Civilization Comes to Steam

Gamespot reports that yet another publisher has joined the ever-growing stable of Steam fans. 2K games is working to bring some of their games to the service, with Civilization III and IV coming to Steam this week, and other titles to follow. From the article: "Also included will be the high-seas adventure Sid Meier's Pirates! and the alternate-history real-time strategy game Shattered Union ... According to a statement released today by Valve, Steam currently has some 10 million customers for both its 'core' products--which include advanced shooters such as Half-Life 2--and casual games, such as PopCap Games' Bejeweled and Zuma. "

Does anyone know

[overshoot]

how these play on Wine and variants?

I like the Civ games, but I'm not about to buy blind.

Re:Steam questions

[Goose42]

Once the game has been downloaded to your machine, it is possible to force Steam into an "offline" mode which won't hit up servers for anything (updates, verification, etc). So, if the Steam service disappears, you will still be able to play your games. As well, you can back up the Steam installer and the game data to CDs/DVDs, so if the service disappears you can load the games back from your own personal backups.

Re:Steam questions

[Dr. Eggman]

Well, The Steam Review [steamreview.org] has a blog/report on the closing of Triton; an online games distribution system that once hosted Prey.

The closing of Triton is a lesson on how not to shut down DD systems. While I fully support Steam and buy all my valve products through it, it is always important to know what could happen. We can only hope Valve takes up Triton's lesson and prepares fail safes. As of now, Valve has tested and says they are prepared to allow bypassing the authentication servers should their service be offline for an extended time. This is a good first step in preparations, but it is still a small step.

You are fully allowed to backup all steam games to disk; it even provides you with a function to do so with minimal work.

In my personal opinion, Digital purchasing of Steam games is just as safe as physical purchases, easier, and (in some cases) cheaper. The real arguement is what if Steam's gone for good and that'll affect all the Steam games equally.

Re:Does anyone know

[Clever7Devil]

Civ 4 does not work in Wine, to my dismay.
Not as if grinding my Hunter to 60 leaves any time for Civ 4...

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=2514 [winehq.org]

Re:Old PC Games

[Bluesman]

There's no such thing as giving Civ III a "whirl."

You can start a game in the afternoon. You'll be "just finishing up this turn" when the sun comes up the next morning, and you haven't slept at all. You've been warned.

So what

[alnjmshntr]

I can't understand why releasing a game on Steam is news. These games have been available for online purchase and download from other sites for ages. Direct2Drive.com for example (my favourite) has many top games for sale and their prices go down pretty quickly after release. And you get to download an actual setup file which you can backup to a dvd.

Re:Old PC Games

[damiangerous]

This is all well and good, but what I'd really like to see on Steam is the "ancient school" games that used to run on Win95/DOS running under Windows XP and available $5-$10 a pop.

What you want is Gametap [gametap.com]. They don't have System Shock, but they have a lot of old DOS games (including LucasArts adventures).

Re:High prices

[Odin_Tiger]

I realize that my case is so unusual as to be negligible and so it doesn't really justify it, but...I live 100 miles from Wal Mart (or any other place that would carry these games), so driving to get it, having it shipped next day air, or downloading it for $30 are my options for getting it quickly, and honestly the download would probably be the best balance of time and money. As it happens, I already own (and don't really like) Civ III, so I won't be getting either, though.

The problem is

[Sycraft-fu]

That it is generally a non-trivial amount of work to update the game to run on modern systems. I mean the way you dealt with things in the DOS was was just totally different from now. For graphics most games would do something along the lines of directly write information to the VGA card's registers then call an interrupt to switch it to a non-directly supported mode (320x240 with multiple buffers was popular, called Mode X often). You'd then directly write to the off-screen video RAM and flip the page when you were ready to display.

Ok so there's just no such thing now in Windows. You don't directly access anything in hardware. You instead call upon an API for it (usually DirectX). This means that to make it directly Windows compatible you have to totally re-write large parts of the code. You aren't just hacking one little thing to be different, it's a different way of dealing with a computer.

The only other option is emulation. You leave the program as is and have something that translates those direct hardware access instructions in to calls to APIs Windows can deal with. That's precisely what DOSBox or the NTVDM do already.

I just don't think you'd find the market to be large enough to justify the development cost of a Windows port.

However, as to the Lucas Arts games, you are in luck. Turns out that all those adventure games they made were designed with the same basic software. It was called the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, or SCUMM. Basically they developed a tool to put together Maniac Mansion. Well when they made another game like it, they started with the same tool and updated it. The upshot is that emulating that engine has become an easy way to make lots of those old games run, and that has been done. See http://www.scummvm.org/ [scummvm.org] for the project.

Re:Old PC Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice for Americans. I tried "Play Now" on a game and it refused with "Only Available in America".