Civilization: Beyond Earth Mac and Linux Dev Update #1

written by Russ Looney on October 27, 2014 in Development Diaries

Welcome to the first ever development update for the Mac and Linux versions of Civilization: Beyond Earth!

In these updates we’ll explore the latest progress made on both the Mac and Linux versions of Civilization: Beyond Earth so that you guys at home can follow along and be informed about what’s going on with this hotly-anticipated title. Our goal will be to post new updates each week until the game is released on all platforms, so be sure to check back weekly (or if you’re a GameAgent member, make sure you’re signed up for our Weekly Roundup newsletter, and you’ll get the latest updates right in your inbox).

These updates will be relatively short while providing status on the product’s development.

So without further ado, here’s what’s going on with Civilization: Beyond Earth!

Status

Currently our testers can perform full playthroughs of Civilization: Beyond Earth on both Mac and Linux, and we are able to test cross-platform multiplayer.

Our current focus is on improving performance. So far performance has been the biggest development hurdle as we’re facing an engine based on Direct X 11 vs. Direct X 9, which Civilization V was based on. This upgrade means lots of new driver issues and development hurdles for the team. This is also why our current preliminary system requirements are much higher than Civilization V or the Windows PC version of Beyond Earth. However, our development team is extremely good at what they do, and we expect to make significant strides in performance improvement over the next several weeks.

Bug Report

In a complex AAA game like Beyond Earth, there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of bugs that we work through from the beginning of the project until it finally makes it’s way to release. Below are some examples of bugs we’ve encountered and fixed in the last week on NVIDIA chip sets on OS X 10.10:

Graphical tearing

Another bug caused the graphics on water tiles to corrupt on machines using ATI graphics chips.

Both bugs have now been fixed, but this gives you an idea of what sorts of graphical issues are common in a project when converting a Direct X code base over to OpenGL.

That wraps up our first week of updates, but stay tuned for more in the coming weeks. And let us know in the comments what you want to read more about or if you have any questions! We might not be able to answer everything right away, but we’ll do our best to keep everyone informed about what’s going on!

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Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide Review Roundup

Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide Now Available Worldwide

Jim McPherson

Great idea for a series, guys!

Over in the CivFanatics forums, people are looking for answers to questions like “Why is Yosemite required?” (I’m guessing due to a specific OpenGL version or feature) and “If my video card is on the list of ‘unsupported’, does that mean it has no chance to run or just that tech support will be extremely limited?”
- Persi
  
  You nailed it, earlier versions of Mac OS X only had support for ancient OpenGL versions.
  
  Yosemite was the first to offer support for OpenGL 4.1, while still far from being the latest version (it was released in 2010 after all) it offers a feature set that’s roughly equivalent to Microsoft’s Direct X 11.
  
  In most cases hardware listed as unsupported won’t be able to run the game. In some specific cases unsupported hardware may be able to run the game but prevented from doing so be abuse of driver issues, users may be able to run the game on these systems by using Windows or Linux on their Mac, but sadly there will be no way of doing so on OS X without an update from Apple.
  - Jim McPherson
    
    Thanks. I found this interesting primarily because it suggests that the support for OpenGL in Mavericks and Yosemite is the same:
    
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5942
    - Alex
      
      It is the same! I’ll be pretty disappointed if the game works on Yosemite but not Mavericks, as they’re both definitely 4.1
      - Cmdr
        
        Think its more of an issue “Stated support” and “Actual support”
      - Alex
        
        with older GPUs, absolutely, but with OSX system hooks these days, I don’t know…
      - Cmdr
        
        Yeah but you need a working driver and software for it, something I don’t think older OSX system’s have. This is not the first time I hear from a developer about OpenGL and OSX.
        
        Will try to find a link about it, but think it was on some obscure developer forum or even IRC i was reading about it.
      - Alex
        
        Right, but Mavericks has OpenGL 4.1, same as Yosemite. I’m not expecting them to port it to Snow Leopard
      - Cmdr
        
        But does it actually work? IE if you runt a benchmark that test the OpenGL functions will it work correctly?
        
