Deutsche VersioniMac G5
I’ve just got a new iMac G5 with 2.1 Ghz, 20” LCD screen and ATI Radeon X600XT - a huge improvement over my old iBook G4 1 GHz with 12” screen and ATI Radeon 9200, which will now only be used for work on the road (Ironic part: I am more of an nVidia fan because of the lots of documentation for developers they provide). This thing is so cool that I won’t even try to describe it here. Besides, you’d be bored.
Concerning my game I found out some interesting things:
- Using DevIL for texture loading is not good for Mac OS X, as it depends on many other files and libraries most people don’t have at all. I didn’t notice on my iBook, since I had them there, but on a computer fresh out of the box, this shows. Now all my texture loading is done using Quicktime. The new code is longer and way more ugly, but works.
- My game looks even more boring when viewed on a large screen
- GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE_EXT is only supposed to work with GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE. On an ATI Radeon 9200, it also works with GL_REPEAT, which might give the impression that this is always allowed. It isn’t and will screw up on a, say, X600XT.
- It is possible to use an Apple Remote for controlling a game, but for some strange reasons only two keys. And they change the loudness of the computer while pressing, so you might prefer to use something else for input.
Oh, I nearly forgot: The ground is visible again. The problem was that code I didn’t write crashed when accessing objects I didn’t create. It takes a long time to find out that this is often a sign that you made some mistake while working with pointers, but luckily, I already knew this from earlier projects.
Written on November 26th, 2005 at 09:11 pm
