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IMG has recently chatted with Mark Allender of Volition about the upcoming 3D RPG Summoner. Mark is the one largely responsible for bringing the game to the Mac. He's been a long-time proponent of the platform, having worked on other titles which came to the Mac OS such as Descent and Descent II as well. In the interview, Mark discusses the decision to bring Summoner to the Mac, some of their trouble with the port, and even hints towards the future of their titles on Mac OS X. Here's a clip:

IMG: Was it a challenge making Summoner's multiplayer aspect cross-platform?

Mark Allender: It wasn't very hard. The hardest part was writing Open Transport code to replace the socket code that we had in place for the Windows platform. Almost all of the high level multiplayer code worked without modification, but it was designed that way from the beginning.

IMG: Have there been any major obstacles in the porting of Summoner to the Mac OS?

Mark Allender: A few. We've encountered bugs in both the video drivers and features that haven't quite been implemented yet in Apple's GL engine. Actually, the biggest obstacles were not the porting of sound, networking, and graphics code (although those were challenging), but getting the game to work across a wide variety of Macintosh platforms. Sprinkle in a few machine specific problems, and there were indeed a few bumps.

IMG Interview with Mark Allender

IMG Preview of Summoner

GraphSim (add to watch list)

Volition (add to watch list)

Summoner (add to watch list)

Buy Summoner

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