'Voyager: Elite Force' On The Mac?

Earlier today, Jake Simpson, one of the programmers working on Raven Software's 'Voyager: Elite Force', made the following update to his .plan file:

Well, for those that are interested I just played the first multiplayer game of Voyager on a Mac. One of the ones kindly donated by Apple in fact - an purple iMac:) Note though that right now you will need 128 megs rather than the 64 that the machine comes with in order to play the game. That may or may not stay the same - we are making huge memory gains with using the skeletal animation system as opposed to the mesh based one, but it's tough to say what our eventual memory footprint is going to be. More than likely it will remain at the 128 level for the iMac, but you never know.

Anyway, I just wanted to take a moment to say a big Thanks to the guys at id - Specifically Graeme Devine for giving me a helping hand, and also John Carmack for making the code so extremely easy to port in the first place.

Of course, there are still some Virtual Machine compile errors to fix, but for the most part, Holomatch is up and working using the same Virtual Machine game files that the PC game uses. Gotta love that portability:) We had some fun playing Mac vs PC, but I'll be honest and say that playing any kind of FPS with that weird puck mouse thing on the new Macs is really an aquired taste.

For those that will ask, the frame rate on the iMac was just fine, and it looked great on the ATI card that's in the machine. I'm not going to post any numbers right now, since we are too much in development for them to mean anything. Suffice to say it was nice to see the game running on an iMac;)

Now it's time to start thinking about the single player game. Now THAT is going to be fun to port, with all that C++ and STL:)

I got some email asking flat out if this means we are doing a Mac Release. At this point, I have to do some obligatory tapdancing here, and say that I'm involved in doing the port so we know it can be done. This doesn't mean we are announcing a mac release, just that it's possible. Activision and Project Lead Brian Pelletier are discussing the implications and all that good stuff, so look for an announcement from them once the dust settles. Now that we are done with dancing around the issue, you can draw your own conclusions as to what the likelyhood of a release is, based on the fact that we are doing all this at all:)

Discuss this news item at Trek BBS!
 Add TrekToday RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!