The Brad Hole

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.

Posted by bradman at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Today's been a really good day.

First, our long national nightmare is finally over - we took possession of our house this evening! We picked up the keys and took a tour of what is now our very own, very empty, very very dirty house. :-) It was actually kinda shocking how filthy it seemed when completely barren, but that's mostly cosmetic at this point. It's been a long week with some harrowing, last-minute twists on our mortgage approval Monday and Tuesday, but it's finally done and I couldn't be more pleased. I never thought a few hundred thousand dollars worth of debt would be so satisfying. :-)

Second, today was the premiere of the final trailer (BitTorrent) for the upcoming Star Wars movie, which will end the series, at least in the cinema. Star Wars trailers are tricky business: I remember being giddy as a schoolgirl over the trailers for Episodes I and II, and this latest one seems like it'll be a strong contender for best movie in the series. Of course, in hindsight, Episode I itself was, at best, average to slightly above average, and Episode II only slightly better. I'm not one of those "Lucas raped my childhood" types, but neither am I blindly oblivious to the glaring weak spots of the past 2 films.

Still, I got chills from watching this trailer - it looks like one continuous geeky money shot, spewing all over the cinema screen. My pants definitely felt a little bit tighter and more constraining when the Emperor started hurling those senate pod platforms at Yoda. If the trailer is any indication, it certainly seems like the Chancellor/Emperor will totally steal the movie. It also looks like it'll be as dark and depressing a movie as I've seen in a long, long time. Here's to hoping that Episode III lives up to the emotion in the trailer and sends the series out on a strong note.

Posted by bradman at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Beth is out in Florida this week for work, and I'm left alone in the house with the 2 cats, like some kind of old spinster lady. And like an old spinster, I have no control over the cats whatsoever.

The cats have decided to celebrate my throwback to bachelor-hood. Ian peed in the corner of the bedroom last night at around 3 am (his incessant pawing woke me up). Bagheera, not wanting to be left out, yakked up a hairball in the family room this morning. Finally, Ian fell asleep in my work chair (forbidden territory!) while I was eating dinner, and in keeping with the theme, threw up most of *his* dinner. Luckily, the majority of it landed on the plastic floor protector instead of the carpet or my chair. How the cats manage to make such a mess when 50% of the floorspace available to them is tile, I'll never know.

Switching gears, our house closing is rapidly approaching - next Thursday is C-Day. The seller agreed to all our repair terms without even blinking, which was a relief. Apparently the repair costs all get subtracted from our closing cost, so that'll ease the blow quite a bit.

The volume of paperwork that I've had to give the mortgage company in the past week is shocking - some 35 pages of documentation for all kinds of oddball things. What's more, for some reason our fax machine doesn't want to talk to theirs, so I had to drive up there during lunch today, a 30-minute each-way trip to drop off the latest batch.

It's not as bad as that though: the mortgage office is within a few miles of my parents, so I paid them a visit and picked up some stuff. And by stuff I mean a box of Time Life "Home Repair" books from the 80s and more lemons than you can possibly imagine. Apparently the recent rains have caused their lemon tree to practically explode, both in quantity of lemons and overall lemon size. There were a few that, I can say without exaggeration, were nearly as round and large as grapefruit. If worse comes to worst, I might set up a lemonade stand to help finance the new house.

Posted by bradman at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)