I'm all for Mac editors for other 3D engines, and Marathon stuff in them. You know, there IS a Mac editor for the original Quake called Quiver; its 20 bucks shareware. And there's apparently something that can convert Q1 files to Q3. But I haven't looked into it much.
: It's much worse than that. The starting point is machine code and the first
: step is converting it to assembly language. Assembly language is basically
: just a translation of machine code into elementary CPU instructions such
: as 'move X to register 45' and 'add Y to register 45'. Not particularly
: helpful. Compiled code looks nothing like the original source code, which
: is usually written in a higher language such as C or C++. A single line of
: source code can potentially generate hundreds of lines of assembler code.
: Worse yet, compilers may use a variety of different strategies to achieve
: the same result, and vice versa, such that there is no one-to-one
: relationship between source code and compiled code. Reverse engineering
: literally involves poring over thousands upon thousands of lines of
: assembler code looking for patterns and trying to figure out exactly what
: is being done, why it is being done and then to write a series of lines of
: source code that might have resulted in said compiler output. It is
: much, much easier to start from scratch given that we know what the
: desired effect should be.
: Believe me, no one would like to see a carbon version of Forge completed -
: Pfhorge or otherwise, but I've been saying for a while now that a more
: fruitful approach would be two-pronged - Mac-compatible versions of level
: editors for a more modern engine such as Q3, and a tool for importing
: existing Marathon files into files that could be used with that engine
: (both for Mac and PC). Once that is done, there would be no need to work
: on improving the code for a decade-old game engine. 3D rendering is an
: order of magnitude more difficult problem than level editing. Look at
: Pfhorte - it was developed nearly overnight.
