Click to enlarge

A new article posted on the Second Life website goes into detail about the Mac version of this Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) which attempts to create a virtual world online, akin to The Sims: Online. The difference with this game is that your world is completely 3D and the user's content-creation plays a central role in the gameplay.

The developer journal goes specifies exactly how Linden Lab farmed out the Mac work to an outfit called Critical Path Software and proceeded with the work. As with many Mac ports, just doing the work resulted in finding bugs and optimizations in the Windows version. Here's a clip from the article:

Some of the work done by CPS on the Macintosh game port provided new insights into existing code, or even direct benefits to the Windows version. For example, the Mac-specific code CPS wrote for window creation and OpenGL setup had some new design features that inspired the Linden team to revisit and improve the code which performed the same function on Windows. In several other cases, the process of revisiting code which hadn't been looked at in some time shook out problems that had been there all along but never identified. Some of these problems, such as endian issues, were particular to the Mac port. Others, like a subtle problem with the use of posix timers, had caused some nagging problems with the backend servers that we were quite happy to finally solve. Intuition, insight and past experience with similar issues were all important factors in tracking these problems down.

Second Life Mac Developer Journal

IMG News: Second Life Born for Mac OS X

Linden Lab

Second Life

Critical Path Software

Search for other Mac games news stories or browse our Mac Games News Archive.