Universal Binaries !

MacWorld '06: Strange Things Are Afoot
So, this thing happened a few weeks ago at MacWorld.
This crazy, crazy, ... really cool thing occurred. There was hoopla. There was fanfare. Grampa Steve put on his black shirt & jeans, and did that thing he does. The crowd did that thing they do, and things happened. Because something really interesting happened this year.

Apple started shipping the long rumored and awaited Intel based Macs.
And they put a great graphics card in 'em. Joy.


The Shiny Thing On My Desk
I've had one of the 'Developer Transition Kit's on my desk for a while now, and the mac-intel port of Torque has been 90% ready for some time now. The real, final hardware arrived in early February. It's pretty cool. It's got a dual-core processor inside, and we've got 2 of them in the office so far... So, I farmed one out to Tim Aste, on a temporary basis, to corrupt him. And so I could have it up and running on the network for my own purposes...
Yep, I've got a little 2 machine compile farm now. Sharing the build between 2 of these babies, I can do a clean build of TGE in about 4 minutes, and all of MarbleBlast Gold in about 2m30s. Distcc is my new favorite cool thing.


It Lives!
Porting work was pretty simple, really: just needed final hardware, a small voodoo shrine ( to get GCC to cooperate ), and some spare cycles... And I'm pleased to announce that MarbleBlast Gold, Torque Game Builder(aka T2D), and the Torque Game Engine are all ready to go as Universal binaries !
Here's the TGE demo and MarbleBlast Gold running side by side.




Torque Game Engine & MarbleBlast Gold Are Up!
New versions of MarbleBlast Gold and the Torque Game Engine are live on the site as of this morning. Torque Game Builder (aka T2D) is in very heavy development, so the Universal binary will go out with the next rev of TGB.

MarbleBlast's version number has been bumped to 1.6, and TGE's version number has been bumped to 1.4.0u .

This is not the awaited 1.4.2 release, with all it's promised goodies. That one will be out when it's ready, which should be pretty soon, actually. I've still got 1 show-stopper in there to deal with, and the glorious Matt Fairfax has just a little bit of wrestling with the windows side stuff yet.


Two At The Same Time Is Good
You can't tell from the above shot, but both are getting very good frame rates, even when running at the same time on the same machine.That's part of the magic of a dual core processor. It's exactly like having 2 processors on the system, sharing memory. And, because TGE 1.4 and later include threading support, processor intensive tasks can be decoupled from the main rendering thread, and run in a separate thread. When you have multiple threads, and multiple processors or dual-core processor, the MacOSX kernel will automagically move threads around between processors, balancing the load for the best performance. Very good stuff. Depending on the specifics of your game, this can be a big win.



Technical Stuff
The TGE 1.4.0u SDK comes with an Xcode file that is set up to build Intel binaries using GCC 4.0 with the 10.4u SDK, and build PPC binaries using GCC 3.3 with the 10.2.x SDK. The main benefit we get out of this is maintaining backward compatibility to 10.2, while still running natively on new hardware. So, with the new TGE 1.4.0u SDK and Xcode 2.2, you can easily build a game app that runs on both Intel hardware and PPC hardware, and even on older versions of MacOSX!

The way this 'Universal Binary' thing works is pretty simple in concept. Executable binaries for both Intel and G3/G4/G5 hardware is compiled and linked, then Xcode creates a file that contains both binaries, plus some header bookkeeping info for the kernel. You get an app that's about double the code size, but will run natively on all Macs. The same approach was used in the 68k => PPC transition about 10 years ago. The two sides were combined in what was then called a 'FAT' binary. This time, they're called 'Universal' binaries. As a humorous aside, the command line tool Xcode uses to create a Universal binary is called 'lipo'. Ah, programmer humor.

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So, that's what I've been cooking.

Share and Enjoy.

/Paul