[Leonard]

Since I'm buying a G4 Dual-800, I've started watching the game news sites for OS X compatible games. Today I noticed that Omni is producing 2 interesting game ports - Giants and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. Both sound interesting, but how do these ports work? For instance Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force is already out on OS 9.x, do you have to buy the OS X port, or is it free if you have the OS 9.x version of the game? Ie. a free update or download?

I noticed the Heavy Metal port is a beta.

[blizzard]

The X version of Elite Force will be a free download, an update to the full OS 9 version. Giants will ship as as OS X-only game; there will be no OS 9 version.

This is the only version of Giants that can use multiple processors. We actually added multi-processing support while we were doing the port, as well as doing various optimizations on the graphics routines (and changing the graphics library from Direct3D to OpenGL). The end result is we're getting the same framerates on our Macintosh dual 500 MHz G4s with a GeForce 2 on an AGP 2x bus as we do on a brand-new, top of the line Wintel AMD 1.3 GHz Ahtlon with a GeForce 3 on an AGP 4x bus and DDR RAM.

Nobody seen this?

[blizzard]

They had some screenshots up over at Inside Mac Games comparing the framerates of two identical scenes, one on the aforementioned PC and the other on the Mac, where the Mac was leading the PC by around 0.5 fps. There's a lot of doubt which can be cast on those assertions, definitely, but it would be cool to see it and I don't think Omni would have a reason to lie at this point.

[Leonard]

Yes I saw that. It's nice to see a game developer taking advantage of the DP machines. I just didn't want to boast about the numbers, or it would start one of those Mac-PC debates again.