What are the major differences between working on Civ IV and Civ V?
The most notable difference has been incorporating SteamWorks for networking and matchmaking into the game which replaces GameSpy. SteamWorks offers many features including games saved to the SteamCloud, matchmaking, PC-to-Mac play and multiplayer servers. Users will need to download the Steam client and create a Steam account; this will allow users game authentication, auto-updating, achievements, potential downloadable content support and more. As this is our first SteamWorks enabled Mac title this has been a learning experience, but the net result for the end user is a more integrated PC-to-Mac experience. Civilization V on the PC was a significant rewrite of Civilization IV. The GameBryo rendering engine and ScaleForm UI engine were replaced with all new Firaxis code, the Python scripting was replaced with Lua, Fork and Granny middleware were integrated, D3D Effects was replaced with a new Firaxis system, etc. Much of our experience porting Civilization IV Mac has been of little us
