Quake Live Dev Says Mac and Linux Are "Top Priority"

AlexMax2742 writes "id's Marty Stratton notes the following in his Quake Live developer blog on the subject of the Mac and Linux port of Quake Live: 'These have proved more difficult than expected, but we're getting close. We expect to also be testing Mac and Linux versions of Quake Live internally this month and then making those publicly available just as soon as we feel they are ready. This work is being done by a separate programmer in parallel with the other work that we're doing, and is his only priority — point being, that this is a top priority for us and not being delayed because of other work.' In my humble opinion, it's awesome to see that kind of (continued) dedication from a company." The post also indicates that progress is being made on the much-awaited private server functionality, and part two makes brief mention of match broadcasting and community-made maps.

Re:Interesting spin

[Paralizer]

id is small. They used to have a list of everyone who worked there on their site, but I can't find it anymore. It was no more than a two dozen people, most of which were artists.

I honestly don't get it

[TheRaven64]

The point of browser-based games is that the end user doesn't need to install anything, but Quake Live is a browser plugin, so it's basically a complete, stand-alone game. Except that it is now dependent on browser plugin APIs for, apparently, no reason. Why is this better than a stand-alone online-only game? It seems to be 'browser' based only in as much as that the browser launches the game and the game runs in the browser's address space (and so can break it). If you want closer browser-game integration, a better approach seems to be to register a handler for a custom URL schema (e.g. quakelive://) so any links in the browser that start like that are handed off to your game.

Re:Interesting spin

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the size of the project, absolutely. AFAIK only 4 people are working on QuakeLive.

I love ID software

[bestadvocate]

They've made a lot of great games, and they open source there older platforms. What more can you ask from a software company?

On a side note Quake Live is fun

Re:I honestly don't get it

[Trepidity]

That's not really the same fashion. You install Flash once to play all Flash games on the internet; you don't have to install a new browser plugin for each specific game. The advantage to the end-user there is that they can click around the internet and play things without installing new plugins, once they've done it once.

Now if id was proposing a new general browser plugin that many games could use, that'd be similar. But it seems that this is a Quake-Live-specific plugin, so it really is sort of like downloading an .exe and running it, only it's in the browser for no apparent reason.

Re:I honestly don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Urban Dead text-based? Show me the graphics, I'll show a plugin.

Re:Interesting spin

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand exactly how large 1% is. That would mean exactly 1 out of every 100 users is a Linux user. If 90% of the US population uses a PC, and 1% use Linux, then that would mean a total of 2.7million Linux users in the US alone. Thats more than half the current install base of the PS3 in the US.

Bah!!! *shakes cane* id an acronym? dream on!

[nawcom]

I've already gone through the posts and see people typing "ID" referring to the company as if they're initials or something. The damn word is id! And I'm sure you've been told that a million times, but your ignorant memory struggles to remember that! It's id - a word - not I.D. [wikipedia.org]

What's the next one on the list to go over, how about the fact that Trolltech's (now Nokia's) toolkit is a word, not an acronym. Qt (pronounced cute) - not Q.T. grr. I could go on with you and your "unix daymon" retarded pronunciation habit as well, but my arm is getting tired of the cane shaking.