While Westlake Interactive has certainly had a busy holiday season followed quickly by Macworld Expo San Francisco, that still doesn't stop Unreal Tournament fans from asking about the Mac OS X version of the popular shooter. Westlake president Glenda Adams recently responded to a question about UT X, offering encouraging news about help from Apple on the port.

She's also looking into some unaligned data issues which could be holding up UT X as well as causing slowdowns in other projects like the Carbon version of Tomb Raider: Chronicles:

Nothing happening on it over the holidays, between Christmas and Macworld I've had little time to program on anything. But I'm back in the office now, and UT X is definitely on the slate. I had a good talk with some Apple people at Macworld, and hopefully we'll be able to get some Apple engineers to take a look or give me some tips on other things to try. So I'm definitely pulling more resources in on the project.

I did hear one good tip about unaligned data problems and some potential stdlib realloc() issues, so I'll probably see if those help at all next week.

On a side note—the unaligned data issues may cause more performance than stability problems, but this may help with the slow performance of Tomb Raider Chronicles under X as well. I'll be looking at that next week or two as well.

The good news is that after aligning the data, developers are generally able to meet or beat Mac OS 9's performance. We'll keep you posted with any new info on UT X or Westlake's other projects in the coming weeks.

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