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It also helps that The Omni Group got involved with Mac OS X before most people even knew what it was. They did a lot of the hard work back in 1999, when they managed to port id Software’s Quake II to Mac OS X Server, which was never intended to run games.
Says Wood: “Our focus then was to find the areas that Mac OS X Server was lacking and work with Apple to get those things nailed for X, so that the first release would be very usable for games, and in fact it is.
“I think the major challenges to game development have been overcome,” he adds.
Useful and Fun
The Omni Group’s mission statement is to “make software that is useful and fun.” While their primary focus is on Mac OS X applications, Shipley feels that the statement also applies to picking the right games to port to Mac OS X.
“I think a useful game is one where it keeps your mind engaged,” he explains, “and after playing it for a couple hours you are excited and thinking instead of feeling guilty for having wasted part of your life.
“The most recent game I felt was useful and fun was Oni,” he continues. “I simply could not stop playing that game. I’ve played it through completely twice now.”
Hot Cocoa
While currently incredibly busy porting existing games to Mac OS X, what does Shipley think about original development in Cocoa, which is Mac OS X’s native programming language?
“Cocoa is an amazing environment for all kinds of programming,” he says, “and we’ll finally be writing our own games over the next couple years.
“What you’ll find is the games we write will be attempts to do something truly different,” he continues. “For instance, it’s always bothered me that there have been, at my rough count, about 200 different airplane flight simulators written over the years, but nobody has ever written even a single dragon flight simulator.
“And how come there are no first-person shooters where you can walk up walls or on the ceiling with special boots? How come there aren’t any games where, when someone shoots you, time slows down like in The Matrix, and you try to dodge the bullets as they fly at you leaving cool little trails?”
Better Software
So, don’t be surprised if you see an amazing, and original, game published by The Omni Group for Mac OS X sometime in the future. And while the company doesn’t employ a lot of people right now, Shipley doesn’t expect to have to swell the payroll just to create a game.
“We strongly feel that software could be a lot better, if only it didn’t take a huge company to write an app,” he says. “Cocoa makes that possible, and I think we’ve demonstrated that.
“Cocoa lets us compete.”
Counter-clockwise from right: Elite Force,
Heavy Metal, and Oni.
Heavy Metal, and Oni.
How do the guys at The Omni Group know so much about Mac OS X gaming? Let’s give you an eye-opening example: they knew how good the operating system was for games when they created an online massively multiplayer dungeon game called Omni for NeXTstep while in college in 1989. (Don’t forget that most people hadn’t heard of online massively multiplayer games back then either.) NeXTstep eventually became the foundation for Mac OS X, and Shipley, Wood and Case adopted the name of that unfinished game for their new company and followed the evolution of the new operating system every step of the way. For several years they did contract work in NeXTstep — one of their first clients was the Los Angeles talent agency William Morris — while playing around with games on the side. |
A lot of their early game porting experience ties into their association with id Software and the days of DOOM and DOOM II, the games that put the company and John Carmack — one of its co-founders — on the gaming map. Says Wood: “We would complain to him and report bugs and say ‘Oh, DOOM doesn’t work on this machine,’ and eventually he got tired of it and sent us the code.” Adds Shipley: “It was literally like, ‘Fine, you want it, here’s the code, you port it [to NeXTStep].’” Now, of course, DOOM III is on the way from id Software as a Mac OS X-only title, and Shipley thinks the game “looks like a return to what was Carmack’s best moment, which was DOOM II. The demo I saw put the gut-level fear back into gaming.” DOOM III will take full advantage of the new NVIDIA GeForce 3 graphics card, and Shipley says he can’t wait for it to come out so that he has an excuse to upgrade his Power Mac G4 to one of the new 733 MHz models. In the meantime, he’s still trying to figure out a way to use his first choice for a company name — “Frungi,” after the sport in the game Star Control II — somewhere at Omni, perhaps as a subsidiary. |
Lest you come away thinking that The Omni Group is just interested in games, we should mention that they’ve already made a name for themselves with several Mac OS X applications, including the web browser OmniWeb, Adobe PDF viewer OmniPDF, and OmniDiskSweeper, which removes large, unneeded files from your hard drive. To find out more about the products they’ve created for Mac OS X, visit their products page. |
Want to know more about the fun-loving folks at The Omni Group? Check out their “Our People” page for lots of fun information about them.
| StarTrek Voyager: Elite Force: Feature | |
Oni: Mac OS X Patch and Feature | |
