ArmyOps: Mac version just went out to the MacNinjas for beta testing. Postal 1: Running With Scissors, myself, and the MacNinjas spent some time moving the original Postal to MacOS X. If you want it, the complete game is on the MacWorld "Total Tiger" disc, which hits newstands today, July 26th. Make sure you get the right magazine, since this is a special edition of MacWorld and not the usual issue. You can buy it online here. This is currently the only place you can get a real MacOS X version of Postal 1, and it's the full single-player game, not a demo, so don't miss it! Postal 2: If you bought the "Meal Deal #3: Minority Combo" disc from gopostal.com, it has installers for Mac, Linux, and Windows included. This went to press today, so those will be shipping sometime soon. If you have a Windows-only AW disc, you can use these installers: Apocalypse Weekend installer for MacOS X: http://0day.icculus.org/postal2/postal2aw-macosx-installer.zip Apocalypse Weekend installer for Linux: http://0day.icculus.org/postal2/postal2aw-linux-installer.tar.bz2 The installers will patch your Postal 2 install to 1409.1 if needed. Unreal Tournament 2004: I wedged in a hack for the license plate. There's some depth test mojo going on that I can't figure out, so I hacked around it. So, here's a first shot at ut2004 for Linux with all the render-to-texture stuff. Some things this fixes: - The scoreboard in DM-Morpheus3. - Motion blur in Red Orchestra and UnWheel, etc. - Realistic player shadows. - The Hellbender license plate. Some notes, first: - This is Linux only right now; MacOS doesn't have the GL extension I want, at least not as of 10.4.2. The second it shows up in the OS, I'll pull the trigger there, too. - You MUST have version 3355 installed. Earlier (and later, later) versions WILL NOT WORK, and the GAME WILL CRASH. You have been WARNED. - You MUST have Nvidia's latest drivers, or this WILL NOT WORK (although it will probably work like it does now, no render targets). ATI's drivers, or anyone else's, will probably work if they support the OpenGL extension GL_EXT_framebuffer_object. - You MUST set "UseRenderTargets=True" in the "[OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice]" section of your UT2004.ini, or it WILL NOT WORK. - To get realistic shadows, you also have to set "bPlayerShadows=True" and "bBlobShadow=False" in the "[UnrealGame.UnrealPawn]" section of your User.ini...the GUI config will not let you set this in 3355 (but the next official patch will correct this). You can also enable vehicle shadows in User.ini. - Realistic player shadows (or even blob shadows) won't render on terrain on the Nvidia drivers, because of their 4 TMU limit for fixed-function pipeline apps. There is no fix planned for this at this time. Go buy an ATI card if it bothers you, and mail the receipt to Nvidia's engineering department. - The DM-Morpheus3 scoreboard renders strangely in Windows too; this is not an OpenGL renderer bug, it matches the behaviour of the Direct3D renderer. - Red Orchestra's motion blur now works (and, unrelated, their splash screen got fixed, too), but the sniper scope is still broken; use the "texture" setting and not "model" for the sniper scope in the options. This is my bug, to be considered later. - This was not built on the Holy Build Box. If it refuses to start up on your machine because of a glibc conflict, etc, sorry. Wait for an official patch. - This was built with all my gcc4 mangling from MacOS/x86, and all my Win64 changes...there is a LOT of code changed over 3355, so if it crashes, too bad, wait for an official patch. - This is x86 only. amd64 will not be forthcoming until, you guessed it, an official patch. If you write me asking for an amd64 build, I will delete it without replying. If you read all that, here you go: http://icculus.org/~icculus/tmp/ut2004-lnx-3355-with-rendertargets.tar.bz2 Unpack it in your game's System dir, overwriting ut2004-bin ... Second Life: Here's 3k words worth of pictures: http://icculus.org/~icculus/tmp/screenie2.jpg http://icculus.org/~icculus/tmp/secondlife-lnx-screenie.jpg http://icculus.org/~icculus/tmp/secondlife-lnx-screenie2.jpg Other stuff: I'm certain that the people that know me are genuinely sick of hearing me rave about this by now, but I'm totally in love with Def Poetry on HBO. Someone once suggested to me that art travels in cycles; there are ages of books, ages of theater, and ages of poetry...you can generalize some things into these categories; novels, non-fiction and short stories under "books," film, TV and stage under "theater," and haiku, Spoken Word, and gangsta rap under "poetry". And so on. This is, generally speaking, not an age of poetry. If I asked you to name me three modern authors, (hopefully) you could. Even if you just count books that are in the news a lot, you'd have J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown. If you watch Oprah Winfrey, you could name me tons of people. If you had to name three modern plays right now, you'd at least come up with the shit Disney feeds tourists on Broadway, or some Andrew Lloyd Weber thing. Or something coming or going in some state of movieization: Rent, Chicago, The Producers, something. Let's ignore hip-hop for a second: name me three legitimate modern poets. Go ahead. Just three. Everyone I've asked this to pops out "Maya Angelou" immediately, and then goes blank. Most of these people can't name any poems she's written, they just know the name. At best, poetry as an artform has been vacillating between commercial exploitation and esoteric craft for a long time. Def Poetry is about as close as most people will come to Spoken Word as a pure form of poetry. For many people that aren't otherwise actively searching it out amongst piles of shit, it might be the only positive message they ever see from "rap" too. It's frenetic, and angry, and funny, and ugly-beautiful all at once. I totally dig it. So turn off those Deadwood cocksuckers and watch something that improves your life for a change. Or, you know, read a book instead. :) --ryan.
