote>quote:<hr />...I'm not paying for any more Westlake ports until you guys get your act together...it's not my loss...it's yours!<hr /></blockquote>Actually, I'd consider it a big win. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

Brad

Guy Incognito · Jun 2, 2002, 07:11 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Brad Oliver:
 They never had SMP to begin with. There seems to be a misconception that SMP support will automatically work flawlessly in every Q3 engine game, and that's not true. A few moments with the Cocoa RTCW test will show you that.
<hr /></blockquote>Can you explain why smp wouldn't work well in all games that use the Q3 engine? I know you get kicks in simply stating that it's not possible without any explanation but I'd like to know how an engine can change so much that smp breaks or functions poorly in other games.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Actually, I was mainly talking about Giants. Cocoa Q1 and Q2 have net play, so I obviously wasn't talking about them - you must've missed that in your rage to click madly on that reply button. If you want us to start learning from other porting companies... <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />
<hr /></blockquote>Fair enough...but RTCW didn't ship with fully functional internet play, so what's your point? Yes, in my 'rage to click madly on that reply button' indeed.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Considering that OSX is a preemptive multitasking system and I can't get as many CPU cycles, I consider it excellent that it runs within 5% of the speed of the OS 9 version. Maybe you believe that there's some magic way that preemptive multitasking is supposed to make games run faster...?
<hr /></blockquote>I wasn't talking about speed per se...there were lots of things that made MacMAME almost unusable on my machine. But in all honesty I haven't tried the latest builds of MacMAME so this may have changed. And like I said earlier, I don't really have a right to talk smack about project that is released to the public as freeware. I was just trying to make a point that it's unfair to judge freeware. I'll give MacMAME another try soon and see if things have changed for the better.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Actually, I'd consider it a big win. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" /> <hr /></blockquote>If you say so...let's just hope this 'Haha, sucker! Don't buy our products! We don't care. We WIN!' attitude doesn't become too widespread or Westlake might go out of business.

I think it's funny when I see people tell me my opinions are wrong...especially when it's members of a company that could be getting my money. I don't pay for crap. I paid for many Westlake games back in the OS 9 days...why? They simply worked well. You guys seemed to know your stuff when it comes to OS 9...I feel like the quality of the OS X ports has diminished.

[ 06-02-2002, 08:21 PM: Message edited by: Guy Incognito ]

blizzard · Jun 2, 2002, 10:05 PM

Here we go again.

Keep it civil please.

Aragorn · Jun 2, 2002, 10:16 PM

First off, you really should realize Brad is being quite nice to actually answer your questions. If I were from Westlake I would promptly ignore you. No offence to you, I'm just saying I would.

Now, are you ignoring some of the answers? RTCW is a bit different than shipping with no MP whatsoever. Keeping up with patches is a big difference. That's like saying one game crashed the other didn't have the game on the CD, you have the same problem! It's not true.

I can assure you I will never drop from Westlake, until Brad claims Star Trek is better than Star Wars (may it never happen). Many other people feel this way, you can't expect game to be perfect off the shelf. I expect quality and I get that. Nothings perfect.

If you don't want to buy the game, that's ok. Your loss. You can say it's Aspyrs, and that's partly true, but your loss is much more significant than Aspyr's.

Let's not turn this into a fight Mod's I don't want it to. I would like to disscuss this issue at hand though. Thanks :-)

[ 06-02-2002, 11:17 PM: Message edited by: Aragorn ]

Brad Oliver · Jun 2, 2002, 11:54 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
Can you explain why smp wouldn't work well in all games that use the Q3 engine? I know you get kicks in simply stating that it's not possible without any explanation but I'd like to know how an engine can change so much that smp breaks or functions poorly in other games.<hr /></blockquote>As you probably know, the SMP support in the Q3 engine works by splitting up the rendering pipeline into two stages. In the first stage, it builds a set of abstract "commands" that define the scene. In the second stage, it translates these commands into OpenGL calls and sends them to the card. The SMP support works by offloading the entire second stage to another process which on the Mac runs on a separate CPU if available.

I'll give you an example of why this isn't a given using the JK2 engine as a test case. When Raven wrote JK2, they added a few extra commands in the first stage of the renderer that deal with the "ghoul 2" skeletal animation system. Then in the renderer backend (as the second stage is called internally), they added code to process the new ghoul2 commands and submit them to OpenGL.

For SMP to work with each command, be it the existing Q3 ones or the new ones added to JK2 by Raven, each one has to be "thread-safe". That is, the first stage mustn't access routines that can execute in the second stage and vice-versa. For the core Q3 stuff, this is fine as id has debugged it fairly well to work with SMP. But in the case of a third party, they don't really test this out on the PC, mainly because no one really uses SMP over there in a 2+ processor situation.

Some of the UI (as in Elite Force) also takes a slightly different path through the renderer, issuing some GL commands from the first stage in the main thread. I was able to reproduce those in JK2 since it uses a similar UI structure, so I'm somewhat optimistic I can fix the EF SMP support without too much of a fight.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Fair enough...but RTCW didn't ship with fully functional internet play, so what's your point?<hr /></blockquote>That I wasn't picking on the Fruitz of the Dojo guys. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" /> They do very solid work. However, I am curious what you want us to learn from them. Their ports don't have SMP support (the Q1 and Q2 engines weren't designed with that in mind), and they perform similary to their 9 counterparts just like ours.

Anyway, the issues with RTCW are completely out of our control in terms of shipping it up-to-date or not. We have to wait for the PC Punkbuster guys to port their library to the Mac themselves. They're very secretive of the Punkbuster code, and for good reason: that's the whole point of the library.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />I think it's funny when I see people tell me my opinions are wrong...<hr /></blockquote>You must lead a very jolly life then. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

Brad

Guy Incognito · Jun 3, 2002, 12:13 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Brad Oliver:

<blockquote>quote:<hr />I think it's funny when I see people tell me my opinions are wrong...<hr /></blockquote>You must lead a very jolly life then. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

Brad<hr /></blockquote>I do, I do...and if I had a penny everytime someone disagreed with my opinions I'd be filthy rich on top of leading this very jolly life.

Oh and thanks for the explanation about smp.

I didn't realize some developers could modify the Q3 engine code this much. In fact, I was always under the impression that the engine licensing provided by iD was to be used as-is and the source-code itself wasn't supposed to be modified by anyone. But, alas, it seems people can do whatever they please with the engine.

SteveJobs · Jun 3, 2002, 02:30 PM

Yeah, people can do with it whatever they want. Elite Force II is an excellent example:
The environment engine developed by id for TA will not be used, but instead Ritual's own Uber engine, which will be neat. Yet, that probably replaces a big part of the source code.

Steve

Vash · Jun 3, 2002, 02:39 PM

I'm just wondering....what is SMP?? I don't know anything...

Big Mac · Jun 3, 2002, 04:39 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Vash:
I'm just wondering....what is SMP?? I don't know anything...

<hr /></blockquote>SMP stands for Symmetrical Multi-Processing. SMP allows an OS to distribute tasks among both processors. In this architecture, both processors are peers. The DP Macs use SMP under Mac OS X; Mac OS X distributes threads between available processors. Applications with more than one thread (which is common) under Mac OS X automatically get MP support. For best results, applications are sometimes designed with MP in mind.