Macintosh

First of all, I gotta say, seeing CCP Mankiller and his presentation reminded me sooooo much of a past life as a game dev. Kudos guys, despite the technical difficulties.

Overall, EVE seems to be headed towards a beautiful (even more so than currently) future, but given the current state of the Mac client, I kinda fear it will be left behind when the time comes to get these things out...

The current SiSi build definitely is an improvement over everything we have in the regular client, and I've had the opportunity a few times to discuss with some devs during mass tests, so I know we are not forgotten entirely, but I'd like to see some "official" stance on these new shiny goodies EVE is about to get.

Is there some sort of reasonable commitment to have the mac client not lag too far behind the PC one, even if the current cider implementation (and even the wine way to do things) can only support so much? Are there avenues being explored to not relegate us as second class citizens when it comes to graphics/performances? I assume the biggest hurdle is the somewhat lacking support for DX on the mac platform, but is there any long term strategy, or is the mac client always going to be "as good as it can get using wine or a derivative thereof"?

Again, not looking for secrets, just a sense of how much we mac folks matter in the grand scheme of things...

Is there some reason you cannot be more specific?

The question, shared by, me, is will we have to turn off all these new graphics features to get any sort of reasonable fps?

And Thanks for working the stability issue.

Hi Vincent,

I'd rather not run the risk of introducing any concrete expectations in the playerbase until we are happy that we have a robust solution.

Regarding graphical features and FPS, can I ask if there is anything recently that you would say causes a downgrade in performance?

Best,

Sledge.

Clouds have always been a badly performing thorn in our sides, we're working on something at the moment to address that both on PC and Mac.

Freezes and other stability issues have been a point of major investigation and work for CCP Vertex and I along with our partner, we're hoping the next release will be significantly more stable.

EVE voice is another known pain point, especially on the Mac, we're looking into options on that front.

Dual client freezing when you quit one of them has been addressed by using Clonemaker, although the issue still exists if you do not use Clonemaker - a problem on our partner's side.

Instructions on setting up Clonemaker here.

Just remember to mass invite all us Mac Users when you plan on doing this CIDER update. Though I haven't had any major issues, I'm always happy to test and share system numbers.

Oh yes. All the effects in the asteroid belts. I do not get to see them, which is unfortunate as I mine quite a bit. With them off, I get 30 to 60 FPS. ( I find anything over 15 is playable on my MBP.) Turn them on: My FPS drops to 1.5 to 2.0. I usually have all graphics set as low as possible, except shader and texture, which are set to medium.
I tremble to think what would happen if I try to have them on when I run all three clients at once (2 miners and an orca).

Edit: On the other hand, there does appear to be a small boost in overall FPS performance with Scylla. Maybe a 20% increase. Thanks for that! I can run 1 client with low to medium settings, the other two at all low, and get 15 to 20 fps on my 5 year old MBP.

Is that a mac-specific mass test I see before me? ;)

See you tomorrow, then!

-nz

Well, as much as I appreciate the work they've been doing lately on the stability of the Mac client it seems we are going to be left out on that graphically beautifully future, the first new effects are coming out and they have an asterisk next to them saying not available for mac users. Not a promising start for us.



https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=419756