Bringing Ultima Online To The Masses

Thanks to GameSpy for their section featuring extracts and articles centered around the previously Slashdot-mentioned new book, Dungeons And Dreamers, which discusses "the rise of computer game culture" through figures such as Ultima creator Richard Garriott. The feature includes a three part extract from the book, dealing with "the trials and tribulations Richard Garriott and his team at Origin underwent in order to bring Ultima Online to the masses." There's also an interview with the book's authors, as well as a chat with Garriott himself, in which he trails his new NCSoft-backed massively multiplayer title, Tabula Rasa, which he says "combines MMP with story-based scripted adventures for parties of players."

Comments

Re:hmmm

[PainKilleR-CE]

Active X used to big a big problem, since there was for some time no program to convert Active X controls to Mac, but that has also changed.

ActiveX? Never a big problem with porting games, since game developers rarely (if ever) used it. Maybe application developers had big problems there, though.

While I love the 3 month wait time from PC release to Mac release, since it both gives me a wait period to see if A) the game is good, and B) get rid of the huge amount of bugs Games always have since they are pushed through, the truth is that its not so hard anymore to compile for both platforms.

Considering how much Windows supplies with DirectX in terms of allowing developers easy access to the hardware for sound and input, as well as graphics (though many still use OpenGL, and probably always will, especially when they intend for the game to be cross-platform), it's not quite as easy as you make it out to be. In theory it should be easy for everyone to develop for multiple platforms, but in practice it all comes down to what each environment supplies for you, and how much time you're willing to spend abstracting your core code from the interfaces with the OS. If you design it from the ground up to be multi-platform you should be able to release on subsequent platforms with a fairly short port and test cycle (with the port process becoming shorter for each subsequent platform in many cases), but you can't just develop a game and then at the last minute decide to recompile for OS X, as it's a change of operating system and architectures which could cause any number of unforseen consequences when not planned from the start.

Re:hmmm

[PainKilleR-CE]

then explain the 3 to 6 month port times of games that where written for Wintel only by companies for the Mac, since most Mac games are not ported by the firm that created them (obviously some are built with the plans for them to be ported in the first place, Blizzard which has put out plenty of cross-platform games even subscibes to the multi-platform disk idea, which gives them major points in my mind) examples of this would be the huge number of games MacPlay ports over, many in 6 months or less with the longest being 9.

Any company that makes a good amount of money porting applications (or in this case games) to other platforms (in this case the Mac OS, in other cases to *nix) will have a set of tools that make porting easier, including searching code files for Windows-specific code (and replacing it in the cases where it's easy to automate, but at the least commenting it as such for ease in finding the offending code in text editors with find functions or in code editors with the functionality of highlighting specific comment types or even categorizing comments), having in-house libraries that replace or handle Windows-specific code for the given platform, and in general just having the experience from previous porting efforts. All of this is exactly why developers often outsource the porting process, because to do it in-house, despite the advantages of familiarity with the code base, would be much harder in many cases due to relative inexperience porting to the platform in question.

Obviously if its a good game, its going to get ported, so why not put the code in ahead of time so it doesnt cost you more later.

It depends on the trade-offs at hand and whether or not you actually expect there to be demand for a Mac port. If you believe from the start that the game might have a small user base or that there won't be demand from Mac or Linux users from the game, it might make sense to just go straight in with DirectX and never even think about the possibility of porting the game. The cost of using OpenGL and something like SDL may be higher for some development houses than using DirectX (though that's unlikely, unless your developers simply don't know SDL and OpenGL as well as DirectX), or performance tweaks may cost more on the other APIs (all of this from the design side, estimating costs rather than actual costs). But, in the end, it's always going to be easier for Mac developers to port the games than it is for Windows developers to have a cross-platform mindset. Additionally, it's even harder to convince corporations (rather than developers) that cross-platform means more sales when the market share and user base of the other platforms is estimated as being a very small percentage compared to Windows.