DrunkenBlog

The upcoming Cube game CD for Mac OS X

That image landed in my inbox awhile ago, and you've probably seen it on sites like slashdot and such by now, but it's a good excuse to talk about the upcoming CD specifically geared for Mac hardware. If you weren't aware, Cube is an open source game (FPS, ala Doom/Quake/Unreal) that's cross platform.

The above is an image for printing out and slapping on your Cube Game CD for PowerPC, which runs on the Pegasos machines. If you haven't seen them before, you should take a look, as you'll be hearing more about them more here in the near future. They're G3 and G4 PowerPC-based workstations that run MorphOS and a whole slew of LinuxPPC distros.

The LiveCD that was released is essentially a CD that you download, burn to a disc, and pop into a Pegasos machine. It boots itself into Gentoo from the CD, and it's tailored specifically to run Cube. Easy way to start up a quick death match, assuming you have a bunch of Pegasos machines that happen to be around and networked.

But wait you say, who has a whole bunch of networked Pegasos machines hanging around their office?

Have no fear, next on their plate is a Gentoo-based LiveCD for Cube for Mac hardware, which means you'll be able to walk into computer lab, slide in the CD, boot, and start death matching with your friends. Well, unless you're the Mac Lab at the University of Chicago, which no one goes into because it's just too damn hot in there, but because it's cross-platform, theoretically you can just walk up to a mix of x86, Macs, or anything that Cube supports and get to gaming.

But wait you say, Cube for Mac OS X already exists, so why would you want to a CD specifically made for playing it? Well, some might say that, as surprisingly few people really know about it or have tried it out. Below is a screenshot.

Before we go into the specifics of Mac OS X, it's worth talking a bit about Cube itself. Some of the main points are:

• It's free
• It has surprisingly low resource requirements, which doesn't mean that you won't be able to play something with arguably prettier graphics on it, especially something commercial. But for this type of project, for the quality you're getting, it has very low requirements. Should have no problem with an iBook or older PowerBooks. Load times, especially on slower disks, are blazingly fast. We're talking a few seconds from double click to being right in a game.
• It has an in-game editing mode, where you can just press 'E' and start flying around and changing what you want. This isn't a small deal, as while Mac users have gotten ports of other first person shooters recently, the companies generally don't find it worthwhile to port over the editing tools, and making your own maps, or modifying ones that exist, can be a lot of fun.
• It's open source, and as a quick aside, this is exactly the type of OSS project that sort of freaks me out from a patent point of view. Stop and think about it: they've created their own engine, but who knows what arbitrary patents for putting polygons on the screen they might be violating. Unfortunately, that way madness lies, so let's move on.

You may notice that the screenshots above look very pretty. It's actually a surprisingly pretty game -- it's not Quake 3, and sometimes isn't even Quake 2 quality, but it's got potential. Some of the technologies in it are surprisingly advanced for a game of this type, like dynamic lighting, and where things aren't it's generally due to the engine, which is where the name of the game comes from.

It's basically an engine geared for outdoor scenes being used to generate indoor scenes, and the entire map is made up of a large array of cubes that are given floor and ceiling heights and such. The engine has to then take care of what is supposed to be visible and what isn't. It really shines is if you're on a slower machine, where the engine does a good job of 'grouping' squares that are farther away into larger entities so that less polygons are on the screen.

The downside to the cube engine is that all the maps have a very square feel to them. You'll see some arches here and there, but this isn't Quake 3, and you won't be running around through tubes.

However, in terms of game play, if you like the hardcore death-match style of gaming, it's a hell of a lot of fun. Seriously. Things are fairly well balanced, and there are a ton of maps, and as you eek up the difficulty level there are a hell of a lot of enemies running around at you, which brings to mind shades of Doom or Serious Sam.

It isn't perfect by any means, much of the AI could certainly use work, as I remember losing count of how many times some monster would get itself stuck somewhere or a fireball would somehow be able to shoot me through a ledge. However, this was with an older version, which brings us to the Mac OS X port.

Originally, in order to play Cube on OS x, you'd have have to go to the unofficial port on source forge and download the larger base set of libraries and files along, along with the OS X specific binary app that would call them all up. The guys who put together the unofficial port did a good job, and if you go and follow the instructions to get up and running, chances are the old version will work well for you. Getting it up and running was as simple as decompressing the base files and dropping the Mac binary into the folder and double clicking.

Unfortunately, the unofficial port has gone away. The main reason for the unofficial port dying off is that there's now an 'official port' included with the game. Now you could just download the game, decompress, and there would be binaries for Windows, Linux, OS X, etc., all included. The 'official' binary actually has a bunch of fixes and features the unofficial port doesn't, too.

This would seem to do away with any need for something like the Gentoo CD, and is a nice step in the direction. However, when I downloaded and tried to run the official version of the game, nothing happened. Checking the crashlog showed:

dyld: /Applications/cube/cube.app/Contents/MacOS/cube can't open library: @executable_path/../Frameworks/SDL.framework/Versions/A/SDL (No such file or directory, errno = 2)

Feb 5 21:13:14 drunkenbatman crashdump: Unable to determine CPSProcessSerNum pid: 2841 name: cube

Erg. I could try to start tracking that error down, as I'm pretty sure it means I need libsdl from libsdl.org, and after some time could probably figure out what the problem is, but I'd have to imagine most couldn't, and if they could getting that up and running on a bunch of Macs you encounter could be one hell of a hassle, if you're even allowed to do so.

All of that stuff goes away with the upcoming Gentoo CD. As long as it has support for the hardware you're booting it up on (including drivers for the cards, etc.) you'll be good to go and things like software dependancies become a non issue.

This doesn't mean it's ideal for all needs, or that it wouldn't be nice for the port itself to be more inclusive of what it needs, as in many cases you don't want to have to reboot your computer to play a game. However, testing and such takes time, and you have another chicken and the egg problem: the OS X community for this game is fairly small, which means there isn't that much testing or work done on the port yet.

So having the upcoming CD will alleviate all of that, as whoever is packaging the CD just has to make sure it works great, at the software level, on one build of Linux and that everything is there. Boot one machine on the network and set it as a server, boot the rest into the client and you're good to go. Because of the low overhead of Linux in this type of a mode, and how fast Cube is to get up and running in general, this won't be as painful as you think.

You still have to know that you have the drivers for your hardware, but that just means it has to be tested once on one model, as you don't have to worry about whether or not someone is running APE or email in the background or other issues. Your Mac essentially becomes a Linux-based console for playing the game as well as possible, and it's pretty cool of them to be doing it.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    February 07, 2005, at 04:13 PM