i know LFS is a PC program. but there are some aspects I'd like to see ported to the Macintosh. The CMX viewer is one of them. I use photoshop on the mac to make skins then I have to transfer them onto my PC to test them. but most days I can't becuase my PC is a laptop and it takes too much time to bring out and set up. So why not port the CMX viewer to the Macintosh. As Jeremy Clarkson says "How hard can it be"?

Yeah I'd like just the CMX viewer to be ported to Mac. Would help. I've used it using CrossOver for Mac, to run PC programs CMX Viewer being the main one. Having a CMX Viewer native app would be great.

Quote from Zachary Zoomy :

As Jeremy Clarkson says "How hard can it be"?

Harder than you think.

I assume the viewer uses the same renderer as the actual game, so Scawen would have to port the entire thing to OpenGL for starters, and I'm sure there's a lot of other Windows specific stuff in there too. Not really worth it to please a couple of mac users, unless it's done as part of a move to port the whole thing (highly unlikely). It's especially pointless if it can already run in a WIN32/DX8 wrapper like Wine.

Alternate solution, setup a networking filesystem on your windows box, something that you can mount from osx. ('man mountftp' or 'man mount_ftp' might give hints). Then, save your skins in osx onto the networked drive, voila, no fiddling with moving files around.

CMX viewer works great in linux (under wine) too

Quote from sweetreid :

CMX viewer works great in linux (under wine) too

And supposedly LFS iteslf runs under Bootcamp (and Cedega for those of the Linux pursasion) pefectly well.

Photoshop CS3 Extended comes with ability to load 3D models, you can edit the textures directly and see the result on the 3D model. If someone exports the cmx models in a format compatible with photoshop I guess you could use that. The lighting would not be correct though.

I use a Mac, solely run LFS under Bootcamp after I restart WinXP native using my Mac. But since all my graphics and all my other programs are on the Mac Drive (Have a 400 gig drive just for WinXP, and 500 gig, 2 400 gig for Mac) so to use CMX I had to get the Trial of CrossOver to run WinXP App's under OSX. It works except it being a trial and only lasting 30 days. And with the version of CrossOver I was using it wouldn't let me resize the CMX viewer window, if I tried the window goes totally black and I have to restart the CMX viewer.

Have you tried Darwine?

Anyway... As a Linux user I feel your pain, but surely you understand that we're hardly a part of the majority of LFS users and thus making huge changes to the core of LFS just for us is a little unreasonable?

Quote from neglouseight :

And with the version of CrossOver I was using it wouldn't let me resize the CMX viewer window, if I tried the window goes totally black and I have to restart the CMX viewer.

I get that same behaviour under the linux/wine combo. If you manage to get the window back to the same dimensions that it started, the graphics come back.

The screen button works better for changing resolution.

Would be very useful for skinning, though TBH it needent be the LFS viewer/shading, anything that can display and reload textures for the models would do the job the actual LFS lighting is a minor thing getting everything lined up and the basic shapes right is what's really tricky. I can't believe that no one has made a 3D object viewer exactly for this purpose OsX (although I've never found one).

Quote from duke_toaster :

And supposedly LFS iteslf runs under Bootcamp (and Cedega for those of the Linux pursasion) pefectly well.

Obviously LFS will run in bootcamp, because Boot Camp is simply changing some system files to allow the mac to find and use a .mbr record to boot Windows XP or Vista.

Cedega/Crossover/Wine does run LFS ok, but shadows cause large bugs, other than that it works perfectly.

the thing is my mac isn't a intel powed one. its a Power Mac G5. power PC chip. so I can't run any PC program on it. I know it might not be easy to port to mac but i figured why not. and while your at it why not update the CMX viewer. I have a feeling this won't be done anytime soon.

You could try Virtual PC. It wouldn't allow you to play LFS (unless you enjoy one frame per second ) but the skins viewer would probably work well enough.

Quote from Zachary Zoomy :

the thing is my mac isn't a intel powed one. its a Power Mac G5. power PC chip. so I can't run any PC program on it. I know it might not be easy to port to mac but i figured why not. and while your at it why not update the CMX viewer. I have a feeling this won't be done anytime soon.

how hard CAN it be to re-port an app to a completely different architexture/OS/graphics thingy?

I don't really know but it took 3 years to port Total Imersive Racing to mac. Colin Mcrae 2005 is still being ported my feral interactive.

Hmmm. I think I could do it, i've done lots with CMX but i've never done 3D on a Mac, but I dont see why I couldn't. I reckon I could produce something that lets you check how your skins look.

The question is how many Mac users would consider a token fee for my trouble if I did?

Depends on the tokens? Does this mean kissing feet? I'm not above that. lol

In all honesty I probably wouldn't pay for a cmx viewer type program.

I would if it was like CMX in some way, CrossOver cost $30 dollars I'm using the trial but I am only using it for CMX View (Trial is free but only last 30 days, and won't let me resize the window)

Becky, I know that if I did skin, I would for sure use it.

Well i've got an untextured LFS car model into an openGL engine so far , doing the UI is going to be the fiddly bit because i've no Mac at home at the minute - which makes most of what I can do to it guesswork until I can sneak in a cheaky compilation from my pen drive whilst at work.

I figure i'll do this for Linux aswell. Afterall if i'm coding for a computer I dont have, why not go the whole hog and code for one i've never had. I expect some User Interface ugliness initially whilst I sort all that out.

Atm my 3D engine is a bit crude, it's my first time with OpenGL, so lighting and environment mapping is going to be a bit simple to start with.

This'd be a lot easier with a Mac

It's taken since the last post but I finaly got textures to work, this should work in Mac & Linux too. I'm now going to start on the user interface.

Becky if you need a beta Mac tester I can do it. I have both MacPro (Intel) and G5 PowerMac's sitting on my Desk.

I'm happy to test things as well

Oh i'm not ready for testing yet, I just spent the last few hours tracking down a bug deap inside the 3D engine. So i've still not even started the UI - and I cant compile on Mac until Monday when i'm back at work anyway. I might be able to throw the PC version out this weekend for some testing. Linux will come later as I dont have a machine to compile on yet and know very little about it - it just theoretically works (I need to find a linux distro with bcc 3.3 on CD as you cant make an alias from bcc 4.0 unless it's installed to a writeable drive and my compiler is insisting 3.3 is what it wants to use).

EDIT: I'm now moving my hack and slash code over to strict compilation too, so it'll be a while yet !