I've been working since the source code was released to try to get a native Mac/Linux version of Plasma running, and over the past year I've been poking a bit at porting the rendering pipeline to OpenGL with shaders.
It's slow progress, since I'm essentially the only one working on it (not just the OpenGL stuff, but also other cross-platform issues). It took me the better part of 11 months to get to this point, considering that I don't actually know OpenGL very well and I've only been able to spend a few hours a month on it.
The DirectX code in Uru is not using shaders, and is basically too old to support any of the new effects that people want to add. Getting it updated would basically involve rewriting most of the pipeline to be shader based (which is a pretty big change).
I'd rather do that shader conversion while also porting to OpenGL, so that we get Mac and Linux support at the same time - essentially for free.
Once the existing pipeline is fully ported, then discussion can start about what sort of things to add and how to add them and how to update existing content. Unfortunately at the current pace, it's going to be a long while. (Even longer for full native Mac/Linux since nobody is even looking at the netcode or PhysX replacements that need to happen)
Guild of Writers
(On the other hand, I seem to recall that using C++11 was a bit of a pain on Mac OS X 10.6. We’ll see.)
some of these improvements look fantastic, especially the book shot of realMyst. The problem I think that needs to be overcomed is that many of the textures in screenshots of Uru and Myst V are so dated and low res, graphical mods won't have the same effect unless they're combined with texture mods.
