WipeOut to the MacOS

The WipeOut titles had already been a great success for the PlayStation, PC and in the Amiga market place. The development team, mainly DirectX® developers, had little experience of the Mac OS platform and were finding it difficult to recruit sufficiently skilled Mac OS developers.

The Challenge

Porting a game to a new platform as well as doing optimisation and getting all the speed out the platform can take months of development.

With a team that understands DirectX®, and with little experience of Mac OS, the objectives were to create a Macintosh-based version that:

Had no loss of playability/speed

Consumed minimum financial resources

Was easy to document and support

Covered the widest selection of Macintoshes

Provided game pads support.

The Solution

Using the MacDX from Coderus Ltd, the WipeOut development team were easily able to bring the game to Mac OS without any major technical skills of the platform apart from basic compiling skills using the Mac OS development environment CodeWarrior.

The MacDX API exposes the same APIs, which were already being used by PC versions of the game, and these APIs were automatically optimised for each of the variations of Macintoshes currently available.

The WipeOut 3D engine didn't need to be touched. The majority of the other existing code did not require any changes either, apart from that used to display a standard Set-up Dialog. This had been introduced for the PC version and was replaced with the equivalent Mac OS dialog code.

The Results

The development of the game was rapidly completed fulfilling all the set objectives.

The time and resources saved even allowed time to add features to the game:

Network Support

QuickTime music playback

Frames per second control (because the game was so fast!)