Nanosaur source port

This is a port of Nanosaur to modern operating systems (macOS, Windows, Linux).

You can download builds for macOS and Windows here: https://github.com/jorio/nanosaur/releases

How to build

To build the game yourself, please read BUILD.md.

About this port

Context

Nanosaur is a 1998 Macintosh game by Pangea Software. In it, you’re a cybernetic dinosaur from the future who’s sent back in time 20 minutes before a giant asteroid hits the Earth. And you get to shoot at T-Rexes with nukes.

Nanosaur was bundled with the original iMac and ran on Mac OS 8. It’s also notable for being a prominent showcase of QuickDraw 3D’s capabilities, which was Apple’s high-level 3D graphics API during the 90s.

In 1999, Pangea released Nanosaur’s source code to the public. This port is based on that release.

Port philosophy

I took a conservative approach to port the game, in a similar spirit to “Chocolate Doom”. I aimed to accurately maintain the behavior of the original game. The port has some minor quality-of-life improvements such as support for arbitrary resolutions. Modifications to the gameplay or presentation are out of the scope of this project.

To make it easier to port the game, I wrote an implementation of parts of the Macintosh Toolbox API, which I called “Pomme”. You can think of Pomme as a cross-platform reimagining of Carbon, albeit at a much smaller scope.

Known problems

The current renderer has performance issues when many partially-transparent objects are on screen (especially when playing in “Extreme” mode). With more time, I’d like to move the 3D code off Quesa and on to a modern renderer such as bgfx so we have more flexibility in the rendering, and to let us use other backends than OpenGL.