One game that Mac RPG fans have been eagerly anticipating for a long time is Baldur's Gate II, which has clearly missed its previously estimated ship date goal of MWNY last month. The forums of IMG partner MacBaldur have always been a great source of information from dedicated fans and game developers, and a recent post by Mumbo Jumbo member Chris Jacobson seems worth sharing with IMG readers.

It was always anticipated that the two biggest challenges involving this port would be networking support (which has to be built from scratch) and Carbonization of the somewhat dated Infinity engine. According to Jacobson's post, OS X has proven a bit of a challenge, but the game should be ready to go any day now. Here's an excerpt:

You'll get it soon, I cant say a date tho because that I really dont know. Its down to the wire here - it could be announced any day (barring any major showstoppers). We're trying to iron out some last minute issues. OS X hasn't been the most pleasant thing to work with... and there have been some other last minute issues with memory and such which had/have to be dealt with. I'm coming in earlier than usual, staying late, losing sleep, getting sick, and generally developing another ulcer while I wrap this up.

As a sidenote, the Baldurs Gate codebase was really designed to take advantage of an architecture that has non-linear mapped memory and true virtual memory (aka Win32), and thus it has some "Gotchas" when moving to MacOS. On OS X it isn't an issue, but on OS 9 and earlier it requires some significant design changes.

Preview: Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn

MacBaldur

Chris Jacobsen on Baldur's Gate II Delay

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