Duke3D:
(I _STILL_ need to merge Bargle's code...argh.)
MacOS X port is coming along. One or two nasty rendering glitches, and some
byteswapping issues (networking, savegames...that's all?) to go, still.
UTPG:
Managed to get the game to limp along on MacOS X before crashing. Some
rendering glitches aside, I could watch the whole intro and tell what was
happening. No sound yet. So much more to do on this yet. It'll be awhile.
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:
Mac version is gold, ships on June 11th. Go preorder from somewhere.
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:
Sent beta2 for the Mac (with all the ut2003 Gold Master fixes) to some
testers. Progress is being made.
Other stuff:
Can someone please explain to me what the hell is wrong with SDL on
MacOS X? Everytime it comes up in a forum, there's always that one jackass
that says "I ditched sdl because it was sloooooow!"
I predict the following:
1) This is probably always the same dude, he just trolls a lot of forums and
2) He probably didn't convert his sprites to the screen surface's format
before blitting or something equally as stupid, but SDL is bending over
to accomodate him.
What is this guy doing now? Writing to Quartz directly? That was clearly a
better plan. Good job, guy.
Then again, maybe SDL's 2D graphics layer _is_ legitimately slow on OSX right
now. I seem to be getting decent performance out of it for Duke3D, though.
It doesn't really matter, though: if there's a slowdown, it's not an
architectural issue; SDL is designed to allow for acceleration at the
hardware and lower-level API levels. So someone give me a good example of
a correctly written program (SDL will try to accomodate even bad
game programming practices!) that is unnaturally slow, and we'll profile it
and figure out what the slowdown is.
Also, I am sick of Allegro developers dissing SDL everytime they make
a new release. For example: "We're on MacOS X now and we're 'lightyears'
ahead of SDL!" The two libraries are totally different. SDL (without add-on
libraries) is much simpler than Allegro, and intentionally so. Allegro is
a better package if you want the kitchen sink, of course, but once you're
willing to wrangle together any external functionality you might selectively
need (like SDL_image, SDL_mixer, SDL_sound, PhysicsFS, etc) I'd question the
superiority of Allegro there, too.
Ultimately, it's all a matter of choice, and choice is good. Stop pissing on
other libraries, though, please...there's so many more worthwhile holy wars
you could be fighting instead. If nothing else, you only diminish yourself if
you have to trumpet significant releases by comparing them to the
"competition".
--ryan.