MDK FAQ Hello. Now that MDK is out, we here at Shokwave are getting lots of questions from the folks that are playing it. This FAQ is an attempt to answer them all in one place.
First, it's important to know that we're just the programmers who ported the code from the PC to the Mac. We're not the publishers. We certainly don't speak for Shiny, PIE or Interplay. We'll try to answer any questions that folks have, but some questions can only be definitively answered by the publisher, PIE. Unfortunately, PIE seems not to know about MDK any longer; their website is apparently broken.
When are you guys going to do MDK2 for the Mac?
We aren't going to.
Shokwave is not the publisher of MDK. We contracted with the publisher to produce the Mac version of MDK.
Due to changes over the past several years, the principals of Shokwave have gone their separate ways. (We're all still friends, we're just doing different things.) So even if we were approached by the publisher to take a similar contract for MDK2, we would not have anyone available to do the work.
"I have wierd problems when I run it on my Mac, the video flickers in horrible ways and it's totally unplayable."
You need the 1.0.1 version, which fixes this. You can download this version for free from PIE (about 1 megabyte).
"Will MDK ever have network play?"
We don't know of any plans to add network play to MDK. It's not clear how it would work anyway. Multiple Kurts? Let someone control Bones? The game just wasn't created with network play in mind.
"I recently aqcuired MDK for the Mac. While I think it looks relly cool right now, I bet it would look cooler with acceleration for Power3D from Techworks. I was wondering if I could get some 3D Rave support for MDK, or if a patch is already in the works?"
We've been around and around about support for 3Dfx. You have to have a deep understanding of the technology to see why it's a tough problem. The main reasons for 3Dfx support are speed and nicer textures.
Right now the game runs pretty fast on modern Macs. On machines made in the last year or year and a half, it runs quite fast. The game is limited to 30 fps anyway, because it gets hard to control Kurt at higher speeds and some G3 Macs already stay at that limit a good deal of the time. Also, 3Dfx cards only go in PCI-bus Macs, so that limits the market to fairly recent Macs (it's a different story on the PC). Put all this together and the speed issue isn't compelling. Many users would get a noticable speed increase, but probably not enough to really affect their enjoyment of the game.
As for textures, the subject gets deeper. First of all, the game was designed BEFORE 3D cards were common. Because of this, the designers did several things to maximize performance and results and some of these are not very compatable with 3D hardware. For example, the game uses a flat background that is copied into the buffer before the 3D data is drawn on top of it. Most 3D cards can handle this (if by no other mechanism than creating a distant flat plane with the texture of the background), but not always gracefully or quickly (the data has to go over the bus, in any case). Also, the game uses 2D sprites (for stuff like blood splatters and text messages and Kurt himself) that are interleaved with the 3D data, but drawn differently. Again, most 3D hardware can cope with this, but not always gracefully. Even worse, the game runs in 256 colors (not optimal for 3D hardware) and it changes palettes quite often. This is really bad for at least some 3D hardware, palette switches can take upwards of 1 full millisecond on some 3D cards. The reflective surfaces you see later in the game are another example of an effect that runs poorly on 3D hardware (this took a good deal a specialized code to get working on the PC 3Dfx version).
Next, the artwork for the game is large. Few cards will allow textures as large as MDK uses (the largest, if memory serves, is 1200 pixels in one direction). MDK also uses textures that are not square, which some cards don't allow. The PC version of the game that was ported to 3D hardware actually uses smaller (less detailed) texture maps for this reason. Also, the textures are much larger than will fit on a 2 meg 3D card. This means that the textures must constantly be loaded onto and off of the cards (sometimes, they won't even fit on a 4 meg card, there's a lot of texture in this game). All that bus activity doesn't speed the game up any, that's for sure. A friend of mine who ported another game to the Mac reports that porting it to run on 3D cards slowed it down significantly because of just this problem. They had to reduce the size of the textures so they would fit on the card (thus they didn't look much better than the software version).
