 Graphic Simulations is reknown for its history in Air Combat simulations. The company worked closely with Techworks to produce one of the most beautiful dogfighting simulations when the Voodoo 1 premiered on the Mac. When Graphsim announced that it had secured the licensing rights to both Descent 3 and Baldur's gate, it made most of us in the Mac journalism industry do a double take.
In any case, development on the Mac version of D3 seems to be progressing rather steadily and with some speed. Jeff Morgan, the figurehead of the company, brought in Duane Johnson to handle the majority of the port. Many of our readers will recognize Duane from Descent I and II 3Dfx releases on the internet. Apparently, he raised enough eyebrows with his hard work on the public domain code to D1 and D2 that Graph Sim decided he was the best man for a Mac port of D3. Thus far, it looks as if Graph Sim made the right decision. More than a few levels were playable at the show, and the animation looks pristine.
The version we saw at the show as running off of Voodoo II acceleration with the new generic 3Dfx-distributed drivers. Duane and Jeff tell us that there are some problems with the implementation of OpenGL and RAVE acceleration right now, but that they should be fixed shortly.
Morgan also commented that progress on Baldur's Gate is proceeding smoothly, just reached playable status (the game was unplayable at the show), and will ship with the expansion pack included. Beyond that, we weren't able to dig up much on the PC hit.
Finally, Morgan addressed concerns of F/A-18 Hornet incompatibilities with the new OpenGL standard saying that his team is hard at work resolving all known issues with the drivers; an update is forthcoming shortly.
For more information on Graphic Simulations, visit http://www.graphsim.com.
[Guroian] |
