Finger info for icculus@icculus.org...


Duke3D:
 I'm putting together a MacOS X installer for Duke3D that can be used with
 the retail disc to get everything setup. I need artwork that I can legally
 distribute, though (that is, not something swiped off 3drealms.com or a
 screenshot, etc...something Duke-like that you created from scratch).

 If you can make me an OSX icon for the game, a separate one for the installer,
 and a "splash" graphic (393x83 pixels worked well with the ut2003 installer),
 please drop me a line.

 The only things missing from the Mac port at this point is music, which is
 complicated, x86 compatibility for savegames, which is not worth the effort,
 and keeping PC-to-Mac netgames in sync, which is a pain. Overall, it's
 worth calling it done at this point, since the widespread appeal of Duke at
 this point is the single player campaign, imho. If you really want to play
 against others, make sure you're all on Macs. Playing against Windows and
 Linux players seems to work, but goes out of sync for some reason, which is
 frustrating, since we appear to handle all the byte swapping (yeah,
 apparently not...).


UTPG:
 Please stop emailing me to ask if this is done yet.

 Got the AL renderer (and the MikMod glue) rewritten and working...I now get
 sound effects and music on MacOS X.

 Only thing that appears to not be functioning correctly at this point is
 the source volumes...the AL renderer used AL_GAIN_LINEAR_LOKI, which was an
 extension that only existed in Loki's implementation. I just need to see what
 exactly that entails, and do the proper conversions before feeding AL_GAIN...
 it's probably something simple, just haven't checked it, yet.

 If anyone has a legal copy (i.e. - you own the original discs that came out
 of a non-Academic version) of Codewarrior 7 they can donate to me, it would
 help make sure that the OS9 version of UT continues to work online when UTPG
 breaks network compatibility. One of you has a copy collecting dust in the
 closet since you've probably upgraded _TWICE_ since that version, and I could
 really use it, here. Please drop me a line if you can help. I'm seriously
 not cherishing the idea of backporting the thing to CodeWarrior 6, since
 that's all I've got here. Ask your IT department if there's a copy in storage
 they can let go of. Someone's got to have a copy they don't need at
 this point.


Devastation:
 Please stop emailing me to ask if this is done yet.

 Server is out. Details here.
 Beta 1 of the Linux client is avaiable. Get it.



Unreal Tournament 2003:
 Mac version is in stores now! Go order from somewhere.
 I assume there are physical stores that sell Mac games that will/do have it,
 too.

 MacOS X French Release Candidate 2 is awaiting MacSoft approval.

 IF THE ENGLISH MAC UT2003 INSTALLER CRASHES AFTER YOU ENTER YOUR CD KEY:
  Then please download this (2.1 megabytes):
  http://icculus.org/updates/ut2003/ut2003-mac-setup-fixed.cdr.dmg.bz2

 You should end up with a disk image with an installer icon. Run it, and
  install as usual. When the installation is done, throw away the disk image
  and pretend nothing ever went wrong. This is an installer bug; the game
  itself runs as usual.


Postal 2:
 Please stop emailing me to ask if this is done yet.

 Skeletal meshes are rendering, most textures are STILL missing, and I get
 a crash in Karma as soon as someone ragdolls...so if you don't kill anyone,
 the game won't crash. This is taking the "it's only as violent as you are"
 mantra to a whole new level.

 Busy begging and pleading for Karma sources so I can fix this. :(


MOHAA:
 Please stop emailing me to ask if this is done yet.

 If there is time this week, I'm going to try and finish this. I'm sick of
 answering emails from people that want to know if it's done. If you
 preordered this from TuxGames, I'm sorry, the delays are 100% my fault, and
 I told Michael Simms that this would be ready WAY sooner than it was.


America's Army:
 Please stop emailing me to ask if this is done yet.

 Cheers to Damian for finding me a Revolution 7.1 card. The OpenAL crashbug
 that M-Audio users are seeing is due to a buffer overflow in the new
 CoreAudio-based code we dropped into ArmyOps. We query the hardware for
 available formats, but only allocate room for one format (this is apparently
 all the built-in sound chip in your Mac supports). The Revolution 7.1 returns
 14 different formats, so we scribble over a lot of RAM, and the game
 pukes. This was just an incorrect assumption on our part, or a misreading of
 the docs.

 A deeper problem is exposed, though. The current OpenAL implementation only
 deals with stereo output. The Revolution, as far as I can tell, doesn't
 expose a two-channel output stream...all the formats want 8 channels. Ugh.
 There are a LOT of 2-channel assumptions in this implementation (and the
 drill instructor sounds like a chipmonk once you get past the crashbug, since
 writing 2 channels to an 8-channel buffer speeds him up by 4x).

 I also don't like that this AL implementation resamples and converts buffers
 on the fly during mixing. I'd rather we do all that crap when we first
 dereference the audio data during the alBufferData() call. If we do that,
 then the significant bottleneck of the mixer callback would become basically
 one big Altivec blit to the output buffer, which is sexy enough to me to
 justify a redesign of code I've never seen before.

 The current implementation does a really rough resampling, too...
 intentionally. Accurate resampling is expensive, especially in the window
 you've got to feed the audio device. We could do something that sounds
 cleaner given the expectation that alBufferData() can do things a little
 more slowly. There are a few sounds in ArmyOps (the harmonica in
 Leavenworth, etc), that are recorded at 5000 samples-per-second...which is
 strange, and it really NEEDS a better resampler to not sound crappy when the
 audio hardware is expecting something that's not a power of two (44100
 samples per second, in many cases).

 So it's four in the morning, and my brain is fried from trying to grok
  this: http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/resample/resample.html

 Sometimes I really wish I had passed Basic Math.

 For the Revolution users, the short of it is "we're working on it". For the
 rest of you, the short of it is "we're working on making it faster". For now
 you should disable the card and use the built-in audio. This requires
 a few clicks in System Preferences, and does NOT require you to remove the
 sound card or open your Mac up, as insidemacgames reported.


Other stuff:
 I need to stop watching shows I liked as a kid. The problem with having a
 Tivo is that I can go on these mad recording sprees and suck down all sorts
 of movies when a nostalgic whim hits me. So I'm surfing around, and see
 "The Goonies". I'm like, holy SHIT, The fuckin' GOONIES! So I record it.

 And it sucks.

 Others followed: TRON? Blows. The Neverending Story? Sucks. I'm terrified
 that I'll find some episodes of Fraggle Rock and finish off my inner child.

--ryan.


When this .plan was written: 2003-08-03 06:43:45
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