The artwork for the game is also optimized for the way it was written. Since they were doing their 3D rendering in software, they opted for simpler models and used texture complexity to make them look richer than they really are. The Grunts, for example (the generic robots always attacking you), have a flat chest, just one plane, two triangles. Onto that plane are mapped complex textures that make it look like a surface with more planes than it has. In this case, you can't really call it "texture", it's more like artwork applied to a model. This made the game run faster back when it was written. When these are run on 3D hardware, however, and the hardware anti-aliases the graphics and performs the various transforms, some of that detail is lost, at least at some distances. The cards are optimized for textures (which look better this way), not for what amounts to artwork mapped onto planes (which gets blurry and indistinct). This makes some of the graphics look worse in 3D hardware than they do in software (this according to the original programmers at Shiny). Of course, you can turn some of these features on and off on various cards, but it would vary by each individual texture and that just adds to the programming complexity and time.
In the end, it just doesn't make sense to us at Shokwave (and again, we don't speak for PIE or Interplay) to do all the work to make a 3D version that will a) only run a little faster or not at all faster on modern hardware and b) have some parts that don't look as good as the software rendered version.
Lastly, we talked to an engineer at one of the 3D hardware companies. He was chomping at the bit to port MDK to their hardware, he thought it would look awesome and he wanted his card to be done first. He told us, "from what I've seen I think we can do the port in a week and it will really show off the hardware". After we talked for an hour or so over the things the game did and how it worked, he said, "I take back everything I said, it will be a lot harder than I thought and I don't know if it would really show off our card very much". Since he's the one with the vested interest, it seems like a good data point.
We know everyone has these nice toys and they want to play with them, it's only natural. We just think they should lust for games that were designed for the hardware, not kludged into it.
"Based on what I have seen , Mac MDK looks pretty good. However, is there a chance (however small) of a demo for this game? Up in Canada, it's around $70, and I'd like to see what it's like before I buy it."
Well, there is a chance, but it's vanishingly small. Once again, we can't speak for the publishers, but we don't know of any plans to do one. MDK is a good-sized game (around 144mb) and squeezing enough of it to be any fun at all into a reasonable download is a tough job. The Mac market (sigh) may not be large enough to make the effort to create the demo pay off.
"I just bought an iMac, and I'm playing MDK. I can't figure out how to save a game in progress."
On the iMac-bundled MDK CD, right under the installer icon, there's a folder called "Manuals." Inside that folder are several different versions of the manual. Choose your favorite language (if you can read this, it might be English). To read and print it, you will need Adobe's Acrobat Reader, which comes pre-installed on the iMac.
To answer the question, the F2 key will save a game in progress.
"I've reached the submarine on level 4, but I seem to have reached a dead end. What's going on?"
"Level 5, Arena 8: middle (2nd ) "Airlift tower" no air, streamers go up but no lift."
Yes, there are two "fan bugs" in MDK. One right after you enter the submarine and another in the room with all of the fan pillars. In both cases, the fans don't have the "oomph" to push the player up high enough. These bugs are intermittant, they only happen a small fraction of the times the game is played.
There are two ways to get around these bugs. One is to back up to a previously saved game and play back to the place with the bug. The chances are that the bug will not reoccur. The other way around these is to download saved games.
Download the saved game for Level 4.
Download the saved game for Level 5.
(Not that anybody cares, but we did too good a job here--the same bug is in the Windows version of MDK.)
"I think I've figured out where the problem is..."
That was from Coilean mac Caiside, who determined that the only time you will see the "fan bug" is when you have previously saved the game on that level. If you play from the start of the level, the fan blows hard enough to "work."
Thanks for that...it's a pity nobody will ever look into fixing it.
I appreciate the download of saved Level 5, arena 9 as the fans on my mac based game didn't have the umph. After finishing that arena, I can't seem to make to level 6. Seem to get thrown out in the tunnel trip each time. Any chance you have a saved level at the beginning of level 6, after the tunnel trip.Now here's a funny thing...this problem has started cropping up all of a sudden (as of March 1999), probably because folks are just now getting past Level 5 in large numbers.
Download the saved game here.
Does Mac MDK support a joystick?
Unfortunately, no. Several folks have asked about support for Input Sprocket. This would take an upgrade, and currently there is no publisher interest in that (see next question).
If you can get your joystick to simulate mouse clicks, mouse movement, and key clicks, then it will work.
I would really like to buy MDK for Mac. Where do I go?
Now this is the really embarassing part. I don't know!
Shokwave developed MDK for Mac, but we're not licensed to sell it. Sorry.
As of early 1999, there doesn't seem to be any way of getting Mac MDK (and this hurts me more than it hurts you!). PIE seems to be denying all involvement.
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