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The Mac OS X port of Wouter van Oortmerssen's Linux game engine Cube appears to be making progress, and might be gracing the screens of Mac users soon.

For those who may not have heard of this OpenGL-based engine, Cube is an open-source Linux first person shooter game engine, currently distributed as freeware. Although not designed to compete with the latest offerings from id Software or to beat the visual lushness of the Unreal engine, Cube was originally conceived by van Oortmerssen in an effort to create a small, fast, yet visually interesting game engine:

(I wanted) the absolutely simplest engine structure I could get away with, to have some fun programming, and try out some ideas I had without getting bogged down in writing a complex (graphics) renderer.

Other interesting features built into the game code include "server-thin, client-fat" networking code, which maximizes available bandwith in multiplayer games by reducing the amount of information the main server has to manage. Also of note is the game's automatic detail level manager, which scales the texture's detail level depending on the speed of your processor and graphics card, resulting in consistant frames rates on even the slowest of machines.

Jeremy Bell, project co-ordinator for the University of Michigan's WolverineSoft gaming resource center, is currently heading the conversion project.

Stay tuned to IMG for more details on the status of this project as it develops. Thanks to IMG forum poster 4.pack for the heads up on this project.

Cube Web Page

IMG Forum: New Game Engine CUBE

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