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Simultaneous Development: Blizzard Entertainment Does Both At Once

Blizzard Entertainment has been committed to cross-platform development for years—ever since they began work on the Mac version of the original Warcraft in January 1995. Rob Barris, a lead software engineer at Blizzard explains, “It’s important to Blizzard that we reach as many gamers as possible, regardless of what type of personal computer they use. While the Windows universe is quite large, the Mac user base continues to grow, and our products have historically done well there.”


But Blizzard’s approach to cross-platform development is unusual. They develop both the Macintosh and the Windows versions of their products simultaneously, and gain some unique advantages by doing so, as Rob explains: “Both our Mac and Windows developers find bugs we probably wouldn’t have found so quickly without simultaneous development on both platforms. We’re building the same game using different processors, different compilers and different memory, and so we catch things much sooner.”

There’s a lot built into Mac OS X that makes this approach work well for Blizzard, especially the Xcode Tools. As Rob notes, “The very steady growth in the strength of the Mac OS X built-in development tools has been truly invigorating for us. Networking, automated tasks, and tool-building are the key strengths of the Blizzard development ecosystem, and Mac OS X is superb in this environment.”

Blizzard’s development approach helps their marketing efforts as well. “We’re fortunate to have a loyal following in the Mac market, and our simultaneous releases—as well as our simultaneous updates after the sale—are part of our efforts to maintain that following,” Rob says.

“We try to respond to the needs of our Mac audience at the same level we do our Windows audience—so it’s a mutual thing. We have users who have selected the Mac platform and want Blizzard products, and we’re motivated to give them what they want.” Releasing both versions on one CD-ROM is also a benefit for users. “People can switch platforms if they want,” Rob says, “and still use the same CD.”

Mac OS X Tools Play Critical Role

Rob cites the Mac OS X performance and debugging tools as critical to the company’s recent development success on the platform.

“Out of the box and at no extra charge, Mac OS X gives us tools for graphic performance tuning, code cache profiling, memory leak/corruption hunting, file systems and network monitoring, remote debugging and profiling, and crash postmortem collection—dozens of useful tools to visualize what’s really going on inside our games,” he says.
Barris adds, “It’s safe to say that having our games running on Mac OS X gives us an excellent added perspective on how the code is behaving and if anything is going wrong or needs attention.”

In regards to simultaneous development, he explains, “Mac OS X tools also help us save time, which is important because both versions have to come out together. And the Unix base of Mac OS X is great for us, too, with its assortment of built-in scripting languages, including Perl and AppleScript.”

Fast Setup and Detailed Results with Xcode Tools

Blizzard Macintosh developers especially like the OpenGL Profiler, Shark, and MallocDebug tools in the Xcode developer toolkit.

“These are all performance-oriented tools,” Rob says, “and they have a quality we really admire in development tools—they are extremely fast to set up, which allows us to start getting interesting results right away from the program under test. ”

Barris continues, “You can run them on your final build if need be; you usually don’t need to switch gears and rebuild your application to benefit from them. These tools all have ways to dump out concise summaries of activity or more exhaustive detailed logs, over timescales from nanoseconds to hours. In the graphics and performance realms, we’re very interested in where all those nanoseconds are going; then over in the memory footprint realm we sometimes have to find leaks that accumulate over hours and figure out which path through the code is responsible. The Mac OS X tools allow us to turn on a dime and check these things out very quickly, which is very important to us in keeping up with our deadlines.”

Staying On Top of the Market

Blizzard’s Mac team isn’t dedicated to working on just one product at a time—instead, they are doing revisions, builds and rebuilds on a variety of products, often in the same day. Their work is very on-demand and labor intensive, and Mac OS X allows them to keep up with this volume. “Because it is so automated, we can do more builds, even if nine out of ten get thrown away,” says Rob. “Having two teams working together but on different platforms can get competitive, and the competition helps keep us sharp. At the same time, so much is discovered in optimization that benefits both platforms, that the result is a better product for our users, no matter what platform they’re on. With the graphical features and program needs of games continuing to rise, we really benefit from our simultaneous development approach, and it helps us stay on top of our market. And using Mac OS X and its development tools is the key to our successful games development on the Macintosh platform.”

To learn about Blizzard games on Mac OS X, see the following:

Blizzard Entertainment is a premier publisher of entertainment software. Since establishing the Blizzard label in 1994, the company has quickly become one of the most popular and well-respected makers of computer games. Their blockbuster titles include Warcraft®, Diablo®, and StarCraft®. Warcraft® III: Reign of Chaos™ has been called the “fastest selling PC game ever,” and World of Warcraft™, their upcoming massively multiplayer online roll-playing game, is considered one of the most anticipated games of 2004. Each member of the Blizzard staff is a true games enthusiast, providing the company with valuable insight into creating products for the gaming industry. For more information about Blizzard Entertainment, visit their website at www.blizzard.com.