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Gamespy, in one of their occasional summaries or features on the state of Macintosh gaming, has posted an interview with Rich Lawrence of Sony Entertainment Online. He is one of the main personalities helping to bring EverQuest, the famous Massively Multiplayer Online RPG to the Mac.

Despite its age (EverQuest was first released 5 years ago), both Lawrence and Gamespy interviewer Raphael Liberatore make sure to comment on the incredible following that still exists, and the compelling gameplay experience that still awaits Mac users. From describing their porting challenges to revealing a revised in-game interface for the Mac, Lawrence dishes out the goods on this highly anticipated title.

GameSpy: Looking at the Mac, what kinds of development issues are the devs running into? Any OS X specific issues making porting difficult?

Rich Lawrence: EverQuest is a very unusual game, even for the PC side, and it has definitely produced some unique challenges to port. Because there is such a huge variety of races, armor, weapons and "looks" a character can have, EverQuest has always featured a large set of textures and geometry. All of this graphical richness consumes memory, and optimizing that memory usage, how to load it efficiently, and yet trying for the best frame possible is a big challenge. Add to that the differences in how DirectX (on the PC) and OpenGL (on the Macintosh) handle these tasks and it becomes all-the-more challenging.

Gamespy Mac EverQuest Interview

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