The Brad Hole

A recent commenter to this blog pointed out the sad truth - I have not been updating nearly as frequently as I'd like. Truth is, I've been really busy and it winds up on my "I should do something about that...later!" list.

The same commenter fired off some good questions, which I'll address now as a means of getting back on the horse.

--What game are you working on now?

Civilization 4. It's a beast. It's not often, but there are games where, while working on them, I think to myself, "it'll be a miracle if this ever runs on the Mac". I thought that about Sims 2, and I sometimes feel the same way about Civ4. It's a huge codebase with lots of interconnected parts. More problematic - and a personal gripe of mine - is the use of third-party libraries. Civ4 has probably set some kind of record in this regard: it uses Gamebryo 2.0, GFC 1.0, GameSpy (which is an umbrella of several minor libraries), FreeType, Python, Zlib (a more recent version than included with OSX), Bink, Miles 7.0 (no Mac version exists for this yet), Microsoft's XML library (including schema support, which Apple's XML doesn't do) and of course DirectX.

--Are the libraries to your satisfaction?

I guess I answered this above to a degree. One thing about being an Aspyr employee is that I'm forbidden about saying bad things about any company we do business with, including those that license third-party libraries. While Firaxis has been great with Civ4, I will say that some of the third-party libraries we've had to deal with have been a real pain. No names because I don't need to get fired. :-)

--Could there be a nice wrapper around directX so that games could be easier ported to Mac os X?

There already is. Aspyr has had such a beast for years and years, and it grows in size and capability with each game we port. It makes ports easier, but each game seems to abuse portions of the API we haven't fully implemented. Sometimes it's a minor thing, sometimes it's major. Sims 2, for example, used high-level DX shaders so we had to come up with a solution that was game-dependent since it's not practical to emulate HLSL on DirectX via OpenGL. We're having to implement the DX "Effects" API for Civ4, which is a little slice of hell in itself.

--Is gaming going to die once wine starts working on Mac os X?

Certain categories will be harder hit, I'm sure. WINE is not cutting-edge, so probably a lot of high-end (or recent) games will not work. Lower-end and older games will benefit the most, I'd say. Still, installing WINE is no day at the beach and running a game through an X11 terminal is not exactly a way to impress your friends.

--Will the Dark Forces source ever be released? Networking code for it? (I think there were rumors that said it was partially working.)

Beats me. I'd like to think so, but my gut feeling is never. I have never seen the DF code, so I don't know about networking. Outlaws used pretty much the same engine as Dark Forces, and they did an Outlaws "2.0" patch that not only had networking but offloaded the rendering to Direct3D. If I could ever get my hands on the Mac code, I'd be all over DF and/or Outlaws like white on rice. Doubly-so for Jedi Knight, of course. :-)