Civilization: Beyond Earth Mac And Linux Dev Update
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Aspyr Media has detailed in a new blog post their progress on the Mac & Linux Civilization: Beyond Earth ports.
The good news is that it's fully playable, but performance is an issue due to the new game using Directx 11 as opposed to their previous port using Directx 9.
See the full blog post here.
What more can we ask for? We have a great porting house bringing us some big name games, and they are being rather open during development.
Aspyr Media
The good news is that it's fully playable, but performance is an issue due to the new game using Directx 11 as opposed to their previous port using Directx 9.
QuoteCurrently 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.
See the full blog post here.
What more can we ask for? We have a great porting house bringing us some big name games, and they are being rather open during development.
Aspyr Media
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Full patch notes over there --->> CivV Steam v1.3.7 Patch Notes (10-27-14)
Linux fix #1 = Improved multimonitor support.
Awesome, Reinstalling now as that is what kept me from playing it before
On the other hand it kind of irks me they spent time to fix it for this game, but when I brought up a multi monitor issue with them about the Borderlands ports they basically said they wouldn't spend time trying to fix multi monitor issues with the games because it was a minority case
EDIT* HAHA, whoops! Pay no attention to me I got my games mixed up. In other Aspyr Civ news, CivV received a game update today
Why not just develop directly with OpenGL? What are the benefits of DirectX today? In the long run, it just causes more work for the devs (or third parties like Aspyr). Hopefully we'll be rid of it soon so we can have true multi-platform development, but until then Microsoft's "standards" will just be a hurdle towards progress, like IE was for web developers for many years.
Kudos to Aspyr though for keeping us up-to-date with things.
Well, posting about that here is very much preaching to the converted I am afraid, when it is Firaxis and the like that really needs to get the message there.
Yeah, sorry I was just venting my frustrations
I think in time, developers will get the idea. Old habits die hard.
OpenGL 4+ has pretty much all of DirectX11 covered iirc. It's a question of upgrading their OpenGL engine (which will probably require some R&D...)
Probably experience, tools and drivers are big reasons for that. DX12 will bring MS platforms even more near to each other. Porting games between Windows <-> XBox One will be even easier than now.
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?108072-Civilization-Beyond-Earth-Overcoming-Linux-GPU-Driver-Problems&p=448970#post448970
http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html
Wow, is that true? And I, in my layman ignorance, thought OpenGL was still years behind DirectX feature-wise. Nice to know.
So my earlier guess of "end of November" was too much optimistic. Mid-December at best, maybe? They did say "Holiday season" before.
So... was just going over the Aspyr "guess the secret game thread" and ran across this: