Bummer - looks like HLP went through one of those temporal disturbances. We lost 7 days!
Anyways - I'm one (of many) of the Mac OS X fellas taking advantage of this awesome FS2 open source development project. Kudos from the Mac crowd.
Alright - this might take a while... and I'm not going to post this all in one fell swoop, but I have a lot of questions (and other stuff that will hopefully help rather than hinder).
I'm posting this in the hopes that it will help out the Mac crowd too.
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1. First of all, who exactly is working on the Mac-side stuff? It'd be really good to know who all is involved ( so we can worship him/her and make sacrifices to the mac development gods, among other reasons). I've posted a bit over at the SCP site and it seems like Taylor is the leading guy on the Mac side.
2. Ok... this specific place (the Cross-Platform Development forum) was actually really hard to find. Maybe I'm just slow, but It'd be nice if you had some kind of link on your front page to mac/linux support & issues.
3. I initially did the manual install using the original FS2 discs. It wasn't all that hard (a lot of people did find it to be confusing, however). Are there any plans to make a Mac Os X installer that uses the data from the discs? Perhaps this would be impractical since the discs are actually really hard to get a hold of and there seems to be a number of high-profile sites (like Version Tracker / Mac Game Files) letting people just download the whole game (as well as a bittorrent). Unfortunate that its technically illegal... We'll see what Volition does, however.
Links here, among others:
http://www.macgamefiles.com/detail.php?item=18968http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Games/Freespace-2.shtmlhttp://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/28874And here's a great thread started by Soulstorm which has all kinds of info links in it:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1521724. The first real bug that I ran into was a lighting one. Someone else in this forum was talking about the exact same thing... and I posted in it before the HLP server timewarp thing. Basically, the lighting was all wonky. I either had to turn of specular lightinng and ambient lighting (flat lighting), or I would have to look at ships that looked more like a christmas tree than a piece of flying metal. After a little fiddling around, I found out that deleting the cache folder (users/*name*/library/fs2_open/data/cache) and adding -noibx to the command line was a way to sidestep the problem. Apparently this worked for the people that were having the flat-lighting problem as well (they had -spec/-glow on, but there was no change). Since then, I've downloaded the latest (and only) Mac CVS build -(
http://icculus.org/~taylor/fso/testing/20060206-OSX_PPC.dmg)- but some data in my fs2 directory somehow got corrupted, so I have yet to see if the lighting/cache problem was fixed. I'll have to get back to you on that.
EDIT: the lighting problem persists in the latest CVS build - strangely, I don't get the 'mashed' lighting anymore, but the flat lighting problem.
5. I know this is being talked about on other threads, and is probably a PC-side thing too... but just in case: at certain distances, there seems to be odd 'breaking' in certain textures. This happens all the time with ship's engines (the small ones too). When you're turning your ship, any engines you see flicker. This is probably related to the same thing that happens with the Deimos at a distance. The black and white 'windows in the middle of the ship flicker as well - they actually just look like a bunch of lines. Any other mac users getting this?
6. In the latest CVS build (see #4), some of the turrets on certain ships (might have just been the Hecate) look like they have a 'bloating' problem - like the graphical frames have been pushed out beyond any recognition. The turrets look more like a comfy chair than anything else. I'll try to get some pictures up later.
7. Every once in a while, I'll be in the middle of a mission (usually close to a cap ship) and all of the sudden, I'll get swept to 30 clicks away from where I just was a moment ago.
8. Sometimes, I'll be shooting (or the enemy will be shooting) a certain part of a ship (seems to happen with the station the most often), and it will start swinging around on an axis. I've been K.O.'d more than once by the Arcadia throwing a mean left.
9. In the weapon selection screen, a few of the higher-end missiles and bombs graphics (in the lower left hand corner) are either missing or are shown as a bunch of randomly colored polygons.
10. After a few missions (I think this depends on the user's amount of RAM/memory), the sound will cut off. All of it.
11. The Mac version seems to have a few problems with some add-on campaigns. I've really only tried two: Freespace 1 Conversion, and Direlict. This probably isn't even the place to post these, but it seemed like the bugs were mostly Mac-specific (I couldn't find anything similar anywhere else).
-Freespace 1 port: EDIT: Ok, with the CVS build, everything seems to have been fixed. Missions weren't properly loading before, but so far everything works beautifully now. The only problem I got was when I had the FS1 vps active at the same time I had some other campaign's vps in the directory
-Direlict: I need to retest it to get the specific bugs.
12. Exactly what are all the current commands for the command line, and what do they do? -noibx certainly wasn't in the readmes, and I don't think it was in the wiki... there's a few others out there that I found really useful, but I really had to look around for in the dungeons of the internet. Perhaps it would be a good idea to make a full list of all of these and put them somewhere easily reachable (its a lot easier to test bugs when you know all of these commands and exactly what they do - and if they're obsolete or not).
13. I'm aware of Mantis... but when exactly would it be a good idea to post a bug on the forum as opposed to reporting it in Mantis? Obviously crashlogs would be appropriate only for Mantis, but (and this is my opinion) wouldn't it be a semi-good idea to post some bugs in the forum to discuss them/see if anybody else is having the same problem and any fixes they have?
