Civilization 5 great engineer Pc#
Civilization 5 great engineer series#

Further, each smaller discipline-such as concept artists, modelers, animators, and the like-shared offices. From the start, the whole team sat on the same side of the building to increase ease of access to all teammates. One of the new tactics we employed on this project was the co-location of our entire project team. As with any new engine, there were issues that needed correcting once we released the game into the wild, and our venders were there with us, constantly updating their drivers, and continuing to make the end-user experience better with each iteration. ThatвЂ™s not to say there werenвЂ™t problems. This was instrumental in minimizing hardware compatibility issues when we launched. Both nVidia and ATI made sure that we had enough video cards for the entire team so we could test on both older and newer hardware in-house, and most importantly, both gave us access to their amazing compatibility labs. nVidia sent an engineer to work directly with us to implement its 3D solution, as well as help us optimize for the hardware.ATI not only helped us with optimization, but also provided us with cutting-edge AMD systems for testing.

Civilization 5 great engineer series#

Intel brought an engineer on-site to assist our graphics team with optimization for the new Core series of processors, and provided us with Sandy Bridge hardware. You can test on 500 different combinations of hardware, but once you release the game to millions of fans, your careful testing has a tendency to go out the window.ДЄTI, Intel, and nVidia were all instrumental in making sure this risk was minimized.

Civilization 5 great engineer Pc#

As many of you may already know, PC development is tricky, to say the least.

Broad testing across many different hardware platforms was something we had identified as a risk early on. In January of 2009, our engineering team was still hard at work creating a completely new engine, including a custom renderer, for Civilization V. Once we had everything back together in the new engine, we already had a game that had been refined for almost two years in its Civilization IV incubator. In the end, we were able to run gameplay with both engines for a few months as the swap took place, which ensured as seamless a transition as possible. We needed to keep a very clear interface between gameplay and the engine so that we could do a quick swap of engines without having to halt development on either side. Our solution was to enable a parallel development track for gameplay using the existing Civilization IV engine as the graphics component. Given our schedule, this plan meant that our new engine wouldnвЂ™t come online until 18 months before release-far too late for us to start testing these gameplay ideas. We were going to need to create an entirely new graphics engine to take advantage of features we wanted to use from Direct X 11. Two of our major goals for the project were to support ambitious new gameplay changes (one unit per tile, hexes, and so forth), and to elevate our target for the visuals.

WHAT WENT RIGHT 1) CLEAR BOUNDARY BETWEEN GAMEPLAY AND ENGINE. ItвЂ™s been a long road from prototype to final product, and as the vision was implemented, the challenges of delivering new concepts built on a new engine started to present themselves-but never in the places we expected them. We were setting out to create a completely new Civ experience, which got the team excited to bring the design to life. On the art side, the team was challenged to create a completely believable world, and to produce leader scenes composed of fully fleshed-out characters greeting players in their native languages. The entire engineering team had the opportunity to create something unique, built from the ground up for Civilization V. On the engineering side, the excitement surrounding the creation of a new engine to accommodate these systems had an amazing effect. Some of the more exciting features proposed at the time included sweeping changes like one unit per tile, hexes, complex full-screen leader environments, and a new scale involving more units onscreen than we've ever displayed before in a Civilization game. Almost four years ago, John Shafer laid out his vision for the next iteration of Sid Meier's Civilization to our prototype team (which consisted of Jon, seven artists, and the ubermoddable Civilization IV engine).