That's always great news to see ports or development for other platforms take place. If games were made multi-platform to begin with I don't think MSoft would be king of the gaming OS. The only reason I own MS products is because of gaming and that is it. I have always felt bad for people having to use emulation software to play a game that was never going to come to their platform.

Hopefully with the whole open source craze starting to catch on with people that the industry will start to conform, more OpenGL 🙂

Scratt, c'mon it's ok to indulge yourself every once in a while. You work 20hrs a day so I'm sure you can fit in 1-3 hrs of X3TC 🙂

20hrs is about right.. and then I dream about it.

Don't tempt me though... I have been known to go on benders with X Series games.. and not be heard from again for quite some time. 🙂

We will of course check it out in a professional capacity, but I may need to have a grown up supervise my erm.. "research" sessions!

You see what you made me go and do! I bought it!

Now if only Deliver2Mac could actually offer descent download speeds I might actually get to try it. So far I've used 4 out of 11 "download tickets" and each time the download has dropped out at about 300MB into a 6.5GB download! At the same time I managed to download 2 iPhone SDKs (totalling almost 6GB) in just under 4 hours from Apple - for free!

Ah well, what this does mean is it's not interfering with coding at the moment... apart from the odd sideways glance at a tiny little blue section of a seemingly unending, and depressingly empty, progress bar...

But seriously, if anyone out there is considering getting this: Buy it in a box if you can. 6.5GB shouldn't really be an issue to pull down from descent servers these days. Unfortunately Deliver2Mac don't get that some of us in Asia and other parts of the world have constantly shifting IP addresses and DSL connections that are not stable across a few days so it's not really fair to offer ticket limited, non-resumable, non-segmented downloads at 20k/sec for massive files! And they wonder why people torrent stuff! Why can't these companies embrace legal torrent usage for downloads?!?!?

/rant over

Ugh. This is very frustrating.

Absolutely avoid Deliver2Mac like the plague.

They give you 11 download attempts, and with good reason. Their server throttles the download connection to you after about 10 - 15 minutes and then will drop the connection at some random interval later..

We have now used all of our download tickets and not managed to get a copy of X3.

We have tried contacting Deliver2Mac via Twitter and their own contact form, and that was during business hours yesterday as well as today.. and not a single reply from them.

Ah well.. I'll have to find a boxed copy somewhere...

I feel sorry that such a great game is marred by an awful distribution network.

Lots of lessons to learn there for any company dealing in digital downloads.

Sorry to here that Scratt. They shouldn't count a successful download unless you actually have attained the full download. That's a shoddy business model if you ask me. Maybe you can contact Egosoft and see if you can work something out or get a copy right from them. I don't know how many times a polite well crafted letter/email will do great things 🙂

That company should also provide a hard copy of the game just incase peoples connections or theirs is crap. I never use download services personally unless it is from the developers. But I have to admit Steam and Direct2Drive are pretty good services.

I have been in touch with the company and they did reset my download attempts.

What I did then was pull it across the "backbone" to my own server.. To do that we had to install GNOME and FireFox on our server, and then use that as a remote computer.. But it did (eventually) let me pull the 7GB down in about 5 minutes - It did take a couple of attempts though, which is crazy when you think that is a server to server connection!!

After that I FTPd it over to our office. Needless to say our server supports resumable downloads amongst other things. 🙂

Deliver2Mac are "looking into it" but say their server provider in the US denies there is any problem... Oh well.

Many people have been reporting numerous errors and problems with X3TC mac port. Can't say I've found one. Glad to be playing X3 on my Macbook (White unibody) It is the absolute lowest settings, but could probably be run at around medium with 4g of ram. (Mine only has two, just ordered some.) Havn't found any major glitches yet. My only complaint is that the mods are impossible. Scripts work, but seem to cause a huge amount of problems. Also, 1024x768 seems to make the game screen itself smaller while 1024x680 (600?) works fine. Not sure what the deal is. Its also not possible to fn -f11 (Or in window's terms Alt-tab) back to the desktop.

Anyway, just a small report on my newest space addiction. Ive played X3TC before, but didn't stick with it. However, I'm having a blast on my most recent playthrough.

If anyone has any questions. Feel free to PM. The company that did the port doesn't answer forum questions. (you have to submit a ticket.) and the egosoft site doesn't really support the Mac version.

Also, download speed. I just let it run all night using Firefox. The server has an appalling download rate, but with a stable internet I think its doable. Also, I found I had 50 download attempts, so that may be new.

Interesting. It's was definitely only 5 or 10 download attempts when I got it.

Good to see they have acknowledged the problem, and come up with an "accommodation", if not a direct fix.

I never heard back from them about their investigations.

As for playing it. Haven't had much time with our own project, and my joystick doesn't seem to be compatible - which was a bit of a bummer. And strange as it worked with all previous X games. So I guess I need to ask for some "real world time" from the team so I can go joystick shopping. *sigh*

🙂