The Cube Festival starts today in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, just South of Paris, France. Featuring The Endless Forest, among many other media art projects. The festival runs until 8 June.
There is Yet Another Windows Virtualization software. This time one that does NOT require you to install windows on the machine AT ALL! I tried CrossOver a year or so ago but found it lacked any 3d acceleration or DirectX emulation, but now they have a new product available.
CrossOver Games is a fancy, 3d optimized, re-packaging of Wine software emulation. Thus it works for both Mac and Linux to emulate an environment compatible with many PC video games. Read more about this on Joystiq, thats where I first heard of it.
Anyway, my tests with getting The Endless Forest up and running with it were mixed. The GOOD: It does a really fantastic job of running the game! It speeds along at over 30 FPS on my MacBook Pro. Since it doesn’t require a real Windows installation I had it installed and was playing in a matter of minutes. CrossOver Games is alot less expensive than VMWARE or Parallels and since you aren’t buying windows either its a good emulation solution. The BAD: I couldn’t get a network connection :( which of course renders the multiplayer experience of TEF unusable. I don’t know if the connection problem with TEF is just a problem with my network or my computer though, so if you try it then let me know what your experience was.
On the upside… It runs Guild Wars flawlessly. So maybe that is some consolation.
I tried out the public Beta of VMWARE Fusion 2.0 because they boast it has “experimental support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D acceleration” (meaning it actually uses the video card, allowing one to play some 3d games!) I was hoping that it would allow me to run The Endless Forest on the Mac, and it does!
Okay, before we all get excited, this is still in the realm of exotic setups. VMWARE is a software that allows you to install Windows (or use a Boot Camp partition) without having to restart your computer. So you _still_ need to have Windows. Also, even on the MacBook Pro which runs TEF like a dream in Boot Camp, in VMWARE I’m getting 7-9 FPS for TEF. This is… not good. Then again, this is a beta of VMWARE maybe the final version will get the frame rate up? It _could happen… right?
Anyway, for you Mac using, dual Booting, tinkerers out there who are curious about TEF, I encourage you to give it a try and let us know how you fare!
We had been testing the new Endless Forest community website for a few months already. Lots of players had found their way to it. And it’s becoming a really fun place with great artworks and stories created by the community.
So we decided to just give up our perfectionism and open the site as it is, in its beta state.
Have a look:
http://EndlessForest.org
Only players of The Endless Forest can log in and post. But most of the content can be viewed by anyone.
More than 25,000 players have named their deer in The Endless Forest, out of almost 200,000 downloads of the client. Welcome, little fawns!
