Interesting. Afaik the quake3 engine acts as a virtual machine for the gamecode which is a bit like java programs running on a VM. This is why urban terror can have 1 version which is cross platform, just like java apps.
Now when looking at wolfenstein ET, I noticed the qvm files are indeed as pointed in that article not present. Instead there are dynamic objects (.so for linux, .dll for windows) in the pak-files. This means that the gamecode will need to be compiled on each platform in order to get the correct gamecode.
A quick look through that gamecode for ET, which was released (not enignecode, just game) reveals some differences between the windows and linux version, considering the difference in compiler between windows (Visual C++) and linux (gcc 3) this is understandable. Since gcc is the compiler used to build panther (OS X.3) the difference between a mac and linux version shouldn't be quite as big (considering mac basically being like freeBSD). You still would need the engine for mac though, but considering that article it could be done.
FreeBSD has certain libraries which allow linux programs to run on it (like quake3) with no speed loss. Of course this works fine x86-x86 but running the x86 linux version on mac isn't possible. I don't know if mac os x has this kind of compatibility libraries for ELF binaries or not, but you still would need an engine recompile so I guess it's not all that important.
I sure hope you mac people won't be left out of this
Advertisement
LINUX heads, whatta ya think a this?
#14
Posted 28 April 2004 - 12:37 AM
wine on osx? maybe someday: http://darwine.opendarwin.org/
Advertisement
1 User(s) are reading this topic
0 members, 1 guests, 0 anonymous users
Advertisement