Shogo: Progress Report

02-April-2000: Progress update by Axel Deising

The Mac version of "Shogo: Mobile Armor Division" and the LithTech engine it is based on, is coming along nicely although it was somewhat delayed (2-3 weeks) because of our contract-work on LithTech V2. The Mac (and Linux) port is based on the sources of the Amiga port which is nearing completion. Most of the work required to get Shogo and LithTech to run on Mac, Amiga or Linux is identical: removing Windows dependencies of all sorts (Direct3D to OpenGL, MFC etc.), removing Visual C++ dependencies, implementing a DLL-mechanism etc. The Amiga team, headed by Thomas Frieden, has been careful to minimise the amount of platform specific code. This has slowed down development of the Amiga version somewhat but was well worth the effort especially in view of the upcoming LithTech V2 engine.

An additional advantage of basing the Mac port on the Amiga sources is that the Amiga team has already gone through the tedious but laborious process of removing endian-problems. Both Amiga and Mac use the PPC family of processors which are "big endian" whilst the x86 family is "little endian" which can wreak havoc if the code is endian-unaware (as was the case). Finally, because of the intimate knowledge the Amiga team now has of the LithTech engine and Shogo, Hyperion is now able to provide "in-house" technical support.

The Mac server is currently up and running and this qualifies as the brunt of the work. It took the Amiga team no less than 5 months to get a working Shogo server. Currently, work is in progress on the Mac client. All platform specific client-code has been converted and testing began end of March. The full game is expected to be completed in the course of Q2/2000. More details will follow soon.