: Yeah, but shouldn't an OS that's not much more than a year old still be
: viable? What happens when 10.3 is released? Will AO suddenly no longer
: support 10.2? One shouldn't be required to always have the newest version
: of an OS.
It depends on the technology used by the game. For instance, OS 10.2 fixed a few bugs in its OpenGL implementation and added all sorts of new OGL extensions (commands), especially those which allow advanced features of high-end graphics cards to be used. If one of these extensions provides functionality that is crucial to the game, then it's impossible to make the game to run on anything less than 10.2.
However, if the game doesn't require the latest technology to be playable, it should probably be written to support 10.1 as well, and just disable any features not supported by the OS; there's no sense limiting the game's audience for features that are not strictly necessary to the game itself. As far as I know, A1 Carbon doesn't even use any 10.2 specific features; the issue is with the compiler not generating a package usable under 10.1. If someone were to compile the code using the version of ProjectBuilder included with the 10.1 developer tools, everything would probably work fine. (That being said, I haven't even been able to compile it on 10.2...)
: BTW: Will you guys (I'm assuming you're in the dev group) implement
: GameRanger support for OA? A chat line for internet play?
I'm not in the dev group (my programming skills aren't at the point where I can read through the Marathon 2 source without getting a headache), but I think that would be their long-term goal; it would probably require all of the networking code to be rewritten to deal with latency, cheat protection, etc., but once the core networking code is updated, adding chat functionality and GameRanger support probably wouldn't be all that difficult.
