Mac Gaming Piracy

[Insane]

Originally posted by FlameFlash
The company that was going to port CivIII was just too lazy to do so.

You can't blame the porting company. It's not their fault. It's the original developers...

If the original PC developers choose to use Microsoft's DirectX networking layer [DirectPlay] (which they inevitably do because it's the fastest way to get networking support into their product) the porting company is stuck.

Microsoft has no interest in supporting DirectPlay on the Mac (no money in it for them). And most developers have no interest in writing a networking layer (to paraphrase Barbie... "[good] networking is hard").

Basically, unless the original developer either a) has their own networking library, or b) intends the game to be cross platform from the start, it's not likely to be doable at a later date.

[FlameFlash]

Also true... however all I want is PBEM, and I kind of doubt that's also DirectX.

[Insane]

No, the only real trick to PBEM is keeping the save game format unchanged.

This means you probably have to do some byte swapping every time you read and write the save file. So you pay a minor performance penalty, but you get better compatibility.

[FlameFlash]

And thusly, my beef.

Hotseat/PBEM is what would benefit me the most, and seeing CivIII port scrapped due to IP multiplayer is just a cheap cop-out as far as I'm concerned. If they didn't want to put in the extra work for the DirectX conversion, so be it, but the loss of the expansions totally really is felt hard.

[Gatekeeper]

Well, at least we finally got all the patches (thru 1.29) for vanilla Civ III. Heh. Just trying to find a silver lining here. If I remember right, that last patch was a major one, too, altering some gameplay aspects.

Let's see ... the game shipped with 1.17 already incorporated, 1.21 is an official downloadable patch and 1.29 is, what, a beta downloadable available at CivFanatics?

Gatekeeper