        AMD for instance say they have OpenGL 4.x on Linux but their ARB_texture_storage was broken for quite some time that caused troubles for the devs that worked on The Witcher 2 Game for Linux. Even though this extension is OpenGL 3.2
        
        My thought is that maybe they covered some 4.1 extensions and called it a day. I haven’t looked into it too deep but that is my guess at least on the matter.
      - Alex
        
        AMD’s closed Linux driver is a trainwreck and shouldn’t really be the basis for comparison with anything To the best of my understanding, OpenGL 4.1 support was reached in Mavericks and not changed at all in Yosemite.
      - Blair
        
        Again, it has nothing to do with OGL support in Yosemite vs Mavericks but rather some bugs that are currently blocking 10.9. We hope to work through them, but didnt want to promise something we arent 100% sure we can support at launch.
  - morgan cox
    
    It sounds like on Linux you will need Nvidia + the binary driver to play this game well.
- Blair
  
  Good to see you Jim
  
  To be clear, we went fairly conservative on specs. We hope to get them down but cant promise that. Also to be clear, our minimums are set to provide a level of performance that we can stand behind as gamers. It certainly doesnt mean the game wont launch (I’m looking at you HD4000 users) but it does mean the experience will be less than ideal in most cases.
  - Jim McPherson
    
    There’s one user in particular that’s concerned about his MBP with HD3000. That’s a “won’t launch” situation since OpenGL 4.1 isn’t supported, right?
    - Blair
      
      Yeah, no chance there unfortunately. BE is actually a fair bit more taxing that Civ V. For example, the texture maps used on the “Leaders” are beyond massive.
      - oakdragon
        
        That would be me, probably. Time to start saving up for a new Mac, I guess.
      - Jim McPherson
        
        Yep, you’re the one I was thinking of
        
        Obviously I don’t know your financial situation or what you use your Mac for besides games, but I’ll just go on record and say the game is gorgeous on my 2012 27″ iMac with 680MX on Ultra in Windows, and I’m expecting the same in OS X. (No pressure there, Aspyr.)
      - oakdragon
        
        It’s a shame there seems to be “no chance”, even though Firaxis claims to support the HD 3000 on PCs. I wonder why that is.
      - Jim McPherson
        
        No mystery about it. The game is written in DirectX 11 (Windows) and OpenGL up to 4.1 (OS X and Linux). Windows can speak DX11 to the HD 3000. OS X can’t speak OpenGL 4.1 to the HD 3000. Fundamentally it’s an Apple support issue.
      - oakdragon
        
        That’s too bad. One would think they could have options to disable the features that require 4.1.
      - Blair
        
        Part of this decision is a difference in policy as to what “supported” means as a publisher.
        
        To Aspyr, a supported chipset is one that we can firmly stand behind the experience as gamers. Putting the technical challenges of DX11 -> OGL aside, we as gamers dont feel the HD 3000 is a good experience. While this policy keeps our hardware requirements higher than most publisher’s and undoubtedly costs us revenue, we stand by this policy as gamers. We want you to have a good experience, its that simple.
- Blair
  
  We are woking on including 10.9 support, but there are several bugs that are out of our control preventing that at the moment. Has nothing to do with the OGL used (but great assumption)
  - Alex
    
    Aha, sorry, I didn’t see this when I responded to the OGL thread above. Thanks for clarifying, and I really hope you get there!
Jake Shapiro

Thanks so much for doing these! It kills me to have to wait for Beyond Earth while all my PC friends are already playing it, and reading updates like this makes the wait a bit easier.
Dellago

This is cool, nice article!
Renaud Lepage

Dev company being upfront on the development of a port from DirectX to FullNative.

I completely freaking approve.
Riell

Which OpenGL are you using?
- Blair
  
  That answer is actually really complicated. But to make a VERY long story short, OpenGL 3.1 up to 4.1 is being used.
  - Alex
    
    Ah, so that pretty much means nVidia is required, right? AMD’s closed source driver that supports 4.x+ is a trainwreck and I wouldn’t want you folks to have to develop against it, and the mesa stack, which is great nowadays, is still only up to 3.3 (though they’re reasonably close to 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2, it’s not clear when it’ll happen).
    - Jim McPherson
      
      There are AMD cards listed in minimum system requirements for both OS X and Linux.
  - Cmdr
    
    Sweet
    Would it be possible to see some 4.5 nuggets in future update of some sort seeing that allot focus was on getting performance there.
    - Jim McPherson
      
      Apple has to support it first. Considering that it took until 2013 to support the 2010 version of OpenGL, and in 2014 they didn’t add any new support, consider not holding your breath.
Mr.T.

