latest: http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtop ... 843#169843
Old text.
Hello, thought I should start a new topic to put forth the state of the ppc mac build I'm working on, and some questions.
First, twould be interesting in knowing actually how much interest there is for such a build; having only my G5 to work and test with that's not older than 8 years, i'm neither sure about support for g4s (only minor tweaks if anything and can't effectively work on an intel build due to zilch experience with the architecture. But solely in respect of a Mac OS G5 build, do people want it?
Regards to the above, keep in mind about this build
- Network sync between any other architectures +OSes (needs a fair bit of work by the looks of the current code, intel mac wont/shouldn't)
- Lua has a few problems, where there's some compatibility differences between Versions 5.0 and 5.1, but the improved mac support far outweighs its use.
- Needing to directly edit the prefs file with a general app for settings(not to hard to add in app prefs)
- Haven't added much of my mac gui interface with the spring engine to the build yet as there's this annoying crash I'm still to pin down with the cocoa.
- Code's bloated (with my debug code support (easily stripped; not sure what dependancies yet to strip out of the dependant libs yet, because I haven't bothered)
- No intel mac support (I'd need a cheap macIntel box to work with, and moving across country within 2 months, I don't have a penny to spare)
- None of the other tools, bar the dedicated server, and AFLobby (Haven't tried much though)
- Till MacOS 10.5 at least, apple isn't supporting the Shadow openGL extention; only intel MacPros have a test build included. 10.5 is confirmed to have it though.
- Need to download the linux data tar, and change pref file to link there, will fix that soon, and make everything in the one drag and drop/pkg installer bundle, linking with AFLobby lauchfiles, add drag and drop onto the icon launch script files etc (drag and drop add maps, mods?)
Some questions for the Spring developers;
- Would you like a mac binary released?
- Could Lua support be moved to 5.1? It'd help a lot and allow more things to work without changes http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#7
- In a general sense, the C itself is rather inefficiently written at times, with lots of badly ordered functions; this isn't just ppc mac things, but for compiled C in general. Understandably Lots of things are written for ease to get a result, rather than get the result efficiently. When I get this mac build to a point, I can help fix these things; Running a profiler though my build of spring, I find Spring is using *at least* 4 times as much memory bandwidth as needed, and there's a lot of 1 and 2 stalled cycles waiting for results to continue. This isn't targeting anyone, but to say Spring has *a lot* of potential on current hardware, and ask is there's plans to tap into this?
- Some other stuff that I've forgotten...
- Finally, are you interested in supporting in you future development and design plans, the mac platform?
Regards,
Eilo
Edit: AI works; recompile the dll/so file, all fine. [/list]