GENERAL
How hard was it to port your respective games from the PC to the Mac platform?
It wasn't too bad. There was more x86 assembly in SMAC than I would have liked, and that involved a fair amount of work. The code was also pretty tightly bound to Win32, so I had to do a lot of work to get that going. Once both those hurdles were met, it was pretty smooth going.

Based on your experience and personal opinion, is it easier to develop games for the Mac or the PC? From that, do you believe it is easier to port from PC to Mac, Mac to PC, or neither?
It's easiest to develop for both at the same time. It forces you to structure your code much better, one build will catch errors that'll never crop up (or be hard to reproduce) on the other, the list goes on. In the end, you'll have a much more stable product, you'll save yourself a lot of work in bugfixes, and you'll make porting the game to future platforms a trivial exercise.

Why do you think so many gaming companies give priority to developing titles where the platform that gets the greatest consideration is the PC?
Money. Most companies go where they can maximize profits. Although a Mac game will almost always turn a profit, people want to turn a larger profit on the PC due to the larger marketshare. Let me explain what I mean when I say that a Mac game will almost always turn a profit: typically, games which tank on the PC never make it to the Mac, which means that the ones that do make the cut are already guaranteed best-sellers.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND / THE GAME
What is your background in working on the Civilization series? What is your personal history of playing Civilization games? :)
This is my first encounter with any Civ-type games from a development standpoint.

I bought the original Civ for the Mac back in the day. I recall at the time the PC version had chunky graphics while the Mac version looked very nice - we all put in many hours on both in the computer lab. The Windows port of Civ came out a few months later, and that brought things back to parity, graphics-wise.

In making the functions of the Mac port compatible with its PC counterpart, was this a major consideration of the team? How difficult was it ? In the case of SMAC, what was the outcome?
Yes, it was a fairly major consideration. In the case of SMAC, we knew from the outset that we'd never have Mac-to-PC network games because the PC version uses the nasty, proprietary Microsoft DirectPlay. Given that, it was important to at least have cross-platform PBEM games and save-game files. It was a lot of work, code-wise, to pull that off since a _ton_ of data needed byte-swapping, but in the end it works.

Is there ever going to be a time that games that will not need a patch from "Day One"?
I seriously doubt it, unless that game has a massive beta test with hundreds of testers. There's just too many hardware combos out there. In addition, there's always someone who will do something that you'd never anticipate during the design cycle that breaks the game in some manner. It's nearly impossible to catch all those cases, especially as the game grows in complexity.

What is the possibility/feasibility of a port of CivIII and/or CTP2, or is it too early to tell?
It's probably too early to tell. Possible deal-stoppers would be if they were written in tons of assembly language or there was some sort of licensing snafu that prevented portions of the code from being ported.

OTHER / DOWN THE ROAD
If an expansion pack for PC 'originating' game that was then ported to the Mac is released, what is the likelihood that the add-on would also come to the Mac platform? In other words, what are the consideration factors that result in a decision one way or the other?
The estimated ability of the expansion to turn a profit, given the sales of the originating game is probably the largest factor. Second to that would be the ease in converting the expansion. If it's a minimal amount of work, then you could probably recoup your investment in the port fairly quickly.

Is there a market for Mac games today? What does the future hold for Mac games?
Certainly. All those iMac users need to play something ;-)

Mac users as a whole are quite loyal to their platform and the people that write stuff for the Mac. If you bring a game to the Mac and press the flesh with the users in the newsgroups and on the forums - really listen to them - you'll do fantastic, word of mouth will spread, and all will be well. Bungie started out on the Mac this way, and ditto for Myst and SimCity - look what they've led to. That's pretty much all you need to know to do well in the Mac market. :-)

With your experience in porting PC games to the Mac in mind, do you believe it has been a worthwhile experience?
Yes, it's been quite a learning experience. It's always fun when other people let you play in their toybox for a little while, and that's what working on SMAC was like. Even though I've never spoken to Sid or Brian, they make cool stuff. :-)

Given the opportunity, would you work on another Civilization project, porting or otherwise?
Definitely! Aside from the obvious reasons, I prefer the genre in general to something like a flight sim or a sports sim. In that respect, I feel very lucky that I managed to work on SMAC since it's a type of game that I enjoy playing, and I think that it is reflected in the quality of the Mac version.

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