I for one would like to know will antialiasing be supported on Linux?
- Blair
  
  Working on that. We will know more as we get a little closer. Right now performance isnt to a level where we can adequately test it with and without.
  - morgan cox
    
    I assume Linux + Nvidia + binary driver = good performance ?
    
    Cannot wait to play this on Linux!
    
    I have played the entire series of civ games starting from Civ1 on the Amiga 500…
ale2695

On the Linux side, it will be required a NVIDIA or AMD Radeon GPU I imagine… waiting for Mesa 11 and OpenGL 4.x support on Intel open source driver
Manja

Great to see an update about the GNU/Linux version. I’m realy happy to see more games coming to the best and the most liberal operating system. One more step closer to fully liberate myself from the Windows world. Keep up the great work!
MichalM.Mac

Great article! Next time don’t be afraid to go more into technical stuff (perhaps in form of sidenotes)
Pobrecito hablador

Great update. I’ve played civ5 on Linux with the open source Radeon driver. Does this post mean that we’d have to use the catalyst driver (which doesn’t support newer kernels/xorg servers for old cards)?
- Jason Boyd
  
  What card do you have?
  - Pobrecito hablador
    
    Amd HD 4970. It’s only supported by the legacy Catalyst driver. I think it’s a Direct X 10.1 card, though, not Direct X 11
Erich Hoover

Any chance you guys need more Linux testers? 😉
Kyle Thompson

Thanks for all your hard work. You guys are really pushing the envelope!
Eric L Beyer

Will your work on this engine potentially redound to facilitating ports of other windows games to mac and linux?
Will

You guys are the best! You should port all other mac games lol
Games like SimCity or The Sims 3 run like crap on my mac even though more graphic intensive games like Bioshock Infinite or Borderlands 2 (both ported by Aspyr) run super smooth.
Andrew

Since you ported Civ V to OpenGL and are now porting Beyond Earth, would it not make sense to also use OpenGL for the Windows version? Seems like it would save on a lot of work and allow same day release across all platforms.
- Kyle Thompson
  
  Aspyr is not the same company as Firaxis. They are operating “downstream” from Firaxis (so to speak) so they have no control over which platform Firaxis uses. In fact Firaxis did make Beyond Earth compatible with Mantle, but unfortunately AMD support on Linux is garbage.
- Jim McPherson
  
  Blizzard is an interesting case study on this. They have (or had, when I played) both OpenGL and DirectX options in Windows, and of course OpenGL was used in OS X, in World of Warcraft. Simply due to hardware optimizations the DX still performed better in Windows, so they couldn’t justify going all OpenGL, all the time. It’s been a few years since I’ve looked into that in particular so perhaps the support has changed – but I doubt it.
  
  I’m actually expecting a bit more fracturing in the environment – if AMD’s Mantle picks up any steam, and Apple halts progress on OpenGL and instead brings Metal to OS X, then developers are going to have multiple moving targets to try to hit.
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oakdragon

Are there plans to make a Mac demo at some point? (Not any time soon, I know.)
- Russ Looney
  
  Very unlikely. That’s essentially dev time that we feel could be better spent on finishing the full game (or on other awesome future projects).
devicer

A question for BE devs.
Since it seems you have taken the road of multi-platform support (finally, I say), why you insist developing in DirectX and then port it to OpenGL? Would not it be easier to design in OpenGL from the start? Which of the following is the reason?

