Status report:

I\'ve packaged up the 010 release, and we\'re good to go, except for an endian problem with the network code that causes problems with Intel-based servers, such as those which provide the game world most players will be using.

However, I do have the planeshift.app working correctly now, and all content is currently bundled into it correctly - so we\'re close to being ready for testing and eventual release.

Weekend\'s almost over, and I\'m still working on it - but RSN.

Sorry, I\'ve been a bit incommunicado as of late.

1) Actually, I have been waiting for 10.2.5.    However, today\'s the first day I\'ve been able to sit down and do any work on getting a build up and running, so it\'ll take me some time to get the tests ready.

2) Once I\'m satisfied that it\'s running, I\'m going to have to muck about with some of the build process to do static linking of some of the external libraries into the CS plugins, so I\'m not distributing a million .so files along with the .csplugin files, and app-wrap the lot.

3) Then I\'m going to need to take the whole thing and move it over to the laptop to see how it behaves on a non-development system.

Those three stages will hopefully be done by tomorrow, and I\'ll have something ready for download and play.

At that time, I\'ll give you a better idea of what you can expect performance to be like, but again, I emphasise that until 10.3, the old rendering system won\'t get us fast-path in a seemingly large number of cases.  Having said that, I\'ll do my best to try and figure out from feedback if additional MB releases can provide us with improved performance as I get feedback from people on their problems with MB on their system.

Thx.

:plur,
Greg

Just so people know, with the help of ATI, Jorritt has plucked out one of the largest low hanging fruits preventing us from releasing PlaneShift for the mac; performance is a factor of 10 better in some cases; I\'ve got a few more modifications which have resulted in what is basically now a playable PlaneShift - at least on my system.

I\'ll do some testing on my Ti400+Rage128, to get an idea of what\'s necessary under low texture memory situations, finish up my patches, commit my changes, and start working on a packaged application for everyone out there Real Soon Now.

Thanks again to Jorritt for his hard work and ATI for the finger-in-the-wind we needed to get the traction we needed on this problem.

On the performance note:

ATI has graciously provided some information that is likely to solve quite a few of our problems.  I\'ll continue discussing this with ATI, but essentially, they\'re going to help us locate where we\'re falling out of the fast render path.

I\'ve been given some advice already which might just fix a great swath of the performance problems; it\'s even theoretically possible that performance might improve beyond that of the current PC version.

Stay tuned.

And everyone:  Go buy an ATI right now.  Seriously.  They\'ve been committed to the Mac for a long, long time, and their intervention in projects in the past has a long, long history; they\'ve been helping Mac developers solve their performance problems and dedicating their own time and effort to helping developers for many years, and deserve your support.

They also happen to make kick-ass 3D cards, to boot.

While at some point I\'ll be contacting NVidia to ask for hardware to test on, be aware that right now, I\'ve got a Rage 128 on a laptop, a Radeon, a Radeon 8500, and may have a 9700 to test on soon.  The Radeon is what I\'m focused on at the moment, and for this release, is likely all I\'ll have time to focus on improving the performance of.

The PC guys are heavily GeForce, as can be expected; I don\'t know if that will translate or not.

Anyways, great news today.  Keep your fingers crossed.

We\'re talking order-of-magnitude problem here.  The current CS rendering engine is resulting in anywhere from 1 or 2 to 30 FPS, depending on what you\'re looking at and how much the renderer is pushing through it.

While this is wholly unacceptable performance, and I apologise for that, I will do what I can to provide some kind of performance improvements before release.  I hope to provide an MB release for MacOS/X users in a .app  within the next few weeks; in the meantime, I\'m spending every ounce of free time I get trying to do one tweak after another in the hopes of providing at least a more consistently usable result.  I must admit that I\'ve had little success (though some - I was able to recently double the worst-case performance).

CS\'s new renderer, while no magic bullet and certainly not a cop-out, is a significantly different beast; it\'s a rewrite of the way the CrystalSpace engine orders and renders content, and should provide a very good boost in performance, as well as a host of more modern features like per-pixel lighting.

I\'m going to do my best over the next couple of weeks to tweak CrystalSpace, and aim to release my best possible efforts within the timeframe of 2-3 weeks to the Mac community.

Until then, please participate in the forums and the project in whatever way you\'re comfortable with, and if you\'re a developer, happen to play one on television, or have the brain of one in a jar on your gondola, grab yourself a copy of the source code for CrystalSpace and lend a hand getting the performance of CrystalSpace up for us Mac folks.

Greetings to all of those readers who\'ve managed to get here via an article which IMG seems to have written out of the blue.

Sooner or later, I\'d have mentioned it to them myself - preferrably later, as we\'ve got performance issues at the moment, and I\'m having a bit of a difficult time trying to get the MacOS/X port of CrystalSpace to behave differently, despite having added support for several extensions in some in-development tweaks.

Basically, for those readers who get here:

* PlaneShift is a MMORPG in development.  Don\'t expect to replace your EverQuest experience tomorrow with PlaneShift; but we\'ve come a long way, baby.

* The Mac version will ONLY RUN ON MAC OS X.  Specifically, you\'ll ideally be running 10.2.4.

* Currently, it\'s being tested on a dual processor 500MHz G4 system.  A slower system than this is not advised.

* There is support for software rendering in CrystalSpace, but ideally, you\'ll have a high-performance GL-accelerated card; my original testing was on a Radeon MAC edition, but I\'ve since moved to the Radeon 8500 for development.

* There *WILL* be a drag-and-drop-install .app you can install which will run PlaneShift.  It *will* be double-click-and-go.

All I\'m waiting on is to solve some of the performance problems to make the game playable; however, keep in mind that support for endianness has *just* been added recently, and that the Mac version is currently one guy - me - working on both CS code and PlaneShift code.

Additional coders would be appreciated.  More importantly, anyone who can have a look at the CrystalSpace codebase and figure out what\'s causing some of our performance problems would be much appreciated, as I\'ve tried many things to little avail; first and foremost seems to be that the cost of changing contexts under Apple GL is an order of magnitude more expensive than on our PC counterparts.

In future versions of CrystalSpace, a new, advanced renderer is under construction.  This will take some time yet before it can be used within PlaneShift as a replacement for the current CS renderer, but once it does, it will offer a wide range of improvements that will hopefully yield better performance; all performance enhancements I\'m working on now are essentially nothing more than stopgaps, things to give us a step improvement in performance, until that renderer can be completed by the CS project team.

For further information on CrystalSpace, the CrystalSpace Entity Layer, and PlaneShift, please see the following URLs:

http://crystal.sourceforge.net/  - The CrystalSpace rendering engine.

http://cel.sourceforge.net/ - The CrystalSpace entity layer, providing us with our entity representations of in-game objects, and

http://www.planeshift3d.com/ - the PlaneShift homepage, where you\'ll find screenshots and news and information about the upcoming Molecular Blue release.