Finger info for icculus@icculus.org...


Duke3D:
 Still need to get Bargle's console and such into the icculus.org CVS, but
 everyone is stretched too thin to do so at the moment. We'll get it there
 soon. Not counting the Mac port, we're really just about done with everything
 we wanted to do with Duke3D.


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


Serious Sam:
 The First Encounter: Beta three is out.
 The Second Encounter is now available, too!
 Details are here.
 Time to work on ssam is non-existant, and there will probably not be another
 build for Linux for the foreseeable future, if ever.


Unreal Tournament 2003:
 The Mac demo is out! Go find a mirror. It's about 135 megs. Reviews on the
 various forums are good...and to my surprise, people are reporting acceptable
 performance on machines I would have considered vastly underpowered! There's
 one guy swearing he's getting 20 fps on a 400MHz machine. If you are
 hesistating because you are under the minimum specs but have some bandwidth
 to spare, it might be worth checking it out just in case.


MOHAA:
 There will be another Linux dedicated server patch (that's compatible with
 Spearhead 2.15), but...I'm fucking swamped. I'll let you know when it's here.


America's Army:
 We showed ArmyOps on the Mac...to demonstrate that it was network
 compatible with the Windows and Linux players, we showed off 1.7.0 (the
 latest public version). I'll be updating it to match all the cool nextgen
 stuff that the rest of the systems were showing, and then we'll stay in
 sync for each public patch.

 Gentoo's got a LiveCD version of the game (like they did with the Linux
 version of UT2003), and this is currently the only way to play it on
 Linux...we'll be releasing a public Linux cient shortly, but I'm
 considering this a "Gentoo Games exclusive" for a few days, so if you
 want it, go get a BitTorrent for it.

Other stuff:
 E3 is wrapping up for me. I totally managed to miss half the people I
 wanted to meet with or spend more time talking to (sorry Connie, Bargle,
 the ex-Loki crew, etc...), but a lot of good business got done while I
 was there, and I got to skip the four hour wait to see Half Life 2 and
 got an early showing of the Matrix Reloaded, too. It's all who you know,
 I swear.

 So I'm camped out in my hotel room waiting to go to the airport, and I'm
 reading all sorts of internet forums. Thus far, Inside Mac Games called
 me a homeless person with things living in my hair (which, by the way,
 wasn't funny), and I'm finding tons of people who think that not playing
 America's Army on the Mac will be a brilliant way to protest America's
 military action in Iraq. That'll show them, no doubt.

 Furthermore, I'm a little nervous about all the posts that say "hey,
 ut2004 is being worked on, I think I'll skip ut2003 and wait for ut2004
 instead." This is twice as surprising after I mull over all the hate mail
 I got about how torturous the wait for ut2003/mac was, how Epic is in bed
 with Microsoft, etc.

 Let me be clear about this: Do Not Assume You Are Getting UT2004.

 If you are a mac gamer, and you want more games on the mac, now is the
 time to control your own destiny. If ut2003 doesn't sell well, not only
 is it likely that Epic will lose interest in the Mac as a market, but so
 will other developers. You can bet your ass everyone is watching to see
 what happens...ut2003 pushes the Mac in ways that other games haven't to
 date, but it's hardware requirements are very rapidly becoming the norm
 in the game market...developers and publishers want to see:

  1) if Mac hardware can keep up. I'm not talking about the shiny new
  stuff like the 1.4GHz towers, either. If developers and
  publishers feel that only (say) 10% of Macs that have been sold can
  even run their game, the market is not viable.
  2) if Mac gamers will buy it. Yes, that sounds like an oversimplification,
  but for many gameshops, this is the bottom line: How Many Units Can
  We Move? The Mac community needs to be able to say, "We moved X units
  of UT2003 and have Y active Mac players in ArmyOps" where "X" and
  "Y" are big goddamn numbers, without qualifiers such as, "But it
  would have been bigger if everyone didn't wait for ut2004" and "But
  it would have been bigger if people didn't consider the game a
  political statement".

 UT2004 is months and months away. I know there was 400,000+ downloads of
 the ut2003 mac demo, but the way to vote is to buy the real game so that
 gameshops are willing to keep talking about Mac ports. Let me repeat:
 if you want to see new Unreal games on the Mac, Do Not Wait For
 UT2004.

 Usual disclaimer: I speak for me, not Epic or their licensees. But you
 don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

--ryan.


When this .plan was written: 2003-05-16 13:40:19
.plan archives for this user are here (RSS here).
Powered by IcculusFinger v2.1.27
Stick it in the camel and go.