Return to Return to Castle Wolfenstein
As has been reported on the net today, the Mac version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory has been released. This marks the first appearance of ET on the Mac, and it's no April fool. :-) If you have a Mac BitTorrent client, you can download the (latest, fixed) disk image here from id's servers. A separate torrent, hosted by MacGameFiles, is here.
A while back (sometime last year, I think) I posted publicly that I'd do the Mac conversion of this one for free if someone could hook me up with the code. Given that ET is free itself, this seemed about the only way to get it to the Mac. As it turns out, my plea didn't fall on deaf ears: Timothee Bessett at id and Dan Hollis (of the ETPro mod team) got in touch with me around mid-to-late December to see if I was still interested, so around mid-to-late January, I was able to finally get going on it. The key to making this work was the release of the 2.60 patch for ET for Win32 and Linux. It gave us the perfect opportunity to get the necessary Mac binaries into the new patch to allow it all to work right.
The timing was kinda bad for me, since I was doing this in my spare time, and pretty much all of my spare time has recently been consumed with a) house hunting, b) house buying and c) house cleaning/painting/repairing in preparation for d) house moving this Saturday. ;-) Ironically, my free time will return to normal here in about two weeks - such is life. ;-) Fortunately, both TTimo and Dan gave a tremendous amount of support to me and the Mac port in general. They both made code fixes and did testing on the Mac version. TTimo also put together the installer, which ended up being a non-trivial task. Ryan Gordon had some interesting things to say about the state of installers on the Mac not so long ago - I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find his quotes. :-)
One notable thing about ET mods: most of them are very PC-specific and will need to be recompiled to work on the Mac. I've already tried to contact the True Combat: Elite guys, since it's apparently a very popular mod. Hopefully we'll see some progress soon.
Also, if time and schedule permits, I'll try to finish up a patch for the original Mac RtCW to add a few things that made it into Mac ET, like compressed texture support. No timeframe for that yet - it'll get done when it gets done.
Comments
Once again, a big thank you from all Mac gamers out there, to Brad (and everyone else involved from id and elsewhere).
It's not my kind of game, but the more the merrier eh.
Ryan's comments are likely in the archives at icculus.org somewhere, if anyone reading this isn't familiar with Ryan's site, it's well worth a peruse of the archives IMHO.
Posted by: benb | March 22, 2005 05:42 PM
Thanks a million, Brad! You are the unsung hero of Mac Gaming and one of Mac Gaming's most hardworking underrated sons!
I hope your patch for RtCW sees the light of day.
Good luck with your new place of residence.
Posted by: macgallant | March 22, 2005 06:33 PM
Brad Oliver, I have never heard of you before today but I love you in a way that defies definition.
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this! And thanks to all who contributed. I've loved using Macs for a while now, but had to keep my PC around to play games - an affliction you have put me on the road to recovery from.
Okay, no time to chat..have to go play. w00t!
Posted by: eve | March 22, 2005 07:36 PM
I nearly passed out when I heard about this! I love you and want to have your babies. ><
Posted by: Jonathan | March 22, 2005 07:38 PM
Thanks you very much Brad. Your work is really appreciated.
Posted by: Isaac | March 22, 2005 09:26 PM
Thanks, Brad, that was very cool of you to make a OSX port; your efforts are much appreciated!
Posted by: Tim | March 23, 2005 02:13 AM
Thanks to all involved for the free game, especially Brad, Tim, and Dan. Now I can stop harrassing Brad about RtCW and compressed textures ;)
Posted by: a2daj | March 24, 2005 12:24 PM
Thanks a ton for doing this Brad, I didn't realize that you volunteered all the time to do this port. Everything you do and have done for Mac gaming is very appreciate by everyone.
Posted by: Brandon | March 24, 2005 01:06 PM
I couldn't believe it when I read it...ET for Mac. Thanks so much for your time, I hope all those significant others appreciate your work as much as I do! Thanks so much for the game...I love it!
MP
Posted by: MajorPayne | March 24, 2005 02:50 PM
Ya, I nearly fell off my chair this morning during breakfast, reading the news this morning on my iBook... Then I downloaded it and loaded it up on a sa-weet dual processor G5 with a nice 256MB video card. Holy crap! Went online and it was spectacular. I bought RTCW for mac and pc and for all my friends, and I will be giving this out to them too. LAN party!
Posted by: mat x | March 24, 2005 06:16 PM
Thanks for putting in the effort Brad! The game is fantastic and it's highly generous of you to have ported it in your spare time.
Just would like to acknowledge you for the great work. Thanks much!
G4Jedi
Posted by: G4Jedi | March 24, 2005 09:08 PM
Great work!
Thank you!
Posted by: Markus | March 29, 2005 08:05 AM
Thank you so much. When I made the switch form pc to mac. This game was one of the only things that I missed... YOu have made my mac experience even greater.
Posted by: Threed | April 1, 2005 02:53 AM
You, my king, are the coolest dude on the internet!
Also, I was wondering about 2 more MODS:
ETpub
ETpro
Will you help them too?
Posted by: Boramor | April 4, 2005 02:34 AM
Thanks so much Brad, I don't really know what to say, this came completely out of the blue! I thought this would be another ridiculious "no mac version for no good reason" situation. thanks again for doing this for free in your spare time!! I am a huge fan of TrueCombat:Elite and hope that team can get an OSX version going!
Posted by: Mark McClure | April 5, 2005 09:08 PM