Apocalpyse Weekend 7 mod for OS X Postal 2:Share the Pain

February 8, 2006 by Santaduck.

Today a stranger IM’d me with the charming yet creative online handle of Satan’s Beer Can. It didn’t surprise me that he then proceeded to ask me about Postal. Specifically he was trying to get the good Mr. Kamek Magikoopa’s mod AW7 to work. Now AW7 is a mod for Apocalypse Weekend, the bug-ridden (sry RWS) single player expansion to Postal 2: Share the Pain– I think Kamek has added new animations, weapons, and maps, as well as removing the constraint of a linear story line. Sounds like even more political incorrectness served up hot and toasty. The problem is no one seemed to be able to get it working in OS X. A few people had posted about it in our forums at Macologist about a month ago, but I hadn’t had the time to take a look. The first thing to do was look at the windows .bat launcher. Basically it just launches the postal game with the switch -ini=PostalAW7.ini. Sounds easy enough. Of course the default PostalAW7.ini uses D3DDrv as the render device, and WinDrv as the viewport manager, so I changed these to OpenGLDrv and SDLDrv from my Mac INIs. What results is the game boots up into a small square room with the bubbly texture-missing textures. Boo. The INI just didn’t make sense. No where did it specify the path to the Apocalypse Weekend folder, which is where all the AW7 content gets installed– no wonder it can’t find a texture, or even a menu. But neither does the retail AW’s INI file, so I was missing something. I took a look at Ryan Gordon’s launcher that he wrote for retail AW. Nicely he left an uncompiled .c version, (which includes instructions on how to compile it w/gcc in its comments!), which revealed the commandline in its true glory, which is different probably because the compartmentalization of OS X .app bundles as well as some bugginess in the implementation of the unreal engine switches. Long story short, this commandline worked. Now I’ll clean up the INI file as well as the default.INI file (which presumably is used to generated the AW7 ini from the stock AW ini), and write up an launcher. Maybe I’ll even compile one with gcc instead of using Applescript, which is kind of clunky anyways.

BTW on that note I’ve been doing a lot of Applescript yesterday. I’m making some big improvements to the UT2004 benchmarking application by adding some features to really improve the options. No, I haven’t made a convenient radio-button version yet, you’ll have to do with stock Applescript dialog boxes still, but you’ll love what I’ve got up here for you. Thanks in advance to Ryan Gordon, as well as PetterF and Rogue for help suggesting fixes and doing the legwork on how to implement the options. I’ll write up an equivalent version with the new options for the UT2004 Demo benchmarker as well, and pack it up as a new Santaduck Toolpak version 3. No, the dropinstaller will not be fixed yet– it doesn’t install .upl or .ucl files, which usually isn’t a problem with most packages, but I’d like to address that some day, since some packages like the Community Bonus Packs use these filetypes.

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