Aspyr Announces Civ3 Complete & Civ4

[AlanH]

Hey! You're up early - it's not 6:00 am yet in Cal-i-forn-i-a

 

[irishlamma]

Hey! You're up early - it's not 6:00 am yet in Cal-i-forn-i-a

my dad teaches at my school so i have to get up at five

 

[JoAT]

This is fantastic news. I can't hardly wait. I will feel a bit funny putting Civ3 on my Xmas gift exchange list for the second year in a row, though.

I have a couple questions for Brad though:

1.) Re: minimum sys req's for C3C; I realize in looking at the PC versions of the expasions that the minimum requirements went up a little for each of the packs. I'm only running a 400MHz B&W G3 w/ the original Rage 128, which runs vanilla descently. Will it still be usable for C3C? (If you can tighten up the code enough to make it happen, I may drive to Arizona to kiss you.)

2.) And as soon as I saw the anouncement, my brain shot back to this (surpirsing) post that I remebered seeing a while ago. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=128303 What the heck was that about?

JoAT

 

[dojoboy]

2.) And as soon as I saw the anouncement, my brain shot back to this (surpirsing) post that I remebered seeing a while ago. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=128303 What the heck was that about?

A crumb. One measely, but beautiful, crumb. Just look at its textures, how it casts a shadow across the forum. :dojoboy lost in reflection:

 

[AlanH]

It certainly got a lot of us thinking From the announcement, it looks as if you decided to pony up with all three versions. Insanely magic

 

[JoAT]

@dojoboy and AlanH:

You two aren't going to break out in song or start reciting poetry are you?

 

[ChiefSparkY]

Absolutely fantastic news! I'm extremely pleased, particularly that Civ4 is going to come to us on the Mac It's also great that Brad is involved again, this time with Aspyr, so hopefully Mac Civving will be a great experience again. Thanks Brad/Aspyr, can't wait (but I will, I won't be going to the dark side to play it!)

 

[bio_hazard]

Very cool! I'm still waiting for my pre-order of the PC version of Civ4, but would much rather play on my Mac. I'll probably keep both though- you can never be too prepared! I'll have to see how I like Civ4- if its as good as its cracked up to be I may not bother getting CivIII Complete for mac.

My newer G4 laptop has these specs: 1gb ram +
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700:
Chipset Model: ATY,RV360M11
Type: Display
Bus: AGP
VRAM (Total): 64 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)

I'm assuming this will run ok?

I will probably not even bother trying to run it on my older G4. I have an 'ancient' first generation titanium g4 laptop with 384mb ram and whatever video card came when the titaniums were first released approx 4-5 years ago (its at home now so I can't check). Its got a tiny (10gb) hard drive, so I'd probably have to install it on a portable firewire drive.

 

[Brad Oliver]

Thanks Brad. Are all Radeon cards AGP-capable? That may be a stupid question, mine is listed as an ATI-AGP in the system profiler. I think?

No - there are Radeon PCI cards. The original Radeon shipped as a PCI expansion card you could buy in stores, and ATI recently introduced a Radeon 9200 PCI card as well. The rest of the Radeons are AGP, including the ones built into the motherboards (like the Mac mini). That's a small lie - the just-released Macs last week use PCIe, but that's even better than AGP and so would be just as good a choice. The original PCI though - not so good.

 

[Brad Oliver]

So my question is: does Civ 4 uses DirectPlay or Firaxis has done a good job of writting their own network module. Remember Civ2? The networking works between PCs and Macs.

The good news is that it doesn't use DirectPlay. The bad news is that it uses GameSpy's network toolkit, which is pretty expensive to license for the Mac. The good news is that we'll probably bite the bullet and license it. The bad news is that we probably won't be able to afford to license the in-game server browser though. The good news is that there will likely be a third-party solution to let you browse all the Civ4 games out there. The bad news is that I'm not sure.

 

[Brad Oliver]

1.) Re: minimum sys req's for C3C; I realize in looking at the PC versions of the expasions that the minimum requirements went up a little for each of the packs. I'm only running a 400MHz B&W G3 w/ the original Rage 128, which runs vanilla descently. Will it still be usable for C3C? (If you can tighten up the code enough to make it happen, I may drive to Arizona to kiss you.)

It shouldn't be too far off from MacSoft's Civ3 performance, but honestly since it's not final yet, I don't want to make any promises.

2.) And as soon as I saw the anouncement, my brain shot back to this (surpirsing) post that I remebered seeing a while ago. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=128303 What the heck was that about?

That's when I found out that we were negotiating for the license. We had to determine if we were going to port all 3 executables or just Conquests, which was capable of running scenarios and data from the first 2. I believe as of right now, we're going to focus on Conquests, throw in "Play the World" as an unsupported executable and forget about the original Civ3 executable, since most people have the MacSoft version and the 1.29 beta patch to fill that need. We definitely don't have time to QA all three apps to get this out in December, that's for sure.

 

[jeffelammar]

Congrats to all you MAC users. I'm really glad for you.

I grew up as an apple user (Apple II -> Mac) and about 6 years ago switched away because there were too many games that I wanted to play that I just could not get on the mac.

If the trend continues, I may even consider switching back...

Now if we can convince them to make a Linux version

 

[dojoboy]

...the 1.29 beta patch...

On a side note, the Civ3 tutorial is not supported in 1.29b2. I never caught it, and this may be why MacSoft never released the FC. Brad, I don't recall if you had 86'ed it. The message is along the lines of "tutorial does not support modified files."

 

[AlanH]

Also, while you're in there, I assume you'll make sure that foreign city names work OK? When we ran the GOTM mod with Viking names the accented characters came out garbled. Scandinavia is in PtW as a standard civ, so I hope the code page, or whatever it is, will be emulated properly.

 

[Padma]

Now if we can convince them to make a Linux version

Once it is ported to OS X, the hard part is done. We just need to convince someone to take it the rest of the way....

 

[Brad Oliver]

Once it is ported to OS X, the hard part is done.

Wow, absolutely not true unless you have a version of Linux that supports the OSX APIs (the Carbon framework in particular). OSX and Linux are similar in many regards, but the GUI and event model (which is the bulk of the porting work) is not among them.

 

[AlanH]

But "nobody buys Linux software". What's in it for Aspyr?

 

[Brad Oliver]

Also, while you're in there, I assume you'll make sure that foreign city names work OK? When we ran the GOTM mod with Viking names the accented characters came out garbled.

Yes, I believe this is already fixed.

 

[Brad Oliver]

On a side note, the Civ3 tutorial is not supported in 1.29b2. I never caught it, and this may be why MacSoft never released the FC. Brad, I don't recall if you had 86'ed it. The message is along the lines of "tutorial does not support modified files."

I think this is probably a case where I didn't use the right data files from the PC when I did the original 1.29 patch for MacSoft. It can possibly be fixed by using the proper civ3id.mb file from the PC. Maybe some adventurous soul can experiment.

I believe it works in the Aspyr version, but I haven't verified it.

 

[AlanH]

Yep! It works with the PC version of the vanilla civ3id.mb file.