Taps sound for Mac version of America's Army
It doesn't look like Mac gamers will be getting any future versions of America's Army, the free team-based first person shooter developed and sponsored by the U.S. Army. Confirming news posted in the America's Army forums (http://forum.americasarmy.com/viewtopic.php?t=213321), programmer Ryan Gordon said that he'll no longer work on the game.
At one time the Army did fund development of Mac OS X and Linux-native clients of the game, and paid Gordon to work on them. For some time, however, Gordon has supported them on his own.
"I'm now paid for just the Linux server. The Mac and Linux clients were cancelled several versions ago," said Gordon in a recent post to his blog (http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus).
Gordon explained that the Army withdrew funding of the Linux and Mac clients after GameSpy, a popular online game matching service, increased the cost of its licensing. GameSpy and other middleware developers have placed onerous licensing fees on game developers, and GameSpy's prices in particular have been cited as an issue for Mac game publishers, who cannot amortize a heavy licensing fee as broadly as their PC counterparts.
Gordon successfully replaced the GameSpy game matching code with an alternative back in March, 2005. Ultimately, however, he's decided that paying projects and other work is more important than this effort.
Gordon's experience with Mac conversions of Unreal Tournament has helped him with the project. America's Army uses the same game engine. Gordon has converted several other Unreal Tournament engine-based games to the Mac, including UT 2004 itself, Postal 2 and others.
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