UnrealEngine3: Work officially begins. Time to get this building under gcc again. Since we changed up the source tree layout, the Makefiles from UE2 are basically useless. Rather than rewrite them, I'm going to spend some time exploring SCons, which came highly recommended by TTimo, the Doom3/linux guy. First Unreal steals their colored lighting, then their build system! :) Obviously, there's a lot to be done at this point, but best to start now so I'm not scrambling to port a whole engine when UE3 games get closer to shipping. Updates as I have them. Spider-Man 2: This is floating through QA right now as a final candidate, so it's Darned Near Done. MojoPatch: Now open source! http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=2040 Shrek 2: Now shipping! OpenAL: For those that weren't at WWDC, Apple gave out preview discs of MacOS X Tiger. One of the things Tiger installs by default? OpenAL.framework. No kidding. That's basically awesome. It's Apple's version, which is open-sourced and residing in Creative.com's CVS repository. Likely I'll move my implementation over to Linux and stop further Mac development, so that there is a clear technology path on the Mac. I'll devote further Mac development and debugging to the Apple implementation. After all, it was partially a stop-gap solution (remember when ut2003 took 25% of the CPU mixing audio? It was a needed fix, no doubt!), and partially a technology proof-of-concept to show Apple what works well in terms of game development. No doubt it has served me well. In the short term, I'll have to decide what we ship on the disc with Unreal-based games. For ut2004, my implementation is the only one with ALC_EXT_capture support for VoIP...this could be added to the other implementation, but hasn't been as of yet. My version is apparently a little faster, but it's stereo only (but the subversion repository doesn't crash on M-Audio 5.1 and 7.1 cards anymore), so Apple's tech is probably more attractive for further development by default. All of the missing functionality in Apple's implementation could be fixed with some elbow grease, which I'm sure will show up one way or another in the near future. Overall, this is a very good step forward, and I applaud Apple for giving game developers something they really need. Duke3D: Latest CVS builds and runs on Solaris/x86 (and presumably Solaris/sparc, too). UTPG: (Yes, this is still being worked on.) Unreal Tournament 2003: There's an exploit in the ut2003 network code, so here's a new build. Linux: http://0day.icculus.org/ut2003/ut2003lnx_patch2225-3-BETA.tar.bz2 MacOSX: http://0day.icculus.org/ut2003/ut2003-mac-patch-2225-3.dmg.bz2 The Linux one has about a million changes over the stock 2225, since it's got all the MacOSX work on top of it. Consider it beta. The Mac version has one or two fixes, so it's worth updating. Unreal Tournament 2004: If Mac retail installer crashes on you, use this: http://icculus.org/~icculus/tmp/UT2004-mac-updated-installer.tar.bz2 Linux (x86 and amd64) official 3236 patch (new build with load times fixed): http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=2064 MacOS X (un?)official 3236 patch (YES, this is newer than 3229): http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=2064 Call of Duty: 1.4 is out, now with PunkBuster support: http://www.callofduty.com/patch/ This is a 1.4 server with an exploit closed. Admins should all upgrade: http://icculus.org/betas/cod/COD-lnxded-1.4-07252004.tar.bz2 Postal 2 Share the Pain: Linux demo: http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=1816 Linux retail: In beta testing (apply at http://www.linuxgamepublishing.com/) Mac retail: In beta testing (no more applications, please!) America's Army: 2.1.0 is out for Linux and Mac: http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=2046 Other stuff: Had a great time in Ottawa at desktopcon2004 and OLS. Jeremy White (from CodeWeavers...the Wine people) gave his talk right before Gavriel State and I and got beaten up on every single bullet point on his slides. We had almost the exact same points, but seemed to be well-received. I'm not sure why: maybe the audience was just too worn out after fighting with Jeremy to throw rotten fruit. I showed off UnrealEngine2, just as a "this is what we can do on Linux right now" sort of thing. Then I talked about how this enables third party licensees to get their games on Linux much easier, and how the mod community has made a 30 dollar purchase of ut2004 into a whole arcade of value for linux gamers...showed Alien Swarm, which shows a unique way to take advantage of the tech, and Air Buccaneers, since it's probably one of the most unique mods out there ("so that was squashing aliens, but here's something you've all been waiting for: Hot-Air Balloon Warfare!") The audience loved it. Gav showed Max Payne on Cedega, then we talked about things that have been stumbling blocks for us from a technical standpoint. We had a good time...the dialogue in the room was a sort of wrestling match and group hug with lots of people that are at Ground Zero of the Linux Desktop...Alan Cox, Havoc and the Red Hat crew, Keith Packard and Jim Gettys and the freedesktop.org/x.org gang...lots of other people. The slides from our talk are here, in several formats: http://icculus.org/~icculus/slides/desktopcon2004/ We used the Keynote version (the only working laptop I have is a Mac; sue me), but the exporter seems to be pretty faithful in .pdf format, etc. Keith Packard's talk at OLS was great, too, btw. I really felt like we've spent years bitching about xfree86 for several reasons, and now things are going to start moving forward at some pace, which is refreshing, to say the least. --ryan.