[taylor]

http://www.insidemacgames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=7623&view=findpost&p=227608

Hordes of angry masses to follow...

[Goober5000]

Hooray!  (Not that I use a Mac but this will be good news for those who do. )

Should we make an OSX Development forum?  Or rename this to Linux/OSX Development?

[dizzy]

Add POSIX to that list too because if MacOS X is working without any specific MacOS X quirks (ie using SDL for any possible Mac OS X specific stuff and use POSIX API for the rest) then I guess things like BeOS or Solaris should be working just fine too (as they offer SDL too and good POSIX implementation).

[fizz]

Maybe call it "Most everything but Windows development"

[Goober5000]

How's that?

[dizzy]

Looks fine as it is now. Because I think you are right that at least at this point the talk happening on this forum is about getting fs2_open to work OK on non-win32 platforms. After Taylor does all the changes he said he will eventually do (switching to SDL and all) I guess this forum might just dissapear as there won't be any principal platform ? Or I am wrong

[Kazan]

yes eventually we will have one unified platform-agnostic codebase

[Sesquipedalian]

Cool!

I'll have to try this when my wife comes back with our real Mac.  (My Hackintosh won't do it - no 3D acceleration available for my vid card yet).

[Sesquipedalian]

Um, so how do I install, exactly?
I downloaded the beta2 from the forum you linked, taylor, but if there were installation instructions mentioned in there, I missed them.  Clicking on FS2_open.app does nothing.

[taylor]

Originally posted by Sesquipedalian
Um, so how do I install, exactly?
I downloaded the beta2 from the forum you linked, taylor, but if there were installation instructions mentioned in there, I missed them.

It assumes that you already have FS2 installed somewhere, or a copy of the VPs on your disk.  Where ever that is just drag the FS2_Open app from the dmg to that directory where the VPs are.  Double click on the app, that's pretty much it.  Have a look at the README for details but you probably know about the cmdline options and such so it would just tell you what to modify to use them.

I need to come up with detailed instructions on how to install it off of the retail discs but I haven't had the time.  I'll try to walk you through it though if you can't just copy the VPs from a windows machine or something.

[Sesquipedalian]

Okay, I've downloaded tigital's beta5, and that works nicely.  On launch in creates a Freespace2.ini in the folder.

However, clicking fs2_open.app does nothing.  I tried renaming Freespace2.ini to fs2_open.ini, but that had no effect.  The readme references /library/fs2_open, but no such animal exists on my machine.

[taylor]

Originally posted by Sesquipedalian
Okay, I've downloaded tigital's beta5, and that works nicely.  On launch in creates a Freespace2.ini in the folder.

That was just getting around a bug I think.  It shouldn't go in the same folder normally.

However, clicking fs2_open.app does nothing.  I tried renaming Freespace2.ini to fs2_open.ini, but that had no effect.  The readme references /library/fs2_open, but no such animal exists on my machine.

It should go in ${HOME}/Library/FS2_Open, where ${HOME} would be /Users/(whatever your user short name is).  Basically just click on the desktop and hit Shift-Command-H on the keyboard to open your home folder in Finder and go to Library, FS2_Open from there.  The fs2_open.ini file should be automatically created if it doesn't exist and will use the default values of 640x480, fullscreen, 16-bit color.

If it's just not launching make sure that you have the SDL framework installed (http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-1.2.9.dmg).  Beta3 will include it but I didn't have time to get that worked out for beta2.  If that doesn't work try the FS2_Open-dbg version of the app and see what ${HOME}/Library/FS2_Open/data/fs2_open.log has in it.

Edit: Oh and what OS X version are you using?

[Sesquipedalian]

Ah!  'Twas the lack of SDL that was the problem.  Thanks, taylor.

I'll start putting it through its paces next, and let you know how it does.

[Sesquipedalian]

Works wonderfully.  More stable than the Windows builds, and better frame rates than I expected.  Great stuff, taylor.  Very much appreciated.

By the way, here's some trivia for you: if I store fs2_open.app in the Freespace2 directory on my Windows machine and execute it through the network using the Mac, it uses not only the data in the Windows directory, but even the commandline flags that are set on the Windows machine.  This happens despite having a fs2_open.ini stored in the proper location on the Mac.  (In case you are wondering, I tried this out in an attempt to save HD space on the Mac.)

[taylor]

Originally posted by Sesquipedalian
Works wonderfully.  More stable than the Windows builds, and better frame rates than I expected.  Great stuff, taylor.  Very much appreciated.

I'm still working on the slowdowns but it's considerably better in beta2 than in beta1.  I'm hoping for better/noticable compiler optimizations in beta3 but it will probably take a lot more profiling to get rid of most of the problems.  Stability should just be on par with the Linux version and after more work I think that the performance will be as well.

And also remember to use -no_fps_capping since the speed gets killed in beta2 otherwise.  Beta3 fixes that though.

By the way, here's some trivia for you: if I store fs2_open.app in the Freespace2 directory on my Windows machine and execute it through the network using the Mac, it uses not only the data in the Windows directory, but even the commandline flags that are set on the Windows machine.  This happens despite having a fs2_open.ini stored in the proper location on the Mac.  (In case you are wondering, I tried this out in an attempt to save HD space on the Mac.)

Yep, that's supposed to happen actually.  The cmdline options are actually stored in a different file (cmdline_fso.cfg) than the ini file and that is compatible across platforms.  On the Mac you can also put cmdlines in ${HOME}/Library/FS2_Open/data/cmdline_fso.cfg and it will override whats in the Windows version.  So for instance you could like an ambient factor of 80 on windows so you could have "-ambient_factor 80" on the windows machine but the Mac could have "-ambient_factor 75" in it's special version of the file and that would get used instead.

Don't know how familiar you are with true multi user platforms (unlike Windows) so that may not make too much sense.  It's a neat feature of UNIX (Linux and OS X) systems though and I take advantage of it constantly.  I especially take advantage of that for mods so that I can have a basic set of cmdlines in my ${HOME} directory and change some based on the mod without having to keep up with with ever changing options.

[Sesquipedalian]

Cool.  I look forward to beta 3.