Mac Work Gooder Now

Mac project files and fixes for TGE 1.4rc2 are out there on the CVS server!

The big news is: 1.4rc2 should be working out of the box on any mac running 10.2.8 - 10.4.2.

Yeah, I know I promised working project files "in a couple of hours" after Ben's initial release, but it turns out that a ton of new goodies needed to go in at the last second: fixes for CVS & Frameworks, workarounds to ensure it will build on 10.2, script file editing tools... lots of good stuff.

Read the readme.txt file, or else.
There, I've said it. Now you can't say I ain't said it. Seriously though, there are still things that cannot be automated, setup steps that need to be taken. They are short and simple, and scripted where possible.

Moving forward
Please note that Torque 1.4 will be the last release to support MacOS 10.2 . Each 'major' version of OSX really does have a lot of changes and improvements in the API s. This means that it gets harder and harder to keep features and behavior consistent across to older versions.

Torque 1.4 will also be the last release to provide project files for ProjectBuilder and old versions of Xcode. Only the project files for Xcode2.1 will be updated going forward. I don't think this will put many people out given the response when I proposed it... Of course, this means I'll finally have to bit the bullet, archive, nuke & pave my own little laptop, but it's worth it. Did I mention the new project file format has comments? That you can diff them intelligently now? Good stuff.

G4 and G5 goodies!
Some really cool resources that greatly improve performance on G4 and G5 Macs have been rolled in. Major thanks are are due to Kyle Goodwin, for his altivec implementation of the terrain blender, and for his research and tips on optimum compiling options. Thanks Kyle!

The current project files default to G4 and G5 specific builds. Out of the box, it builds an app that will not run on G3's. Apple hasn't shipped a G3 based machine for almost 2 years, if I recall correctly. But don't worry, it's a pretty simple matter to get a G3 build going, if you really want to.

New features
Ben covered most of these, but they're just so cool I'm gonna reiterate a few here:
- Unicode font rendering: Cyrillic fonts, Asian fonts, crazy fancy cursive English fonts... It's pretty. It's not perfect, as some languages have rich, subtle and complex writing systems that vex we poor plebeian English speakers' text drawing algorithms.
- Unicode Input: really cool stuff. ANY input method that is available under MacOSX should work. There may still be issues with this, I don't speak any Asian languages, so feel free to give me a heads up if it's spouting gibberish.
- Wireframe debug rendering mode works.
- Audio using OpenAL 1.2 works on 10.3 and 10.4 !
- The media libs ( OpenAL, Ogg, Vorbis, Theora ) now ship as frameworks packaged inside the app.
- Header files and script files are included in the new project files, to make searching more informative.
- Assert and Alert dialogs now function properly in windowed mode and fail gracefully in fullscreen mode.
- Map2Dif_plus target added to the project files. Yes, I know it builds the entire engine, them's the breaks.
- Framerate cap now equal Win framerate cap, and is controllable by a console preference! This means you can tune it to best fit your game.
- Copy and Paste in and workin' .

And last... GCC4 compatability
Gcc4.0 is rather more pedantic than it's predecessors, but that's a good thing. Lots of little cleanups all throughout the engine mean that the new compiler, and the shiny, shiny new tree optimizer and it includes are available to you.


So, that's what I've been working on.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'm tackling some T2D stuff, a shiny square hyperthreaded toy I can't talk about, and an optimistic little project I won't talk about.


Share and Enjoy.