Quake Port at Apple’s WWDC
As some of you may know, a port of Quake was demod at apple’s WWDC. Here is the full info:
A couple weeks ago, I got an email saying: “Hey! We heard you are porting quake for WWDC!”.
I replied: “Uh, first I’ve heard of it… I was planning on supporting Quake 2 on it late this year…”
Well, I stole some time and went ahead and did it (mostly last weekend — running tight!). I’m quite happy with how it turned out, and I’m glad it made it for the demos.
It is actually a port of the current research QuakeWorld-merging-into-Quake2 codebase, so it only plays network games at the moment.
It is running through 24 bit display postscript, and doesn’t have the assembly language compiled in, so don’t believe anyone that says it was running faster than under windows. It was a fast demo system. There is a good chance that it will be a bit faster then win32 when I am done with it, because the direct-to-screen API doesn’t require all the locks and unlocks of Direct Draw, and the sound access will avoid the DirectSound penalties, but basically they should be the same.
98% of the support I need for games is present in rhapsody, and now that there is an existing game for it, the remaining decisions can be rationally guided.
I am still going to press the OpenGL issue, which is going to be crucial for future generations of games.
I am definately going to support Quake 2 on rhapsody. I may make a public release of the QuakeWorld demo, but I will probably wait until we get the full screen api working. Omnigroup has a little qspy-like openstep program that we can use with it.