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Volition Confirms No Mac Red Faction Level Editor
11:25 AM | Michael Eilers | Comment on this story
All the way back in October of 2000, a few scant weeks after the announcement that the next-wave shooter Red Faction would be coming to the Mac OS, IMG brought you the disappointing news that it was very unlikely that the in-game level editor this title will feature on the PC side would be ported to the Mac version. As with many game editors, the Red Faction tools were put together with Microsoft Foundation Classes -- a rapid prototyping tool used to make quick user interfaces for applications in development. There is no Mac OS version of the MFC classes (tools) of course, so moving editing tools crafted with MFC would mean re-writing the tools practically from scratch -- not a viable option in most cases.
Mark Allender of Volition dropped by our forums recently and confirmed his earlier speculation, stating definitively that the Mac version of this shooter will not ship with editing tools. Here is his post:
There will be no level editor for the Macintosh. The editors are quite a bit more time consuming (and thus cash consuming) to port over. It's actually quite a bit more difficult because of the user interface work involved.
Sorry about that.
Obviously this is a disappointment for the small part of the gaming community who wished to make levels for this unusual shooter; unfortunately this situation is not likely to improve in the future, as the MFC classes remain useful tools for PC developers and are still commonly used. The use of Microsoft-only technologies such as Visual Basic and MFC to create level editors will continue to be a barrier to ports of Mac editing tools, except in unusual situations such as Westlake Interactive's port of the Tomb Raider level editor which will be released with their port of Tomb Raider Chronicles, later this summer.
 News: Volition on Mac Red Faction Editor
 Mark Allender on Red Faction Level Editor
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