|
Page 1 | 2 |
|
|
By Brad Cook “In a very real sense, we’ve been waiting for this day for 12 years,” says Wil Shipley, president of The Omni Group. That day was March 24, 2001, the release of Mac OS X. Shipley and his fellow Omni co-owners — director of research Tim Wood and director of engineering Ken Case — don’t seem to mind that they waited over a decade for the release of the new operating system. |
Anime and Heavy Metal
The guy heading up The Omni Group’s Mac OS X game work is Wood, who says that the new operating system “right now as it stands is a very viable platform for making games.”
During the last several months, he spent many hours in front of his Power Mac G4 (hooked to an Apple Cinema Display, which Shipley says makes games look “ten times better than you might think, except better than that”), engrossed in the task of making sure that four recently-released games will take advantage of the memory protection, preemptive multitasking, and OpenGL support that are just a few of the many features in Mac OS X:
Oni is a hard-hitting action game with a heavy anime influence and a storyline full of dark secrets and betrayal.
“Oni is a great departure from the normal first-person shooter games, which are typically just shooters,” says Wood. “Not only do you have interesting weapons, but you have hand-to-hand combat too, which is often more effective.”
As for Shipley, he thinks that Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2, which is based on the animated film of the same name, is “a really innovative game.” In it you play Julie, protector of the planet Eden, in her battle against the forces of evil. The action is in a third-person perspective, like Oni, but it’s violent, so parents beware: it’s rated M for mature by the ESRB.
The Final Frontier
Evolving from a well-known property is Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, a first-person shooter based on the popular television show.
It features 40 missions full of battles against the infamous Borg as well as 16 multiplayer arenas in which you can violate the Prime Directive with your friends.
“That game is a great use of the Star Trek license,” says Wood. “It plays like you’re watching an episode of the show. The pacing, the cut scenes and the dialogue are all interesting and fun.”
Breakdancing
So far, Wood has found that getting games up and running in Mac OS X isn’t a difficult task, especially if the original developer did some Carbonization work, which makes the process even easier since Carbonized games are able to run in the new OS. It usually takes him just a few days to get a playable version of each game running.
There are always some tweaks to be made, however. “When we brought up Oni for the first time,” Wood recalls, “you go into the training mission and the camera pans onto Konoko, who’s doing all this crazy breakdancing stuff. It turned out that I hadn’t addressed some byte swapping issue and all the animation data was random gibberish. That’s a pretty obvious bug, though — you can find it and fix it easily.”
As he continues to work with Mac OS X more, though, he finds that making games work gets easier with each one he tackles.
