Wow, has it been that long?
I didn't realize I missed making a blog entry in July. Whoops! Well, July was a pretty "patchy" month for me at Aspyr. We had to do some Civ4 patching, then I did a quickie Tiger Woods 2k5 patch to fix some launch issues with the newer QuickTime versions on 10.3.9 (a familiar-sounding bug for MacMAME users, but in this case entirely different). This new version of Tiger2k5 also has full support for Cmd-Tab and Cmd-H when playing fullscreen - a feature that has been long requested.
I've also been working on some other patches - a universal binary patch for Civ3 complete as well as universal binary builds of Jedi Knight 2 and Jedi Academy. I hope they'll see the light of day soon; it's mostly an issue of getting them through QA and approved for release at this point. I also did a universal binary of another Quake-based game for fun - a personal favorite of mine. Hopefully she'll be ready for action soon.
With Civ4 "in the can", I've been ramping up on another project. From a code standpoint, it's fairly large. It's been quite an effort to get it compiling, and I'm not quite there yet. This is the first project I've done 100% in Xcode from the start. This particular codebase abuses the STL in a lot of painful ways, making assumptions that iterators are pointers, accessing private methods of the Visual Studio STL standard classes, using template syntax that is completely non-standard, etc. Beating it into standards compliance (with gcc practically demands) has been rough just due to the sheer size of the codebase. I could probably write a book about all the things I had to change so far.
As for WWDC, I wasn't there this year. The last time I didn't attend was 1999, but that's ok. Attending WWDC every year is a bit of a hard sell to me, because each year typically only has a small subsection of "new" things from the year prior. The big draw for me is meeting up with other colleagues and getting to hash out issues with Apple engineers.
Unlike a lot of people, I though the keynote was pretty good. I'm interested in Time Machine and a few of the other new features in Leopard. I'm also interested in Xcode 3.0, which apparently is 4x faster opening some text files. (I've always thought it was weird that Xcode is the only text editor I've seen that shows a progress bar while loading a moderately large text file.)
I know that a lot of rumor sites are beside themselves with anticipation for an Apple iPhone, so I am probably the only person on the planet who a) doesn't think this is a brilliant idea and b) doesn't want to see Apple introduce one. To my eyes, the cell-phone industry is filled with a bunch of money-sucking consumer-hating leeches who will kill their own grandmother before they stop charging you $2.00 to download a cheesy MIDI ringtone or wallpaper. Apple's entry into such a field would inevitably force them to pair up with someone like Verizon or Cingular, and I don't see that preventing any of the rampant nickle-and-diming. Maybe I'm just not as a big a gadget whore as I need to be to appreciate this.
Comments
Glad to see you blogging again - there have been a few too many Mac blogs disappearing lately - but I'm a bit worried about you saying that Civ4 is "in the can". Does this mean no more patches? Because it feels like it's still leaking memory - restarting the app speeds it up a lot, but I don't have the DevTools installed on this machine to get any more info - and I'd love to see that fixed.
BTW, did you see this thread?
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=146309
Posted by: P | August 13, 2006 08:17 AM
"...but I'm a bit worried about you saying that Civ4 is "in the can". Does this mean no more patches?"
Sadly, no. I'm sure Civ4 has a patch or two in its future.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | August 13, 2006 01:31 PM
Is there a chance for a universal binary build of Enemy Territory?
Posted by: v | August 14, 2006 01:13 PM
Well, sad for you perhaps, but I like it - Civ4 is a much better game than Civ3, and it can use another patch. With Civ3, the patches stopped coming when the game got an expansion, and they're talking Civ4 expansions now.
BTW, in the config file there is a line:
; Allows some memory savings *** ALT-TAB WILL NO LONGER FUNCTION ***
MemSaver = 0
What does it do? Changing it to 1 seems to help with the leaking, at least some, but it may be a placebo effect.
Posted by: P | August 14, 2006 01:52 PM
About the UB build for Q3-based games (JK2, JA, etc.):
do these builds include fixes for the various Q3-engine security issues that have been discovered this year?
For example:
http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosure/2006-May/045906.html
http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Full-Disclosure/2006-06/msg00112.html
Posted by: Totoro | August 19, 2006 05:46 AM
Hi Brad,
I'm a pretty hardcore Jedi Academy clanner; I would love to play it with a decent framerate on my new Macbook Pro. Is there any chance you need a beta tester for the Universal Binary versions of Jedi Academy or Jedi Outcast?
Posted by: Paul Martin | August 22, 2006 03:51 PM
Welcome back Brad :)
Well, the JA UB patch is out:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13614
As for the 'other' Quake based game.. I wonder what it is.
Taking the wild jump that 'she' refers to more than just the engine, I'd hope it'd be Alice. Although I've heard it runs okay in Rosetta (yet to install it) it'd be nice to have it native. It's a great game and has been sadly overlooked by many. Maybe the combination of a UB update and the possibility of future digital downloads will give it the wider audience it deserves.
I suppose there is always the Janeway link for STV:EF. I'm sure an update there would be popular. Or of course 'she' could just refer to any code-base :)
It's a shame that that other heroine focussed Quake3 game, F.A.K.K.2 has never been given the proper OS X treatment and probably never will (with OmniGroup leaving the gaming world).
Posted by: Ben | August 25, 2006 05:49 PM
I have just installed the JA update and the changelog does not mention any security fixes.
Aside from that, holding "Shift" while (double-)clicking on the JA icon no longer brings up the dialog where you could enter additional options (e.g. "+set fs_game MODFOLDER" for the Dark Forces mod).
Is this a bug or is there some other way to pass these options to JA?
Posted by: Totoro | August 29, 2006 09:25 AM
Brad, I was wondering what you would recommend with the following.. 2 Gig Dual Core Macbook 1 Gig RAM, looking for either Civ 3 or Civ 4,,, I believe they are the same price at CompUSA right now so I think Civ 4 would be better, if my system can handle it.
Thanks
Posted by: Mike | September 6, 2006 09:22 AM
The regular Macbook cannot handle Civ4 - it requires discrete graphics, according to the official spec. Don't know if it will run anyway. The Macbook Pro handles it fine.
Posted by: P | September 11, 2006 02:13 AM
Would that "other" Quake based game happen to be a Universal Binary of Enemy Territory?
I'm dyyyyying for this.
Posted by: Jeffrey Baxendale | November 10, 2006 01:08 PM