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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Mac Architecture Questions?


cyberdrift

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A couple questions for the planning folk to ponder:

 

You can install X11 on OS X through either a product called Fink or Apple has just released a beta of their own X11. The Fink product claims compatibility with the Apple version, and its pretty popular with the *nix "Switchers", but it doesn't sound like many mainstream Mac folk are messing around with it. Base xenocide on X11 on the Mac or go for full Mac platform?

 

Include stuff to take advantage of the Altivec technology in the G4's. Its supposed to be very sweet, but would definately by Apple G4 specific. Any G3 (non-flatscreen iMacs, iBooks, older everything) machines would be out of the party. Based on my very informal impression, Mac owners tend to hold onto to hardware longer than PC folk. Partly due to how :cussing: expensive everything is! Our "target" audience might hold onto their current boxes for 4-5 years.

 

My personal preference would be to utilize Cocoa rather than Carbon for the Mac specific framework stuff. Carbon is the link to the past, Cocoa is the way of the future. Sound good?

 

I am starting out at the command line to get things working. Given that Project Builder is free and CodeWarrior costs something in the neighborhood of $500 (and I don't already have it), I would probably move the project into Project Builder in the future.

 

Anyway, just some forward looking questions to think about while I slog my way through the first stages of porting.

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gcc is the default compiler collection for the project. Anyway, you don't have to worry about targeting macs with older graphics cards I say because on the linux, windows side we're only worried about newer cards because older cards/systems might prove to be too slow. I don't know anything about mac development so carbon vs. coco about all I know is one is C++ and one is Objective C. If you use gcc you can use both those languages. Apple uses gcc to build their stuff and is why gcc supports Objective C.
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Guest stewart

There's one and depending maybe a second decision to make.

1) Will we support Classic OSes.

2) If so how will we do it?

 

Reason to support Classic, many if not most Mac users are still using classic.

Reason against, less work.

 

You're probably the only Mac guy here, so your call.

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There's one and depending maybe a second decision to make.

1) Will we support Classic OSes.

2) If so how will we do it?

 

Reason to support Classic, many if not most Mac users are still using classic.

Reason against, less work.

 

You're probably the only Mac guy here, so your call.

As far as linux and windows are concerened we are only supporting fairly modern systems that can handle the OpenGL stuff we throw at them. Basically only two types of cards are worthy of supporting and that's NVIDIA (Geforce 2MX+) and ATI (Radeon).. There really are no other good 3D cards and voodoo 3 is too old to support.

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There's one and depending maybe a second decision to make.

1) Will we support Classic OSes.

2) If so how will we do it?

 

Reason to support Classic, many if not most Mac users are still using classic.

Reason against, less work.

 

You're probably the only Mac guy here, so your call.

As far as linux and windows are concerened we are only supporting fairly modern systems that can handle the OpenGL stuff we throw at them. Basically only two types of cards are worthy of supporting and that's NVIDIA (Geforce 2MX+) and ATI (Radeon).. There really are no other good 3D cards and voodoo 3 is too old to support.

At least OpenGL 1.3 to be exact... I too dont know of any other chipset that support vertex programs...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

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  • 4 months later...

We have officialy dropped the support of both Linux and OSX because lack of developers, any developer can get the code and try to port it (and will have all our support but the support wont be official until V1 is released)...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

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I guess I will try to port it with the help of a few friends. Before we start, on some part of the website it mentioned that the code was written with platform-independance in mind. Is that still the case, or is it pretty Win32 specific at this point?

 

Also, damned if I can figure out CVS (have only tried for five minutes with a command line version, but hey). Is there just a simple archive I can grab for the source, or am I going to have to learn something new? :wub:

 

Or maybe there's a thread on using command line CVS already?

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You will have to get used to it.... There is some guidelines made by Guus in the Programming Forum and I made those too (for listed developers in Sourceforge only - aka with upload capability -)... In trying to port it, you will have to start with the utility package... then the rest...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

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