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Star Trek fans, rejoice! We can report that Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force for the Mac OS has reached beta. Duane Johnson, who is currently porting Elite Force to the Mac, sent us a lengthy note with loads of information on the progress he has made in the last two weeks. Here is an excerpt:

The beta CD's are being burned this very minute. The last two weeks I
been banging away at the code getting into shape. My alpha tester (14
year old son, Chase) has played through once & he's going to be
strapped in again for another go.



I've added a level of joystick support that Q3 did not have. Not the
full sprockets panel, since the plan is to carbonize EF once id has
done [so] with the Q3A engine. But since I like to mouselook with my right
hand & walk/straiff with my left, using a stick. I "had" to add
joystick support in somehow. So configuration is all done within the
EF UI. The walk/look speed is tied to stick deflection, which is nice
when crawling around in the Jeffries tubes. The standard mode is look
for left/right, walk for foward/back. You can configure a stick to
only look or only walk, however.



This is also one of the first (the first?) Mac games to use the Bink
video system, by RAD Game Tools. This made video pretty easy since the
cut scenes did not need any conversions & the code was nearly
identical. Raven was smart and built high & low quality versions of
each movie. There was some tuning required on deciding when to use
which.



Performance is what you'd expect with the Q3 engine drawing stunning
visuals & MP3 streaming in your ears. I did tune up the load/save
screens a little, Raven was reading the screen shot from disk twice for
each savegame displayed. But other than that its not easy improving
Carmack's code, unless of course, you are John himself. And once he's done with
the Q3 1.25 tune-up, I'll be folding that into EF.



Having the voices of the real Voyager crew adds tons to the feeling
that you ARE a crewmember doing that Star Fleet thing. The music is
also pure Voyager & it ties in with the action wonderfully.

Aspyr Media

Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force

Aspyr Media (add to watch list)

Raven Software (add to watch list)

Westlake Interactive (add to watch list)

Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force (add to watch list)

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