Porting Efforts

It has been fully ported to cross platform technologies allowing it to run natively on many operating systems and architectures.

Platform / Inputs

The game now communicates with the operating system via SDL, which has a growing list of supported systems:

Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IPhone, the PSP, Syllable, Haiku/BeOS, OpenVMS, WebOS, MorphOS, AmigaOS, and AmigaOS 5.

Building

The game is currently compiled using gcc and mingw but has in the past been compiled with winegcc and visual studios 2008/10.

There is currently no 64bit builds, although you can easily play on a 64bit OS by simply installing 32bit libraries or using the pre-compiled static builds that include the 32 bit libraries into the binary.

Mac is fully supported but only through Wine because there is no other way to cross compile using gcc and access opengl acceleration.

The community is also responsible for a few patches added to Wine that allowed the original directx6 game to run perfectly!

Graphics

Rendering was ported to OpenGL and D3D9.

An OpenGL3 version is also supported with some development efforts being directed towards moving the lighting system and other effects onto the GPU.

Audio

The game now uses OpenAL Soft for cross platform sound API.

Although it's still based on panning and volume control to simulate the 3d environment.

Efforts are in work to soon use OpenAL's built in 3d sound support.

This has many benefits some of which are:

surround sound, doppler effect, and better environmental effects (such as being submerged in water).

Networking

ProjectX was ported to a custom, peer-to-peer library written on top of Enet.

Routers / Firewalls

The game always has been and will most likely always be peer-to-peer.

This has the side affect that players must forward/open their game port (default: 2300 UDP) to their gaming machine. Multiple computers are supported by forwarding a different port for each one.

This wasn't needed back in 1998 because nobody had routers and most people were directly connected to the internet using 56k modems without any firewall! Today however internet providers generally embed a router right into their modems. But majority of these users have no idea that they even have one much less how to configure them! There is also those that may be in a public access location such as a hotel or coffee shop. Hence this is basically the only issue players have with setting up the game. Today we are actually in a period of migration to ipv6 which will remove the need for NAT effectively fixing the problem. This is not a bug in the game but more a bug in the player / industry.

One of the features designed into the game is the first player to join a game does NOT require their port to be forwarded. This is because players connect to the host just like you connect to web sites and because *existing players connect to new players* in the exact same way. Thus the first player to join a game never requires someone to connect to them. Obviously though if you leave the game you won't have much success getting back in and everyone has to work together so that you join first.

Until that time we are looking into having the host support proxying of players. Although this has the downside of increasing the latency and bandwidth it will in the short term make the game more inviting. Support for upnp and other protocols are also being looked into which allows the game to talk to the router to temporarly negotiate a port on the fly.

Bots / AI

There has been some work done on making some better bots. This is still in development though. An interesting idea is to support pitting bot programs written by users against each other and other human players. Much like c-robots and it's descendants.

Level Editor

See PX Blender.