Cheating in online multiplayer games is rampant, and one solution to combat it is Even Balance Inc.’s PunkBuster technology. The company recently posted an online news update to advise users about their progress with Macintosh development of PunkBuster.
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PunkBuster software has seen wide deployment on Quake III Arena servers and servers for a couple of other games that use the same technology — Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix (published for the Mac by MacPlay) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (published by Aspyr Media).
There’s only one problem: To date, Mac versions of PunkBuster for Quake III Arena and Soldier of Fortune II aren’t available. That means that Mac gamers aren’t able to access PunkBuster-protected servers. This limits Mac gamers to a more limited selection of game servers and also exposes them to abuse at the hands of other players who exploit cheats.
Although Id Software Mac OS X maven Graeme Devine has updated recent Quake III Arena public test builds with the hooks needed to support PunkBuster, Even Balance has been slow to release the actual Mac version of PunkBuster itself. In a posting to Even Balance’s news page over the weekend, the PunkBuster developers reported on their efforts — efforts that will hopefully yield tangible results soon.
“Also, we would like to report that we have made good progress on the Mac builds for Q3A and [Soldier of Fortune II]. We expect to move into the testing phase early next week,” they said.