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Ryan Gordon, known for his work on many Unreal-based Mac projects, has given a new update in his .plan file regarding an OS X version of the original Unreal Tournament released in 1999.

This shooter was extremely popular on the platform in the OS 9 days, and many Mac gamers still long to be able to play it on their OS X machines. While there is a Carbonized "preview" released available, there are difficulties in getting it to run well which Gordon is attempting to rectify.

In his latest status update, he notes problems with some of the memory handling functions the program is attempting to call in OS X. He also explains that while the more moderns incarnations of the Unreal engine only send a video card the deltas of what's new, the original Unreal Tournament sends all of the vertex data in each frame. Here's an interesting piece where Gordon ponders the possibility of reworking the game's architechture to get around the problem:

UT'99 would take quite a bit of reengineering to seperate out the data that never changes. Still I wonder if there's a speed boost in just forcibly shoving it all over the AGP bus every frame. I guess I could play around with fencing and keep enough vertex array space for 3 or 4 frames so that the card can be pulling from one while I fill others...

There's also a part of me that says, hey, we've got a LOT more RAM than we did in 1999...I wonder if I could just cache the whole map, models, and animations in AGP memory and be done with it. That'd be wild.

Ryan Gordon's .plan file

Epic Games

MacSoft

Westlake Interactive

Unreal Tournament

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