Date for Universal Binary for Civ 3 Complete?

SethB

Chieftain
Joined
Jan 25, 2006
Messages
3
Has anyone seen a date for when Aspyr will be shipping a Universal Binary for Civ 3 Complete? My new Intel iMac just arrived, and I'd much rather play natively than through Rosetta...
 
As of the last time Brad Oliver commented on it, he thought it would work well enough in Rosetta that a Universal Binary wouldn't be necessary. But at that time he hadn't been able to test it on the new machines yet.

If you've tried it, and it doesn't work adequately, let him know (actually, he'll almost certainly read this thread). Details of performance would be preferred, I expect.

For that matter, I have a new iMac showing up next week, so I'd like to know. Is this just a "I'd rather be native on general principles," or is it "it doesn't perform well enough under Rosetta," or is it "it doesn't work at all under Rosetta?"
 
But at that time he hadn't been able to test it on the new machines yet.
That would be surprisng. Aspyr has had Intel Developer Kit machines for months, and they all shipped with Rosetta. I suspect they have a good idea what Rosetta can do for games compiled for PPC, and will have made their Civ3 Complete project decisions based on that.
 
AlanH said:
That would be surprisng. Aspyr has had Intel Developer Kit machines for months, and they all shipped with Rosetta. I suspect they have a good idea what Rosetta can do for games compiled for PPC, and will have made their Civ3 Complete project decisions based on that.
See this post.

It appears he's specifically referring to not having tested it on the new iMacs yet. I expect you're right and it's been tried on the dev boxes, but as of the 10th Brad hadn't "tried it yet on the new Macs."
 
You're right, I misread your comment. Of course Brad has to warn that he hasn't tried it, but I guess I'm a born optimist. I find it difficult to believe that Rosetta will be running slower on a new production iMac than it was on a PC shipped over six months ago.
 
Well, playable is a highly subjective term, isn't there a guy here who plays on his Quadra? :)

I just loaded it up for about 5 minutes, and it's playable, but I'd MUCH rather play on my 12" PowerBook 1.33Ghz G4 than on this brand new iMac, I'd estimate it to be at least twice as fast. The game is fairly responsive while playing, but selecing routes for units is a bit laggy, and map scrolling is very chunky, and that was with a brand new game. I'd hate to see how the end-game is going to perform later.

I have the 17" iMac Core Duo, with only 512MB RAM, and my additional GB hasn't arrived yet, but I'll be sure to post more when it does. I guess I was just naively hoping for a Universal Binary, since I just bought the game two weeks ago for $45, and it's already obsolete!. :sad:

Brad, if you want me to try anything, or load up a save file, just let me know. I'm not going to gripe about this, as, when I think about it, the bulk of the porting was probably done in something other than XCode, and generating a UB would probably be more work than the C3C project was, so I can understand the desire to move on to Civ 4.

It's not a huge deal for me, as I've got my PowerBook, and I tend to play Civ 3 mostly when I'm stuck somewhere with time to kill. (If only I didn't have to lug that damned DVD with me, I just know I'm going to break/scratch it to death in my laptop bag, or leave it on a table somewhere). I also have a fast PC downstairs that I use for gaming, with Civ 4 on it. This iMac is mostly my wife's machine, but I was just going through the apps that are on here to update what I can. At least World of Warcraft will have their Universal Binary patch out in the next week or so. :) Now if I can only get work to buy me a MacBook Pro later this summer when Civ 4 ships...
 
SethB said:
The game is fairly responsive while playing, but selecing routes for units is a bit laggy, and map scrolling is very chunky, and that was with a brand new game. I have the 17" iMac Core Duo, with only 512MB RAM

I have a 17' iMac Core Duo with 1Gb RAM. CivIII is working very well for me, even with a large map at an advanced age and many units active in the game. I have no problems with even long movement routes. I love the color of the iMac flat panel display! There are some screen resolution settings that have a problem with scrolling when the cursor is at the edge of the game map image. The 1024x768 setting scrolles very fast. Also, the 1.29b2 update is needed.
 
Back
Top Bottom