OpenAL:
In considering the multichannel support in CVS...I'm not pleased with it.
Bugs aside, I feel like VBAP isn't good technology for 2D positioning...
since it picks pairs of speakers, there are some common situations that it
doesn't handle well (sources positioned on the Listener, panning from one
side to the other leaves a gap as you approach center, etc).
Mathematically, it looks good on paper, but I don't think it flies in
practice for 2D spatialization. A 3D setup (where you use speaker triangles
instead of pairs) could be interesting with VBAP, though, given a good
distribution of loudspeakers.
Then again, if all your speakers are on a 2D plane, you can probably extend
the hacky stereo panning from one dimension to two, and get acceptable
rendering cheaply enough. I'll have to play around with it.
Duke3D:
Apparently jonof and Ken Silverman have an OpenGL renderer for Build...that's
awesome work, guys! We're looking at integrating it with the icculus.org
tree if possible, so the Linux and Mac people can take a looksie at it, too.
UTPG:
We're bringing in Steven Fuller ("relnev") to do some UTPG hacking. Beyond
doing consistently quality work, I expect his mere presence will keep my ass
in gear to get the Mac and Linux ports done.
Unreal Tournament 2003:
Mac patch is out:
http://www.macgamefiles.com/detail.php?item=17882
New patch coming soon to fix some things that broke in the last patch,
mostly.
We're likely going to be putting out a Linux/amd64 dedicated server package
soon to test the waters...our 64-bit builds have been limited to public
demos mostly, so I'm hesistent to just dump this out on the public. With
Unreal, the dedicated server is basically the client without rendering (well,
that's about 95% true), so this gives us a way to get a real beta test of
most of the codebase without attracting a million asshole "benchmarkers"
that'll write articles that come to premature, or downright incorrect
conclusions. You know who you are.
When this stabilizes, publically-available Win64 and Linux clients become
much more sexy to us, but there is no timeframe for this, and emails asking
for one get deleted.
Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo:
Linux client is out! http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=1879
Mac client is out. Thanks to Tuncer Deniz for jumping on distribution on
(literally!) a minute's notice!
Obviously, there are bugs. Stress-testing on a wide distribution of hardware
is part of the reason a demo materializes before the retail box. As some of
you have realized, my ut2003 2225.1 fix for Radeons in Panther isn't in
the ut2004 demo...the fix never got put into source revision, and was totally
overlooked. This is my stupid fault, we'll correct it. Other bugs in the
Mac client can be reported to James Robrahn at MacSoft: ut@macsoftgames.com,
or submitted to my bugtracker at https://bugzilla.icculus.org/ ... James
will probably feed them into bugzilla anyhow, so this is just a question of
how you are more comfortable reporting bugs.
Bugs in the Linux dedicated server (and eventually, the client) can go to
bugzilla. Unlike James at Macsoft, I hate bug reports in my
already-overfilled inbox, so if you want it to be read, don't send it to me
directly.
Call of Duty:
1.2 Patch is out! http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=1861
Postal 2:
Share the Pain demo for Linux now available:
http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=1816
There is likely going to be a retail boxed Linux version of P2:STP...do NOT
buy the Windows version yet. This should be announced soon if it happens.
Mac version will be coming soon...so, so busy right now...
MOHAA:
Non-expiring version is out:
http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=1846
This one was built with gcc3, which fixed some other odd bugs, like some
static meshes being positioned incorrectly. You can see this in the first
mission ("Lighting the Torch"); the building you storm has a room with a
medpack floating in space in the original binaries. In this version, there's
a table under it.
I wonder if gcc3 would fix the falling-through-the-floor,
final-boss-won't-die, or platforms-kill-camera-view bugs in Serious Sam, too.
I'll have to check that someday.
(UPDATE: No, it doesn't. Oh well.)
America's Army:
The 2.0.0a patches for GNU/Linux and MacOSX are now available. Details are
here: http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=1829
Other stuff:
I'm cleaning up MojoPatch and releasing the source to it...it's some
stank-nasty code that's awkward to use, but hey, a free patching tool for the
Mac could be of use to some developer somewhere, I'm sure.
--ryan.