End of the official Mac OS X port

[Michi_cc]

0.7.3 seems to work fine for me, at any rate.

The current nightly is much more interesting though, because of the changes I mentioned some posts above.


-- Michael Lutz

[metalangel]

Just to add, another lifelong (lifespan of TT that is!) fan here, barely had any time with TTDPatch before I moved to an iBook G4 and now still use it on 10.4 and have a (currently dead due to PSU failure) Quicksilver G4 too.

I realize I'm probably the worst kind of user for OpenTTD as I'm contentedly grinding along on hardware that's five years and two OS upgrades out of date - but it still does everything I want it to, why change? etc etc.

Anyway, I doubt I could offer any support as I don't have a clue about programming beyond the inevitable 10 GOTO 20 jokes.

So instead, I just want to express my extreme gratitude to everyone involved in OpenTTD, and particularly for the extreme lengths you've gone to to keep my fellow Mac users in this magnificent game for so long.

I suspect by the time this comes to pass, I'll have finally forked out for a new MacBook Pro and will be able to use Boot Camp (or something) to continue running OpenTTD, but it's been great running it natively all this time.

Again, thanks to all of you.

[NShiell]

Oh No!
I love using Oppen-TTD on my MacBook
It is great to play on the high quality Mac screen.

It's important to have a good Mac installer without messing around with X11/Wine/Darwine/Crossover or VMs
i will be honest I don't know enough about coding on mac to offer coding assistance in taking on dev work for Mac
Is there any other way I can help? (Don't have oodles of cash for mac servers either)

[Absolutis]

If you want to, I can do os x powerpc testing. See my profile for email.

[Michi_cc]

The next nightly will feature automatic font detection for languages where the built-in glyphs are not sufficient.

Testing (and reporting) this and the things mentioned before could help.

-- Michael Lutz

[Absolutis]

The music player doesn't seem to work... well at least on 10.5 (10.6 is not for powerpc)

[planetmaker]

But you have MIDI files in your OpenTTD's music dir ~/Documents/OpenTTD/gm ?

Code: Select all

> ls ~/Documents/OpenTTD/gm
gm_tt00.gm	gm_tt05.gm	gm_tt10.gm	gm_tt15.gm	gm_tt20.gm
gm_tt01.gm	gm_tt06.gm	gm_tt11.gm	gm_tt16.gm	gm_tt21.gm
gm_tt02.gm	gm_tt07.gm	gm_tt12.gm	gm_tt17.gm
gm_tt03.gm	gm_tt08.gm	gm_tt13.gm	gm_tt18.gm
gm_tt04.gm	gm_tt09.gm	gm_tt14.gm	gm_tt19.gm

[Michi_cc]

The music player doesn't seem to work... well at least on 10.5 (10.6 is not for powerpc)

There's a simple way the check if that has anything to do with the recent changes.

Open ~/Documents/OpenTTD/openttd.cfg with a text editor and find the line

Code: Select all

musicdriver = ""

Change it to

Code: Select all

musicdriver = "qt"

This enables the old music player. If that's also not working, your problem isn't related to the recent changes.

NB: Changing it back to "" or "cocoa" will re-enable the new player.

-- Michael Lutz

[sonofmof]

Unfortunately it seems most of us Mac users no little or nothing about coding. It must be the appeal of "It Just Works" which lures us to the Mac platform.

I do however have 1 new 24" nvidia imac, 1 17" white ati imac and 1 1.5ghz ppc mini in my household.

Any testing I can do, please let me know.



Also, I saw previously in these forums that someone had ported OpenTTD to iphone, it is radically different to OSX ? perhaps there could be a lot of shared code, and some of the thousands of iphone developers could save our beloved OpenTTD OSX from extinction ???

http://www.iphoneclub.nl/24239/zodttd-b ... uit-cydia/

[Rubidium]

Also, I saw previously in these forums that someone had ported OpenTTD to iphone

Which was based on our OSX port. Besides that he is rarely updating it, so not much use for the 'official' OSX port.
Then I should not forget to mention that he has a severe lack of version (control); he checks out some version of trunk, then makes his modifications and all this combined he commits to some VCS without ever mentioning the version of trunk. Then he calls this 2.0.0 and claims it can be used to play on 0.6.3 servers (which for a fact is not true).

