Weird Worlds Mac OS X patch for testing

[sgqwonkian]

The missiles weirdness (angular octagons if the target goes away) is on the main game (and mods too) post mac-patch.

In particular the multimissile was the most noticeable offender. If memory serves me I think some other missile did it too, but the multimissile is really obvious.

[Fingers]

Well, in general the missile trails are tweaked to the lowest possible number of particles that didn't horribly offend me, but it seems the lost target state makes these particular ones (the second stage of multimissile) turn in a tighter radius than they normally do.

[MShadowy]

Alright, patch downloaded. I'll see if'n I can't find anything weird about weird worlds after installing it.

[Alphasite]

Will there be a Universal binary soon?

[Fingers]

The universal binary will not happen anytime soon. If I understand the situation correctly, there's some kind of a problem getting OpenAL to work with universal binaries.

I'm going to use my own SDL-based sound system in our future games, and there's a possibility that I'll retrofit it to Weird Worlds... which may make the universal binary easier to do. In any case it'll be at least a couple of months before this happens, as it's kind of a big change in the code.

[Ed_Zavada]

To be specific, the problem is that Apple has taken over the OpenAL implementation on the Mac, and rewritten it substantially, but in the process, they have changed something about how it deals with larger numbers of sounds that made it much less efficient. I have a full universal binary version running, but the sounds don't play properly because the sound takes up most of the CPU. I've reported a detailed bug to Apple, but no response. So, my options are to try to build a Universal binary of an older version of OpenAL, try to fix OpenAL myself, or try to find a Universal binary version of older OpenAL that doesn't have this problem. As Fingers says, it's going to be a bit before I can get to that (and he may beat me to it with his work ripping out OpenAL).

[Alphasite]

Hopefully Apple will get around soon to responding to the problem.

Right now my MacBook Pro gets really hot playing WW and I was hoping a Universal binary would help as Rosetta wouldn't be necessary.

[sgqwonkian]

I've been playing A LOT with the Mac Patch. Two things I've noted:

1. My mods all seem to be buggier with it, unless I keep purging the game.cfg files.

2. I have yet to see Ravians. It's driving me up the wall. I refuse to go use the pick-your-quest mod for my first Ravian encounter, because I really enjoyed the "what's going on here" impact of the 1st time through Primordius or Kawangi. Yet for whatever reason, with-or-without mods, I never seem to get the Ravians. You sure they're in there?

[Fingers]

It seems there's something wrong with how this version handles the game.cfg file. Ed's looking into it.

Looking at the patch files (I don't have a Mac), the Ravian files are definitely there and game.ini seems correct so they should show up occasionally (About once per 15 games). Make sure you don't have the tutorial mode on as it disables main quests.

[sgqwonkian]

Cool. Thanks for the update, Fingers. I'll keep playing, and eventually I'll get my hands on those sneaky Ravians.