The Brad Hole

Mac gamers are a sensitive bunch. They pretty much want every game on their Mac, right now. In itself, this isn't a bad goal, but it is pretty unrealistic, considering that the average Mac game sells maybe 2-10% of an equivalent PC title. This number isn't surprising, since that's about what the current Mac market share is compared to Windows.

It is through this frustration that petitions are born. Recently, two such petitions caught my eye: one that petitions Westlake to release Halo editing source code, and another to petition LucasArts to release the source code for Jedi Knight 1. Unfortunately, both of these are stillborn petitions; petitions for Mac software in general fail because usually they have a fundamental misunderstanding of the software development process. Usually with a petition, you are trying to convince someone that a market exists for which the recipient is completely ignorant. And usually, Mac game developers are painfully aware of the demand for feature parity.

Let's take the Halo petition first. These folks want Halo editing tools. That's certainly a reasonable request. They want Westlake to release the source code if we don't port it. That's where things fall apart. For one, it implies that Westlake has a) the editor source code, b) some sort of unenforceable contract to port the tools such that we can shrug off this responsibility, c) no interest whatsoever in doing the conversion and d) the decision-making power to release the source (or engine specs) to a third party (never mind that one with demonstrated ability to get the job done does not exist yet). First off, the decision to bring Halo editing tools to the Mac starts with the Mac publisher. If they want it, they're gonna pony up the dough for someone (like Westlake) to do the job. Second, commercial companies (particularly big ones) hate giving out the source code to their crown jewels. You'd be better off reverse-engineering the important details. Usually if you show even the remotest hints of competence, companies in a position to do so will try to help out with specs. Bungie did this with the third-party Marathon 1 tools, and LucasArts did this with the Dark Forces editing tools (of which I wrote one back in the day). Even ignoring all that, most editing tools are written in the most unportable, Win32-specific code you can possibly imagine. For the man-months involved, it typically would cost 2x as much just to do the editing tools as the game itself, unless the tools are somehow integrated into the game engine (a la Age of Empires 2 or Alpha Centauri). And having said all that, we pretty much almost always want to do the editor if it's even remotely possible. The only time in recent memory this has happened has been with Civ3, where I did a Mac editor in Cocoa, with some hairy MFC-to-Cocoa glue code to make the port remotely possible.

The Jedi Knight 1 petition is a completely different ballgame. On the surface, this passes my "petition check" - it's not immediately apparent that a market exists for JK1 on the Mac, given that the game is almost 6 years old. So ideally, a strong showing here could make a difference. Unfortunately for this particular petition, such an effort was made (by yours truly no less) right around the time I started on the Jedi Knight 2 port for Aspyr. At that time, the JK2 port wasn't announced publicly, but my hope was that we could get the Collectors Edition of JK2 on the Mac (which would mean DF1 and DF2:JK1). I offered to do the port for free, and managed to summon up a petition with 3000 some signatures, which was enough to get Aspyr's attention. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to get LucasArts' attention, so the effort failed. At this point, the best solution for this problem is to focus on just reverse-engineering the engine from scratch. For someone with a lot of time, this probably won't be too hard; the engine isn't particularly complex with regards to 3D. Scripting might be a whole different ballgame though.

I'm amused in particular at this petition because the person organizing it claims to have no programming skills, but would love to be a "project manager". Really, what that says to me is "Hi, I really love this game and would love to involve myself into the process even though I have nothing to add other than a near-pant-wetting level of enthusiasm." Hey, when it comes to Jedi Knight 1, the pant-wetting begins and ends right here. :)