Also take a look at some of the comments posted in the link you gave. They got the feeling that he's doing too much at a time and trying to push 'something' (unfinished) out. Unfinished patches do not help the OSX port because adding stuff hoping it's going to get better usually backfire and make things worse.

[Michi_cc]

Any testing I can do, please let me know.

Just read the previous page, there are some posts with things to try and test (using trunk though, not 0.7.3).

-- Michael Lutz

[NShiell]

1. OK, I know a bit of coding, and have a basic idea of C and C++, can you guys suggest some resources where I can get my skills to the point where maybe I could help making OTTD for MAC?
I just can't get my head around dependencies and building make file etc...

2. What is it specifically that is causing problems in keeping this working? Could we liaise with Apple over this?

[TomS]

Sorry if this has been offered before, Im too shocked to read the entire thread or properly (sorry, Im breaking the rules)...

So if someone was generous enough to supply two Mac Minis (you said you'd need two), would that be of enough help to ensure that the Mac build could continue? Or is it really a lack of developer(s) to actually write the code/port?

Im not a big C/C++/ObjC programmer, so Im not sure I would be able to help out (much) in that respect.

I personally use a Mac, and dont particularly feel like switching between Mac and Windows every time I want to play, but I suppose I will have to if that is the worst scenario that comes out of it.

But others are not as "fortunate" as I to be able to have Windows and OS X on their Mac, so its not a solution for everyone.

TTD is my favourite game of all time! It would be a massive shame to see it unsupported or undeveloped on Mac. You guys have such an awesome selection of OS support, it would be very sad to see one of the worlds gaining OSs fall off the map.

Ive also considered donating in the past, but have never "gotten around to it", but this is one cause I would consider helping out!

Im not a Mac fan by any means, but as it is my platform of choice these days, I'd like to still be able to play on a Mac into the future. And, I can spare it!

Cheers,
One devoted (O)TTD fan.

[Zuu]

Take your time and read the thread from the beginning, then some of your questions will be answered. Especially pay notice to the answers by the developers. There is also some suggestions for workarounds so that you can run OpenTTD on Intel Macs after it has been discontinued.

[Phx_01]

I wonder what the original developers are waiting for.

Reading through the thread, there are
- some people offering testing support (including myself)
- some people offering hardware support
- at least one person offering coding support (while not completely sophisticated, he would at least try and certainly becomes better over time)

After all that, I wonder why no reply is suggesting an acceptance of the help offered. Instead, every time someone offers help, it is more like "naa, this is then not good and that also".

Why is any attempt of support turned down before at least trying? Even with past experience of such, not every person is the same. It is really a shame...

[Michi_cc]

It is really a shame...

Yes, it is, seeing that regarding here and here just one single person gave any sort of feedback (and that wasn't more than a rather useless doesn't work). I would have expected a bit more enthusiasm.

And if somebody wants to help fixing the problems, great, the matching FlySpray entry was posted quite early in this thread. Actions speak way louder than words. People are always quick to talk and make suggestions, but usually fail at actually doing something.

-- Michael Lutz

[Rubidium]

I wonder what the original developers are waiting for.

Simple, someone that wants to (and can!) take over care of the Mac OS X port.

- some people offering testing support (including myself)

Testing can only be done when someone fixes the issues users are having now. All other testing would only show more flaws in the port, though that isn't bad for telling us (the original developers) about the quality of the port.

- some people offering hardware support

You can offer hardware, but who would take it? It should be the person that takes over the Mac OS X port, who I have not seen.

- at least one person offering coding support

Offering coding support is one thing, actually having fixes for the bugs is another and actually managing over the port is another big step.

After all that, I wonder why no reply is suggesting an acceptance of the help offered. Instead, every time someone offers help, it is more like "naa, this is then not good and that also".

