Newsgroup: it.comp.macintosh
Titolo: Per il mio amico Cacicia

Unreal Tournament 2003:
 The Mac demo is out! Go find a mirror. It's about 135 megs. Reviews on the
 various forums are good...and to my surprise, people are reporting
acceptable
 performance on machines I would have considered vastly underpowered!
There's
 one guy swearing he's getting 20 fps on a 400MHz machine. If you are
 hesistating because you are under the minimum specs but have some bandwidth
 to spare, it might be worth checking it out just in case.
 Some other Mac stuff...there's some misinformation and unanswered questions
  floating around I need to address:
 MAKE SURE YOU'VE GOT OSX 10.2.6! Here's a brief breakdown on your results
on
 earlier MacOS versions (from memory, this hasn't been tested recently) :
   10.0 and 10.1:
      Probably won't even start up.
   Anything before 10.2.3:
      No S3TC support...textures lose quality, we have to cut a miplevel to
      allow for higher video memory usage since we need to decompress the
      textures manually. Lots of graphical issues, probably crappy
performance.
   10.2.3:
      Game will have rendering bugs and shitty performance on all video
cards.
      Run Software Update!
   10.2.4:
      Game will run _extremely_ poorly on most ATI cards on this version...
      there were about a million ATI-specific fixes for ut2003 in 10.2.5
      (thanks to Chris Bentley, Phil Churchil, Thomas Fortier, and many
others
      who did everything from optimize the hell out of the drivers to add an
      OpenGL extension to increase performance to fix a win32 bug of all
      things). ATI engineers never get enough credit in this day and age,
but
      ATI's Mac engineers are first rate as far as I'm concerned.
   10.2.5:
      Game will have rendering flaws and random crashes on GF2mx and GF4mx
      cards (Thanks to Geoff Stahl and John Stauffer for smashing this for
      a speedy 10.2.6 patch).
   10.2.6:
      All known OpenGL bugs and performance issues at the OS level are
fixed.
      If you haven't gotten the hint yet: UPGRADE TO THIS VERSION NOW!
 The OSX demo is network compatible with the latest win32 and linux demos.
 The OSX demo has GameRanger support (thanks to Scott Kevill for staying up
 until ungodly hours to help with this).
 The demo UI won't let you specify various resolutions that fit (say) a 23"
 Cinema Display well. This is because the list of available resolutions are
 hardcoded in UnrealScript and changing this breaks network compatibility
with
 Linux and Windows players. I snuck all the popular Mac screen resolutions
 (like 1680x1050 and 1920x1200) in before the latest win32 patch, so the
 retail Mac version will have these out of the box. The brave among you can
 get the demo to use these resolutions by editing a config file; otherwise,
 you can use the in-game UI for the price of the game.  :)
 There are Altivec optimizations if you've got a G4 CPU, but this isn't
 required (game runs on G3s for you poor bastards that are in iBook land).
 The game does use dual CPUs...the music is decoded in a separate thread
 which MacOS X will toss on the second processor on dual systems. Some
 implementations of OpenAL will do their mixing on the second processor,
too.
 On Linux, this is easily a 5-10 fps boost for SMP boxes, and I wouldn't be
 surprised to see similar results on the Mac...but I haven't explicitly
 benchmarked this. Most games are generally single-threaded, but understand
 that this means a Dual box will still be able to cook one CPU for the game
 itself and run the other 20 or so system processes on the other processor,
 so there's still a benefit to this.
 We'll be listening to what people say to MacSoft (and I'll be trolling
 various web forums)...we'll all be taking the responses seriously before
 finalizing a gold master. The timeframe is short...my personal goal is to
 bless a gold master sometime after returning from E3, but that is not
 a solid date commitment, before you go and post my .plan file on Inside Mac
 Games.  We'll go with the standard Epic response of "two weeks". We all
know
 what that really means.  :)
 Don't email me bug reports; I am drowning in the workload from hell for
 shiny things I'll be showing at E3. Email bug reports to James at MacSoft:
 
u...@macsoftgames.com
 ... he'll organize them and filter them to me. This is
 the best way to get your bug report noticed! If you post a bug report on
 forum, even a popular one, I can't guarantee the right people (like me)
will
 see it. While I'm talking about "don't email me"...don't email me to ask if
 a given game is being ported to MacOS or Linux or your toaster. Those are
my
 guidelines. If you just want to chat, feel free to drop me a line.  :)
 Thank you for your patience...I know this took forever to get out the door,
 but I hope we used the time to get it right. The good news is all of my
 engine changes will be eventually be made available to all Unreal Engine
 licensees, so hopefully this will result in more Mac ports...and more ports
 on a faster timetable than UT2003 was done.


No? :)
Grazie e alla prox :)
--
Cacicia
---
http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/Cacicia
"t4pnpvpvn" is ROT 13 encoded.