The Omni Group will showcase their latest ported Mac OS X games next week at Apple’s World Wide Developers conference in San Jose, CA. The company will be showing Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2, as well as the public debuts of Oni and Star Trek Voyager Elite Force on Mac OS X in the Apple Gaming Pavilion.
The founders of The Omni Group — Wil Shipley, Ken Case, and Tim Wood — have been developing games and applications for NeXTstep, a predecessor (of sorts) of the next generation operating system since 1989. This experience and expertise has brought The Omni Group lot of attention from game developers eager to make the jump into Mac OS X games arena, according to company spokesperson Manny Chao.
“Mac OS X will be the best platform for games, and we’ve got the most talented and experienced engineers for porting games to Mac OS X,” Shipley said. “Successful projects for Omni include Doom II, Quake II, Oni, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2, Star Trek Voyager Elite Force, and Quake III Arena. We’re finding even with the tiny amount of time we have to port games, we get better frame rates for every game we port on high-end hardware. The sound latency is lower and the graphics are faster.”
The Omni Group also develops Mac OS X applications including OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner. OmniWeb is a Web browser for Mac OS X. OmniGraffle, written in native Cocoa and makes full use of Mac OS X’s Aqua interface The app is great for making make diagrams, org charts, layouts, flow charts, or any other graphic presentations of relationships and labeled parts. OmniOutliner is a tool for outlining and organizing thoughts, tasks, project components, etc.