Civ4 Demo for Mac Now Available

[AlanH]

He does turn up at publicity events as well. I believe he was in on a tour with Soren that took in London recently.

 

[Minmaster]

well sid has nothing really to do with the port of civ to mac. the performance issues and the like are more of the porting house's fault, since this is a mac only problem.

 

[AlanH]

Not entirely true. The issues with performance hit the PC world before we got them. For a turn-based strategy game this puppy needs a heck of a lot of display hardware, in a Mac or in a PC, and many, many PCs were found wanting. The fundamental decision to use a high-powered 3D graphics engine like Gamebryo was made by Firaxis. Aspyr had to pick up the pieces and try to make them work on the Mac.

 

[5150]

Are you saying that you don't believe that the port could have been better done?

 

[AlanH]

Please don't put words into my keyboard! The post that provoked this sequence of responses said:

Sid Meier used to have a policy of releasing games that run on virtually all hardware. He has now released a game that is totally unplayable on a professional machine that was still being sold when the game (PC) went on sale.

That applied to PCs before it applied to Macs.

I have no doubt that more optimisation could be done on the Mac port, but what do you mean by "better"? There's always a trade-off between getting it better and getting it out the door. Better can mean able to work on more Macs, or available earlier. Generally you can't have both at the same time.

I've no idea how far up the curve of diminishing returns the current version goes, but I'm sure it won't have reached 100% of achievable performance.

 

[Beamup]

For that matter, no game ever has reached 100% of achievable performance. Precisely because of the diminishing returns Alan mentioned.

 

[5150]

I was thinking more in terms of quality than performance.

 

[AlanH]

I agree, that's another dimension, and I think we've already seen a little of Brad's thinking on that issue. I still don't understand how the beta testers missed all those first release problems.

 

[5150]

I'm wondering if there was an outside test group at all. That issue seems to have persisted to the demo, which isn't encouraging. I know Brad personally has limited hardware on which to check things, but one would think that there'd be a QA/QC department that would actually do the testing.

I had been invited to be part of some of the previous Civ beta cycles, but didn't see a thing anywhere about such a program for Civ 4. NDA usually keep most people from blabbing, but they rarely keep everyone from even acknowledging that there's a testing group.

 

[5150]

Just a quick follow up thought here. It's discouraging to see the lack of communication between Firaxis and Aspyr. If I remember right, Brad wasn't even aware that there was a PC demo available until someone here informed him of it, which is why the Mac demo was so late in coming.