Glenda Adams worked at Aspyr for almost seven years as the Director of Development, responsible for leading our Mac game development studio and making our lives easier by providing guidance into all things technical.  She is a rare breed of person who can make technology understandable and accessible for those of us who aren’t technically minded. Before her employment with Aspyr, she was President of Westlake Interactive, the development house responsible for many-a-Mac-port such as Tomb Raider II Mac, The Sims Mac and many others.  Not only did Glenda manage the work on these games, she also took part in the actual code-writing as well! Glenda has participated in bringing great games to the Mac for over 20 years and now uses that expertise to bring great apps to iOS.  Glenda left Aspyr in May of 2009 to pursue development for the iPhone and to run her company Maverick Software.  Some of her hits include Cupcakes, the long-running #1 seller in the iTunes Kids Game category; More Toast!, the first of her More Foods apps to make a big splash; and More Cowbell, an App that launched on the iTunes store in its early days which helped us all enjoy Don’t Fear the Reaper in a whole new way. We at Aspyr and GameAgent are still great friends with Glenda and are huge fans her work, so we wanted to check in with her “on the record” so we could share some of her great insight with our community.  

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We recently sat down with the development team at Aspyr Media to ask some questions about their experience  working on the newest strategy game for the Mac, Sid Meier’s Civilization V.  In this first installment of a multi-part series, we take a quick look at the differences between Sid Meier’s Civilization IV Mac and Sid Meier’s Civilization V Mac.  We also look into some of the bigger development hurdles the Aspyr team has faced in working on Civilization V for the Mac.

Have some questions of your own for our development team?  Send them our way and we’ll answer them in upcoming DevDiary!  You can leave a comment below, post a message on our Facebook wall, or send your questions via Twitter to @Civ5Mac.

What are the major differences between working on Civ IV and Civ V?

The most notable difference has been incorporating SteamWorks for networking and matchmaking into the game which replaces GameSpy.  SteamWorks offers many features including games saved to the SteamCloud, matchmaking, PC-to-Mac play and multiplayer servers.  Users will need to download the Steam client and create a Steam account; this will allow users game authentication, auto-updating, achievements, potential downloadable content support and more.  As this is our first SteamWorks enabled Mac title this has been a learning experience, but the net result for the end user is a more integrated PC-to-Mac experience.

Civilization V on the PC was a significant rewrite of Civilization IV.  The GameBryo rendering engine and ScaleForm UI engine were replaced with all new Firaxis code, the Python scripting was replaced with Lua, Fork and Granny middleware were integrated, D3D Effects was replaced with a new Firaxis system, etc.  Much of our experience porting Civilization IV Mac has been of little use predicting issues that we will encounter with this port.

Additionally, RapidXML middleware is used for parsing XML assets, replacing the MSXML-based code in Civilization IV Mac.  This has helped in avoiding the significant challenges we encountered simulating MSXML in Civ 4.  Fonts are supported directly in the Firaxis renderer using their own XML-based font format, which again has helped in avoiding the difficulties with font metrics that we encountered with Civ 4.

This has been a completely unique experience from our Civilization IV Mac porting experience with a new set of challenges, but in the end it’s turning out to be a great Mac game which we hope our Mac users will enjoy immensely.

What have been the biggest development hurdles in making this game?

In addition to the fact that working on Civ 5 has been nothing like working on Civ 4?  (Kidding…)  Perhaps the biggest challenge in developing Civilization V Mac is simply the timeline.   We’ve been working very hard to get the game available for holiday so folks can enjoy playing this holiday season.

Sid Meier’s Civilization IV Mac is one of the best selling Mac games ever, created by Aspyr and sold here at GameAgent amongst other fine Apple retailers.  In fact, the recent promotion we had that featured Civilization IV and its expansions was so popular, we were taking back orders by the second day!  To follow up, we wanted to ask a member of the Aspyr team, John Butler, about his experiences porting the game over to the Mac platform.  In this exclusive DevDiary, John talks about the challenges of porting a game like Civilization IV over to the Mac, including one bug near the end of development that almost stopped the project cold!  Check out how he dealt with these issues after the jump…

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Many times when we port a game to the PC or Mac, we have very limited contact with the original developer.  Sometimes that’s even part of the contract — we get a small number of support calls we can make and that’s it.   (more…)

When bringing many games to the Mac, we go through a porting process which involves taking the source code for another platform such as the PC or Xbox and manipulating it so that can run on the (more…)