DrunkenBlog

Cube Game for Mac OS X (download)

Awhile back I posted on the upcoming Cube CD for Macs (think Quake/Doom/Unreal Tournament), and went into a bunch of info on the history of the game, why I dig it and why I think the CD will be a cool thing for Mac users to have in general.

If you're lost, I'd start there first, but one of the main things I mentioned was that there were some real problems with the 'official' OS X build of the game.

My new main-man, Troy from ZettaServe, chimed in on what was going on and then sent me a build with everything fixed. He was also good enough to file some bugs, so hopefully this kind of thing shouldn't be necessary in the future...

I could have just posted the build and given you some instructions on getting the rest of the files and where things need to go, but it seemed just as easy to wrap it all up and post it as an archive so you can unzip and double click:

• Download Here (23.4 Megs)

While that's downloading, it's worth giving a quick primer so you aren't completely lost after you clicky-clicky... With the caveat that if it works it works, but if it doesn't...

I'm not going to be spending any time on it, but it should be enough to get you up and running. It was tested on Mac OS 10.3.8, and just a few machines.

Once it's downloaded, decompress the archive and move the game folder to wherever you want it. It was archived with the Finder, so it's probably best to unarchive it with the Finder...

Inside, you'll see something with an icon that looks to be about the only thing you can double click that'll do anything... If you're in Icon View it should be immediately obvious since it is the drunken edition.

You should be dropped into an empty map which you can run around in to get a general feel -- no monsters.

The big key you're going to need to keep in mind when you start is the 'ESCAPE' key on your keyboard. This pulls up the menu for just about everything, from starting games to quitting. The arrow keys move up and down the items, and to select something just hit enter.

While gaming, the movement keys default to A, S, D, W, space. Basic FPS controls. Weapons use the 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., although if you have a scroll wheel on your mouse you can cycle back and forth through them that way.

Hit the escape key, and you'll see options for tweaking, single player, multiplayer, etc.

Select single player by moving down with the arrow keys and pressing enter, and you can change the skill level, start a single-player game, straight deathmatch with bots, etc.

You might want to turn the skill level down and start with basic single-player deathmatches for awhile... once you clear a map it moves to a new one, or by hitting the escape key and going back to the menu you can choose what map you want to play.

If you go this route, you'll see a few options -- local or server. Local is what you do if you're connecting to other machines on your LAN, server is what you do when you're playing freaks around the world.

It's important that you first click to download the master server list so that the game is able to bring up a list of server games for you to join in the other areas. After that, it's as easy as seeing one that looks good and pressing enter.

The game defaults to 640x480 when run, but can be run at much higher resolutions if you have the hardware for it.

To start it in a higher rez, drop to the terminal at the root folder of the game (where the app you double click is), and enter:

./cube.app/Contents/MacOS/cube -w800 -h600

Basically just starts it manually but passes different parameters for the rez -- you can make those numbers whatever you want in standard resolutions... 1024x768, 1280x1024, etc.

I know, if you're clueless saying 'drop to the terminal...' can kinda throw you, but basically, open a terminal window, type 'cd ', drop the game folder onto it and then hit enter. Then paste in the above... I have faith you can figure it out.

The game is meant to scale down to very very modest systems, and basically just specs a 500MHz P3 on the x86 side. It runs slower on PowerPC systems -- because of lack of optimization that's just the way it is -- but it will still scale way down on Apple hardware.

If you're having problems with it chugging, one of the easiest things you can do is go to the tweaking menu and change the first settings you see down. It should be obvious once you've entered the area.

This basically means detail drops much heavier on things that are farther away and things can have a tendency to 'pop up' as they get closer, but it can make a huge difference on slower systems.

In the game folder you'll see a file named readme.html that you can double click and it'll pull up a whole bunch of information on the weapons, monsters, how to edit maps (yes, you can edit maps in-game!), etc.

There's also the official forums, which offer pretty good detail on the game in general -- but be warned, the OS X side of things isn't very large there.

Like I said, if it works for you, great. If it doesn't... If you want to leave a ping either way, please specify the system you used. I.E., make and model, RAM, what version of OS X, etc.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    March 04, 2005, at 02:33 AM