Patch News
I don't pay as much attention to my blog as I used to, but I just spent a few minutes catching up on the comments you folks have left in the past few months, so rather than try to address some questions in the comments, I'll just update here.
Call of Duty/CoD United Offensive: I handed off the patch to our QA guys for testing last week. It shouldn't be too much longer - probably weeks, not days or months.
Call of Duty 2: I've started looking at a patch for this now that the CoD1 stuff is behind me and I have more time away from the main project I've been on. We originally handed this port off to an outside house, so I do have to get up-to-speed a bit on it, but the core code is eerily similar to CoD1 so that's a plus. The biggest issue with this is that it hitches badly on the Nvidia 8600/8800/9400 cards, which shipped after our port did. I've identified the issue (the game is using Vertex Array Range in a way that causes trouble for the NV G80 driver), so that's good to know. Fixing that should also bring up performance in general for all the other cards. A few people have mentioned that the graphics are wrong for skin/water on the Nvidia 8600, but I'm not seeing that in 10.5.6, at least on the starting level. I'll have to research that some more.
Knights of the Old Republic: This was reported to run like ass on the Radeon HD 2600 even with the Universal Binary patch. I know exactly why this is: the HD 2600 doesn't support the OpenGL extensions that KOTOR looks for to be on the ATI "fast path", so it falls back to some really slow rendering. Specifically, ATI_text_fragment_shader (an extension that predates ARB_fragment_program) is gone. I had to update the shader code in Call of Duty to address this same issue, so this is really more of the same. I don't have a timeframe for doing this, other than after I finish the CoD2 patch.
Occlusion query support for other Q3 games: a2daj smartly pointed out that there are some scenes in the Jedi Knight games that take a big framerate hit when bright lights/flares appear, and this also uses the same code I recently rewrote to use occlusion queries for Call of Duty. Love to fix this as time permits, but I think Aspyr is getting tired of me constantly patching Jedi Knight/Academy. ;-) I suppose the same must hold true for Alice as well - both the flare performance and the patching frequency!
More Mac Games: Yeah, we announced Guitar Hero: World Tour for Mac and PC the other day, and we do indeed have more Mac games in the pipe and of course actively in development, just not announced yet. I guess they'll get announced as they get closer to shipping. I wish we'd go back to the "Westlake" style of codenames for unannounced projects to indicate just how many we're doing and show some forward progress, but I think that notion lost traction somewhere along the line.