Visualise this! sat down and spoke with Dan Baker and Dennis Shirk from Firaxis. They talked about Civ V and how they used Intel GPA to make the game scale across all tiers of hardware. This was streamed live from GDC 2010 in San Francisco.
Questions
- 1. Civ IV was a popular game and considered “near perfect”, why make Civ V? What will it bring to the table that is new to its fans?
- 2. Tell us about the new features in Civ V.
- 3. We understand the Civ V team used GPA 3.0; how did you find this tool useful in your development cycle?
- 4. Can you explain the new Platform View in GPA 3.0, and tell us why developers should care about it?
- 5. What is the typical workflow for game developers using GPA to find and fix common issues?
- 6. What are the typical indicators you would see through GPA that point to a title being GPU bound? CPU bound?
- 7. How does GPA compare to other performance tuning tools (Pix, PerfHUD/Nexus and Intel® VTune™)?
- 8. What other Intel tools were used in Civ V, and how did they help?
- 9. How did GPA help you create a game that plays well on different tiers of systems?
- 10. How important would you say mobile game playability will be for Civ V?
Fredrik 'Grey Fox' Henriksson is an avid Civilization and StarCraft 2 player as well as a wannabe game designer. When he isn't playing games or working on mods he likes to paint digital art, watch tv-series, a movie or just hang with good company.