Andrew Kinnie Posted October 26, 2001 Share Posted October 26, 2001 Greetings.... I was wondering if and when you'll be carbonizing Combat Mission to run on Mac OS X natively? If you don't have current plans to do so, I'd be willing to help.... Andrew Kinnie 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted October 26, 2001 Share Posted October 26, 2001 There are several threads in this forum (and possibly the General forum) about CM and OS X, so you may want to look through those for further opinions and issues. CMBO is considered a finished product and no further updates are expected (there might be some exceptions to this, but BTS has stated that they consider CMBO a 'finished' product). Unfortunately updating CMBO (or coding CMBB) to be carbonized is no small issue. If it were just a simple matter of changing some code to be compliant with the interface and other libraries of OS X, then it probably would have been considered. However the biggest obstacle to using OS X with CMBO (or CMBB) is that the program is written with the QuickDraw RAVE 3D API. OS X's support of this API is lacking and you can only get true hardware acceleration with a boot into OS 9.x (not Compatibility Mode). The RAVE API support for Compatibility Mode supports RAVE 1.6 (the Classic RAVE extension) according to some people and CM needs RAVE 1.7. BTS has only one programmer, Charles Moylan, and recoding CMBO and/or CMBB into OpenGL just isn't in the cards. It took 3 years to design and code CMBO and it will take just a little under a year to update CMBO's engine for CMBB. Rewriting the graphical API for OpenGL would be a huge undertaking that BTS can't financially perform at the moment. I believe that OpenGL is being considered for the API on CMII (at least on the Mac), the engine rewrite of CM, which will start coding once CMBB has been sufficiently patched for any problems. It will probably take around two years to complete the new engine (which will have many enhancements other than transposing APIs). I don't think that BTS is looking for any programmers to hire or for any programming help (to my knowledge). As most programmers should know, it is much easier to have one person code up a product than to split the task between several people and manage it (with time not being a factor) for quality control and code documentation purposes. A programming team spends a lot of effort and time on communicating ideas, parameters, problems, etc. If sales are really outstanding to the point that BTS should decide that they could use and support additional programmers (probably one more at the most) then the applicant would probably have to have a very good background with programming on multiple platforms in graphical APIs (preferably with game development experience) and the obvious requisite higher math skills. I mean no disrespect to your offer of help, but it has been offered by others before. However there are just too many negative issues for BTS to consider most offers of help at this point. Many people would like to have CMBO/CMBB run on OS X, but time/finances and Apple's API support are very limiting factors. [ 10-26-2001: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]</p> 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew Kinnie Posted October 26, 2001 Author Share Posted October 26, 2001 OK, fair enough. I didn't know it was QuickDraw 3D RAVE. Bummer. Well I hope eventually it can be done. Good Luck! Andrew 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.