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Ryan Gordon, the Epic Games programmer in charge of porting Unreal Tournament 2003 to the Mac, recently posted a .plan update discussing the recent release of the Tech Demo of the game.

Gordon first reiterates that all users who try the demo should have Mac OS X 10.2.6 installed on their machines. He goes on to detail what UT2K3 will do if you try to run it on Mac OS X versions less than 10.2.6.

Gordon also explains that UT2K3 does indeed use dual processors:

The game does use dual CPUs...the music is decoded in a separate thread which MacOS X will toss on the second processor on dual systems. Some implementations of OpenAL will do their mixing on the second processor, too. On Linux, this is easily a 5-10 fps boost for SMP boxes, and I wouldn't be surprised to see similar results on the Mac...but I haven't explicitly benchmarked this. Most games are generally single-threaded, but understand that this means a Dual box will still be able to cook one CPU for the game itself and run the other 20 or so system processes on the other processor, so there's still a benefit to this.

We'll be listening to what people say to MacSoft (and I'll be trolling various web forums)...we'll all be taking the responses seriously before finalizing a gold master. The timeframe is short...my personal goal is to bless a gold master sometime after returning from E3, but that is not a solid date commitment, before you go and post my .plan file on Inside Mac Games. We'll go with the standard Epic response of "two weeks". We all know what that really means. :)

If you haven't tried out the Unreal Tournament 2003 Tech Demo yet, head over to MGF to download the 131 MB file. And don't forget, UT2K3 is available for pre-order through the IMG Store.

Ryan Gordon's .plan

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Unreal Tournament 2003

MGF: Unreal Tournamet 2003 Tech Demo

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