What the Texas happend to Westlake Interactive?

[BFG]

Ever since Glenda left Westlake and joined the boys and girls at Asypr things at westlake interactive seem to have gotten a lot quieter. woah hang on , yeah for those of u that didn't realise westlake are a texas based mac porting house.... they have done some of the best AAA game releases we've seen on the mac.

The question is, what the hell is going on with them? The site was last updated in June 2004, the project status page lists its updates from June 17th 2004

So what happened to Westlake did i miss something or have they gone to heaven leaving their website as a lasting memorial?

[Civrock]

Nothing really happened to them. They're still porting games, just Tropico 2 recently, but others publish them. Particularly Aspyr and MacSoft, but more by MacSoft now because Aspyr pretty much built their own development division (with some people from Westlake Interactive).

I don't know why they neglected their website so much, but they still exist and focus on porting games.

[BFG]

Ahh tropico 2 yeah that does ring a bell... and then again i guess we havn't really had many mac game releases recently that they could have ported!!

Aspyr are doing in house porting now?

[*DAMN Mauti]

Yes partly.

However where are the next big ports? Since Apple announced the Intel switch nothing really new exciting has been released and FtF unfortunaly doesn't receive any exciting updates in Gameplay or Multiplayer... It has some good ideas, but it seems abandoned.

Well also for PC no new exciting tactical shooter has seen the light of the day in the recent months...

[Civrock]

That's wrong, there have been several released and announcements on the Mac side, mainly non-FPS games but that's because of the big wave they had before. Another good new one is due, though, and Aspyr is going to announce a big new game on the Macworld SF in january... we'll see what it is. Speculations go from CoD 2, to BF 2, till Quake 4.

On the PC side there have been even more big games, especially shooters. CoD 2, F.E.A.R., Quake 4, QuakeWars, etc etc etc... and that's only the FPS area. Sure, no REAL tactical shooter, except CoD 2 maybe, but there will be. For example, GhR 3 is planned for early next year.

For both platforms we have AA. A great and realistic tactical shooter.

[*DAMN Mauti]

Well, nothing of interest for me right now. I want a new GhR or R6 like game with a HUGE Mac community around it and GameRanger support of course ;-)

As for AA - I can't stand off the 2-4min Punkbuster verifications. This really turns me away as well as the missing GameRanger support.

I really like Desert Combat - much more than AA, but with so less games being played on Mac side it doesn't make fun…

Bye,

Mauti

[BFG]

Mauti that 2-4 min punk-buster verification dosn't sound right -

i have problems with the account authorization sometimes which normally means doing the old 'reconnect' in the console command but i guess u get used to it.

Id like to know when exactly Colin McRay rally is going to appear  - im dying to get my hands on that one. but i've all but given up on the likes of BF2 CoD2 GhR3 and any other interesting AAA Titles

[BTs_GhostSniper]

As for AA - I can't stand off the 2-4min Punkbuster verifications. This really turns me away as well as the missing GameRanger support.

It usually just says it can take 2-4 min, but in general it normally takes less than a minute (sometimes only 15 seconds or so).  Now, also make sure you don't have the auto login button checked...it not only gives you horrible in-game frame rates, but it also makes the PunkBuster verification take FOREVER.

[*DAMN Mauti]

And here it really lasts this 2 - 4 mins, which is very annoying... May the servers I tried were slow or overloaded…

Good night,

Mauti
ps: I think the Intel transistion will bring us many interesting new games, at least in 1 - 2 years from now on…

[BFG]

thread has fallen from page one but it seemed relevent to add that my mission to find the evil doings behind the disapearance of westlake interactive have been realised... www.westlakeinteractive.com now forwards straight to the macsoft website

[BTs_Mysterio]

What the devils is MacSoft up to? They've done very little recently. Do we know if they will publish UE3 [UT2k7] or if Aspyr got the rights?

[BFG]

Dunno, i thought they had got UT2k7 but now im not so sure if i was confusing it with 2004. they have busy with things like RRTycoonIII and stuff i guess but that was a while ago now. i wish these guys would give us a little more idea of what they are doing on their websites - westlake did a nice job of their project status page, i loved guessing on those wacky project code names

[Civrock]

They're working on some AAA games which take quite long to port and therefore couldn't be announced at the MacWorld, one is planned to be announced in the first quarter of this year. It's most probably UT'07.

[BFG]

So are West-lake now working entirely or merged into the Macsoft guys? Macsoft doing UT07 makes sense (i can't see Aspyr doing it)

[Civrock]

Most of their guys switched to Aspyr a while ago to work in their new in-house team, I believe, the remaining ones seem to be employed by MacSoft only now, yep.

[BFG]

rgr, i guess the loss of glenda was the start of a bit of a death blow to em

[BTs_Mysterio]

Who does Ryan Gordon work for? He announced a long time ago he was porting the engine, so I assume he would be doing the UT game like he's done with the rest of them. Also, I saw when it was first announced that macs would get UE3 dev tools; is that still on the to do list?

[Civrock]

He works for Epic Interactive (which doesn't exist under this name anymore, though), but he's a freelancer for a lot of companies (US Army, Postal, etc). He's most probably gonna be involved, if he's not doing it by himself again, in UT '07 and everything about it (engine, developer tools, etc).

[BFG]

That guy is a coding god among gerbils... hmm that didn't quite sound right anyhoo

can't rember but is UT07 going to be running the UT3 engine? it is isn't it? given how many games are going to be wanting to use that engine i hope we get a first class port to show folk how good it can be!! (2007 to early for intel only games i wonder? my gut says these games will be the ones that say Intel only)

[Civrock]

Yes, it's going to be the first game using the UE3 engine.