id Software's Graeme Devine updated his .plan today announcing the release of a new build of Quake III: Arena 1.27h for the Mac. The new non-debug version uses the new Metrowerks compiler and "should run as well or better than previous builds," according to Devine. "The sound code is still taking up more CPU time than it should," continues Devine, "this is a Quake code issue I'll resolve quickly." Devine continues with more information on the Altivec and OS X builds of Quake III: Arena...

The altivec enhanced version and the OS X build. I've not had time yet to build those and update them. The OS X work done for the keynote address demo in Tokyo pulls directly across to the OS X Q3A build, so it should be very straightforward.

Given the beta hardware, daily builds of OS X, hourly patch dumps for the GF3 OpenGL driver, and content/code changes from id, the keynote build ran exceptionally well. We did not have time to completely optimize for PPC or OS X, as I understand more and more about PPC and Altivec programming, I'm seeing more and more opportunities.

by MacNN Staff