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=2040Shrek 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=2064Call 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.bz2Postal 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=2046Other 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.