Why is any attempt of support turned down before at least trying? Even with past experience of such, not every person is the same. It is really a shame...

The first post explains why quite a few things are not wanted, primarily because it costs us lots more time to manage. For example the time and effort required for compiling a release went from 4-6 hours real time spent over half a dozen developers waiting on eachother for the different steps to under an hour with a single developer firing up the system and everything happens automatically. I really do not want to go back to that, or you would like less stable (both in number and stability) releases and scrapping of the nightlies. This is ofcourse about people compiling OpenTTD for us; the compile farm is not even the major problem for the short term survival of OpenTTD.

And, we haven't made replies that are an acceptance of help? Pointing people interested in coding to the bugs that need to be fixed isn't accepting their help?

Anyhow, what things (described in this thread) can be tried that do not require a Mac OS X developer that would help Mac OS X development?

[Phx_01]

Yes, it is, seeing that regarding here and here just one single person gave any sort of feedback (and that wasn't more than a rather useless doesn't work). I would have expected a bit more enthusiasm.

And if somebody wants to help fixing the problems, great, the matching FlySpray entry was posted quite early in this thread. Actions speak way louder than words. People are always quick to talk and make suggestions, but usually fail at actually doing something.

-- Michael Lutz

I am sorry. I must have overrun your posts. I will have a deeper look on those and see what I can do.

Offering coding support is one thing, actually having fixes for the bugs is another and actually managing over the port is another big step.

All things at their time. Using your statement, there are three steps to this. Offering support is the first.
Similar to me that I just missed some comments (e.g. from Michael), it can happen to everyone. So, maybe he just oversaw on where to start from. However, expecting that one from the first sight knows their way around is a bit overrated. Not everyone who can code and likes the game necessarily knows the code inside out.

[Rubidium]

However, expecting that one from the first sight knows their way around is a bit overrated. Not everyone who can code and likes the game necessarily knows the code inside out.

Well, then I'll give all the help I can give w.r.t. to code of the OS X port. The code of the port is likely either in src/os/macosx/*, src/os/video/cocoa/*, src/sound/cocoa*, src/music/qt* or src/music/cocoa*. More I can't tell; I don't know about how the code works, primarily because I've got no clue about the Mac OS X API. So, is this really helpful information? I guess not. The helpfull information has to come from the previous Mac OS X developer, but he kinda left without saying a word... so not much that we can do about it.
So... expecting that the current developers know their way around the Mac OS X code is a bit overrated. Not every developer knows all OpenTTD code inside out.

[Phx_01]

Well, then I'll give all the help I can give w.r.t. to code of the OS X port. The code of the port is likely either in src/os/macosx/*, src/os/video/cocoa/*, src/sound/cocoa*, src/music/qt* or src/music/cocoa*. More I can't tell; I don't know about how the code works, primarily because I've got no clue about the Mac OS X API. So, is this really helpful information? I guess not. The helpfull information has to come from the previous Mac OS X developer, but he kinda left without saying a word... so not much that we can do about it.
So... expecting that the current developers know their way around the Mac OS X code is a bit overrated. Not every developer knows all OpenTTD code inside out.

Any information can be helpful one way or another, but that your previous developer for Mac OS X just left without saying something is indeed bad.

Also, I would like to point out that while you already stated not knowing on how to program on Mac OS X, I never expected any existing (the original) developers to know the Mac OS X portion inside out. If you would, you would program it yourself, I figure...

My intend is also not to attack anyone here. The postings here just seemed so negative. However, to make a long story short, I will have a closer look at the changelog link sent by Michael and see what I can do.


@ NShiell

I am not much into coding, but a while back when I had some ideas to program something for the iPhone, I saw that one can go to http://developer.apple.com. A drop-down link "Dev Centers" will lead you to the three available centers. A simple (free) Apple ID account is required to get some information there.

Since I never really got around learning to code, I never tried to contact Apple though. So, not sure if this is possible, but worth a try if it is.