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.