after watching this project for years now (that is, passing by once every year or so), I decided I'll give it a try to contribute a little bit (to what I perceive as a very well designed game so far). At least, as far as RL allows it

Being a programmer I first tried to get to compile this thing. I've switched to Mac a few months ago, so I followed the instructions given on the wiki for Macs: got the new SDK for Mac you provided, did the svn-update and tried to build. Which gave me 120.000 errors or so. So I went to the forums and found in relevant postings there, that I should use Xcode4. Unfortunately, I'm on OSX 10.6, and trying to upgrade to Xcode4 via MAS wasn't possible due to the Xcode4 version delivered by MAS only working with Lion.
However, there seem to be people around here who are running Xcode4 on 10.6. So my questions now: Can you give me some hints how you did this, and how I can get Xcode 4 for 10.6? Or is there a way to get Xcode3 to compile FO? Upgrading to Lion is not an option at the moment (would break some software I need that requires Rosetta, which was dropped in Lion).
After my failed attempt to compile FO on my Mac I reactivated my old notebook (6 years old core duo, WinXP), and started over (again following instructions on the wiki): Downloaded and installed MCVC 2010 Express, downloaded the SDK for Windows, svn-update, build solution. This one went better - until I got fatal errors from the compiler complaining it ran out of heap space (and subsequently crashing). Tried the same on my Mac with WinXP running in a VM, same result. My old notebook has 2gb of ram, the VM on my Mac had 2.5gb (couldn't allocate more to the VM without crashing my Mac). Monitoring memory consumption revealed that while compiling certain modules memory consumption indeed went up to 2gb and more, until, well, you know...
Is there something obvious I'm missing? Am I doing something wrong? Or does compiling FO on Windows really require 4, 6, or even 8gb of ram?
Any hints/help would be appreciated...

Regards,
Vezzra