Mac?

[tgk212]

Hi,to all this is my first post and I was wondering if Molecular blue release will be available for Mac? ?(

[boonet]

A Mac version actually exists. It\'s not yet public because we\'re working at fixing some speed issues it has. Check our website in the next few days to have any news about it.

[tgk212]

Ok thanks )

[Lightyear]

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.

[Big Yellow Monkey]

Do you have a tentative date for the release of the OS X version?
Oh, by the way.  I have 2 macs in my house, and I\'m wondering how it will run on them.  I just gave up on shadowbane beta after about 20 minutes, because the speed was absolutely horrible.
The first one is a TiBook/800, 512 MB RAM. I figure it\'ll run well on here.  It has a Radeon 7500 Mobility.
Second one is a Beige G3 with a Sonnet G4/500 and ATI Radeon 7000 Mac Edition, 384 MB RAM (theres another 256 floating around my house somewhere.)  This is the computer I use the most.  I\'m curious as to how well this one will run the game.  I might have to wait until the new, more efficient, renderer is finished and implemented, but I guess I\'ll see.
Keep up the good work!  If I had any programming experience at all, I\'d give you a hand.  

Thanks,
-Biggie!

[Lightyear]

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.

[azeazezar]

lichtjaer, wy dont u have blue stars and an avatar like the rest of the devs

[Nafaldur]

Just about 6 hours ago I heard about this game and it looks astonishing.

And now I\'d like to thank you all, that are using so much time to give us Mac-gamers a chance to play your promising game. Not so many are willing to use a second of their time to port a game or even make volunteer tweaks to ensure, that Mac-users get the same kind of experience as others.

It is remarkable to see people with a great sense of pioneer-spirit to give a MMORPG like this for free. Many other would\'ve taken a monthly fee, but you want to give everybody a chance to play it. I would\'ve been even WILLING to pay you that monthly fee!

This is so great, that I think I\'m going to cry ;(

Anyway, first post so hello everybody )

[Lightyear]

azeazezar:  The reason I haven\'t got any blue stars is \'cuz I\'m not l33t.

Keep in mind that the \'port\' of PlaneShift to OS/X began about a month ago; it\'s taking place in my spare time between work, and while I\'m dedicating as much time as I can to it, it\'s not moving as fast as I\'d like because of this.

Nafaldur:  Keep in mind that PlaneShift is two things:  An Open Source project that you can help code, whose engine can be reused to build new genres and new open source games, as well as PlaneShift, the game, whose content needs skilled people in art, writing settings, and coming up with new ideas.

If anyone thinks they\'ve got the interest, professional skills, and time to help out with any of the PlaneShift project teams, hop over to the website, have a read, and contact the appropriate team leader.

This is our world now.

[lstr]

Just wanted to say I\'m happy for the Mac support. Can\'t wait to play. Oh and it\'s my first post here too. Maybe if more Mac headz register we can get our own forum section, no?

[Whaleman]

Originally posted by Lightyear
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.

First I must thank you for giving us the possibility to play this game in the future =)

Next, how does it run on a similar PC? Is this with low settings on the graphic? And how scalable is the graphics engine at the moment? Sorry about all the questions, but getting a project like this to the mac is quite exciting. I would love to help you if I could, but unfortunately all coding I know are population dynamics . There has been an update on the IMG  news though, asking for help, as well as a note about it on the forum, so I hope somebody has the time and skills to help you out )

[Lightyear]

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.

[Lightyear]

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.

[rainmaker]

This is really exciting news, I\'m extatic!

A couple of days ago I happened by inside mac games, the first time in maybe a couple months and saw the link to planeshift.it.

Suddenly, a totaly free mmorpg with 3d grafics on par with the latest in the gaming industry (ok I\'ve only seen screenshots, but they look very promissing). And perhaps the greatest shock of all, it\'s being developed for mac side by side windows and ofcourse the linux version.

That\'s all I really have to say, i\'m pretty excited. I\'d just like to thank the team so far especialy lightyear for the mac port. Keep up the good work.

btw. suddenly i\'m really happy with my radeon 8500 purchase a few months back

[Whaleman]

I apologize if this has been covered before, but i did all kinds of searches and couldn\'t find anything. Does the crystal space engine support SMP and will this support be transfered to the mac version of PlaneShift?