Platypus MacOSX Beta

Community Forums/Showcase/Platypus MacOSX Beta

swerdnik(Posted 2005) [#1]
Hello:

Here is the beta of Platypus on MacOSX. I would love to know how it runs on your specific Mac. There are a couple of known issues.

Download: http://www.retro64.com/bf2222/platypus_osx_beta.dmg
Screenshot:

1. It still has the default blitzmax icon
2. The file size is 19 meg, i expect this to get down to about 10 for the free version
3. On the main menu, it says "Exit to Windows" :-)

Special thanks to Michael Reitzenstein for getting this thing ready and to Idigicon for splitting the bill Porting from Blitz->Blitzmax for a game of this size isn't an easy task! Oh and Anthony too for making the game!


pls(Posted 2005) [#2]
Runs great on my slowest iBook (G4 800mhz) with 10.4 (Tiger).
Great graphics, cool gameplay, liked it.

PLS

PS: best of luck on the market. The game looks, sounds and plays very well.


TartanTangerine (was Indiepath)(Posted 2005) [#3]
Runs nice Mike,

I noticed you are porting other titles, looks like the Mac market is ready... Best of luck.

Tim.


BlitzSupport(Posted 2005) [#4]
Works nicely here. It won't run direct from the opened .dmg but once copied to a folder on the hard drive it's fine.

There is quite a delay (2-3 secs?) whenever you go to the menu screen (everything is frozen, mouse included), and the display very briefly goes sort of corrupt on exit, which I reckon might be cleaned up by simply clearing the screen to black before exiting (maybe a couple of times so both buffers are clear?).

Overall, though, looks exactly the same as on Windows, ie. great. Nice job!


eni(Posted 2005) [#5]
Fantastic that you're porting this. I've thought there should be a mac equivalent before but realised the language barrier might prevent it.

It runs well on my powerbook 1.5ghz (1gb ram, ati mobility radeon 9700 128mb) in game. Initial loading the first time was quite slow but I'm assuming there was some unpacking going on as it didn't occur subsequent times? Also loading between waves and menus pauses for a few more moments than feels natural.

It also unexpectedly quit on the second wave when I picked up a star. I do have "quartz 2d extreme" enabled on a trial basis at the moment which is far from finished or official on apple's part so that may have been the cause.

Side note: It's funny (but obvious since it's in development) that the menu still says exit to windows.


swerdnik(Posted 2005) [#6]
I am not so sure the Mac Market will be great. Most high quality titles seem to see a nice initial burst of sales, but they fade within a couple months, but we'll see.

Re: the pause at the main menu. This is due to some code changes Michael had to make for image caching. Anthony originally loaded images on-the-fly while the game was running. This (surprisingly) works just fine in blitz2d, but caused bad pauses in gameplay as textures were uploaded to opengl. The code is hard to deal with, so Michael created a caching system to help out. I am hoping that pause doesn't put off potential customers.

Yeah I have been doing all kinds of web and mac versions, but the Mac versions I paid other people to port, so it wasn't much work for me personally. So I didn't code Platypus for the PC, didn't port it to the Mac either- what did I do?!


eni(Posted 2005) [#7]
So I didn't code Platypus for the PC, didn't port it to the Mac either- what did I do?!


Smart business.


Red Ocktober(Posted 2005) [#8]
i think you'll do just fine in the mac market... just make it accessible to more than the highest spec machines... there's a lot of macs out there...

the hardest part might be getting the news out to the people that the gamesome mac has finally arrived :)

good luck

--Mike


TeaVirus(Posted 2005) [#9]
That was fun! Never played the original so I'll have to pick this up when it's done.

It ran really smoothly on my Mini but did run into a problem. I got to the stage with the waterfalls and picked up a green star which caused the game to crash out. I can e-mail you the "crash report" if you want it but I don't know how much it will help.


Neuro(Posted 2005) [#10]
Heheh...i got a copy of the pc version from George Bray at one of those Idigicon meeting in VA a couple years back!!! I need to dig it up again somewhere.....


Steve Elliott(Posted 2005) [#11]
Well if it's now running in BlitzMax, compiling a PC version is straightforward - how do the BlitzMax and BlitzBASIC versions compare? Any smoother?


Sphinx(Posted 2005) [#12]
Works very nice here, congrats Mike :)


swerdnik(Posted 2005) [#13]
Thanks Maher!

It appears there are 2 issues:
1. green star IS causing a crash.
2. the .dmg needs to be extracted to a folder in order to run properly.

The blitzmax and blitzplus versions run identical for me...


ImaginaryHuman(Posted 2005) [#14]
This is looking pretty nice! The graphics are playful and fun and colorful, I especailly like the multiple levels of parallax scrolling, and that everything is running very smoothly even with lots of things flying all over the place or bits of debris etc. I got to about stage 4 on my first try and a green star crashed me out, but otherwise it was fun. It's a good shooter! :-)

Here I'm on a 1GHz G4 iMac which has an NVidea GeForce4MX gfx card. It runs perfectly fine and smooth.

The only offputting thing, a bit, was the load times, where things are visually frozen except for the little speech bubble thing in the corner. It's not too bad, but it does seem a bit slow. Probably lots of gfx to load. Maybe the player could be reading something while stuff is loading?

Otherwise, great job!


Anatoly(Posted 2005) [#15]
I have the same thing with Platypus on PC - so I guess that's normal.
Though I can't really notice that unless I have a lot of other stuff running in the background.
So stop complaining about it - you can sit through it!


Steve Elliott(Posted 2005) [#16]

The blitzmax and blitzplus versions run identical for me...



Is that because the framerate is fixed at 60FPS? I've noticed the PC version runs a lot smoother now my current monitor (flatscreen) has a refresh rate of 60 - not 75.


tesuji(Posted 2005) [#17]
I got a protection fault straight away when I tried :`(. I had extracted it from the dmg before trying to run it. Running 10.3.9 on a 2Ghz G5 with a GeForce FX 5200.

*Edit* Got it working now. When I opened the dmg folder it looked like there was only a single application file but I eventually found all the resource files tucked away at the far end of the scrollbars. Might be better to stick all the files inside the .app folder as is standard. Makes it easier for us mac weenies to just drag & drop.

Game is much fun BTW :)


Erroneouss(Posted 2005) [#18]
ONe of my FAVORITE games ever! :)