1. DirectX is technically superior to OpenGL (so, it will have less features)
2. DirectX is technically easier to develop with (so, it makes sense to quick release the DirectX version and with part of the money coming from Windows user base sustain development of OpenGL version)
3. developers are simply more used to developing for DirectX than OpenGL (but they are technically on par)

Thanks for supporting Linux.
- Jim McPherson
  
  This would be a great question to ask, say, Blizzard. Unfortunately it doesn’t work at all for Beyond Earth, because it’s two different game studios. First, Firaxis develops the Windows version using whatever technology they think will give them to best performance in Windows (in this case, DX11 and Mantle). Then, Aspyr takes the code and ports it to OpenGL to make it work in OS X and Linux. Firaxis really has no interest in making things better, easier, or faster on non-Windows systems, because there’s no financial gain in it for them. 2K (the publisher) & Firaxis get the Windows sales, Aspyr gets the OS X & Linux sales, and Aspyr pays what I believe is a fixed licensing cost to 2K for the porting rights.
Mateusz Bartłomiej Gołdak

But that is only addon to CIV5, nothing else and more than CIV5
kris

Can you tell us something about plans regarding patches in the future? Are you going to begin porting the patches from the windows game before they are finally released for windows, and how long will a patch approximately take to patch? when Civ:BE is released from your side, do you expect it to be up to date with the Windows version?
- Jim McPherson
  
  Given their relationship with 2K & Firaxis, it’s safe to assume the same situation as we had in Civ V – Windows patches will launch when they’ve been tested and signed off on Windows, then Firaxis will send Aspyr the code to port the patch. So the game will be out of sync for anywhere between a couple weeks and a couple months at a time.
  
  There’s a lot of obvious bugs in the Windows version, so even if Aspyr launches in sync I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t stay that way for long.
- Russ Looney
  
  Yeah, Jim’s pretty spot on. We’ll always do our best to push for simultaneous updates (including at launch), but unfortunately that’s just not always a reality. Especially in the early months of a release where updates might be coming hard and fast. Sometimes it’s just more important for Firaxis/2K to release a game-fixing update immediately rather than wait on implementation/testing on other platforms.
Rob Galloway

So, how do I become a ‘tester’. I game exclusively on a decked out Macbook Pro (2012-Hi-Res, non Retina). I’d love to ‘apply’. Thanks for this welcome web series. -R
- Jim McPherson
  
  Yeah, I wouldn’t mind lending some of my 680MX iMac time to help them test, but they probably have one of mine in the office already
J G

Preordered the Mac version. Literally have played months of Civ 5 according to Steam. Can’t Wait! If you need more Mac testers I volunteer!
Cristian Beroiza

I just bought the Linux version. Many thanks for all of this work Aspyr guys. greetings from Chile.
Oskar Tegby

Your work is much appreciated.
JB

Please Devs, add a simple setting to play in “Strategic View” (CivV) so low end Macs and players just in it for the gameplay can play the game.
Malcatraz

Thanks for doing this! I was really mad at you guys for the delay, but now I realize the important work you’re doing and that I was being unreasonable.
Zegalles

Now waiting for digital river to support payments from click&buy. Have already 2 failed attempts. Both charged to my bank.
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Anthony

What about the new iMac retina Radeon card? Are you testing?
Renting

I pre-ordered the game just because I think these dev blogs are cool.

I have one question: You mention in one of the blogs that the revenue for the Windows games goes to Fireaxis, and the revenue for the Mac games goes to Aspyr, how does that work for something like Civ V, where in Steam I bough it for both Windows and Mac? (I think, I have it on both)
- Russ Looney
  
  Civ V is a Steam Play title, meaning that if you purchased it on one platform, you get it on all supported Steam platforms for free (so you wouldn’t have to purchase a Windows version and Mac version separately). When buying directly from Steam, the platform you’re using when you purchase it basically determines how the sale is attributed. For instance, if you buy the game on Windows PC, then it’s a Windows PC sale and goes to the Windows PC publisher, and if you buy it while on a Mac, it’s a Mac sale and goes to the Mac publisher.
  
  There’s a slight caveat in how this works, and that is the platform you play it on the most in the first week following your purchase. So if you buy it while using Windows, but then play exclusively on the Mac for the first week after purchase, it will be re-credited as a Mac sale. If you don’t play at all during the first week post-purchase, then the sale stays with the platform you purchased it on, regardless of which platform you play it on moving forward.
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