New Player Question

Hi all, I played UO for a long time and I'm interested in trying SOA. Two questions: 1) I am experiencing a very slow game play experience using a brand new MacBook Pro, is this normal? 2) On average how many active players are there on SOA? Is it a large active community or a niche of a few hundred players?

 

There were a few FPS bugs recently, community Is bigger than many other half finished games!

 

I'm afraid slow performance is all you can expect from a macbook - these are not gaming laptops without dedicated 3D hardware that a gaming laptop would have so even a brand new one is always going to struggle.

 

I've been running on a Mac for over 5 years. Outside of Unity upgrades, I rarely run into major issues. Even with the Unity upgrades, the dev get them fixed pretty quickly most of the time.
Unless you go eGPU, you'll need to turn down the video settings. Start by turning down quality level and then disabling some of the other settings until it run at the performance level you want.

 

Greetings Apollyon
I am also a MacBook user. Mine is a 2017 i7 but it still has an integrated GPU (Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB). There are a few things you can do to enhance your game play though. Here are the main things that affect the game play.

1. First and foremost is ram and hard drive. Since yours is a new one I assume you can not change these after purchase so what do you have? 16 gigs is good and a 512 gig HD that has at least 30% free space (all Mac drives are SSD now).
2. Turn off all background task. So many things want to automatically update from the system to almost all the apps installed. There is no easy way of setting this other than going into each apps preferences and unchecking the auto updates. Also best not to have any other programs running when playing. I have Firefox open for the sotamap but quit all other programs.
3. Open the Launcher and click on the gear in the top right and type this into the Launch Arguments box -force-glcore.
4 , Lastly on the login screen for SotA there is an Option button.
4.1 Under Video set Quality level to Fastest and as you play you can TRY setting it to Good or Best.
4.2 Uncheck Load Time Baking and GPU Occlusion (this was in a @Chris stream and it may be unnecessary now). There are other things in the video section that you can try setting that will possibly help with frame rate. I have run this game on both a MBPro 2012 i7 and now on my MBPro 2017 i7 and will tell you that it does run slow. Especially when you first move the camera or your Avatars view.

If I can be of any help please message me here or in game. name is Warrior B,Patrick in both. Have fun and although SotA does not list it, Patience is a Virtue.

 

while you're not wrong, i'm on an Intel quad-core i7 3.5GHz that played Middle Earth with a PS4 controller just fine with its Iris 6100 card...my guess is it's hard to support all platforms when macOS is so different and represents such a small portion (usually) of the players.

nevertheless, it's true that Macs aren't built for most games...however, this is no Modern Warfare or Battlefield...but it should absolutely be doable on 64bit Mac. it doesn't help that games like these are expensive to get launched and maintain and often change ownership/management.

one of the devs posted a link to a temporary Google doc that doesn't begin to describe the PELICAN and various other errors and instability, and it doesn't mention Macs fully locking up forcing a wait or long-press to shutdown/reboot—nightmare.

sadly, this doesn't appear to have been an issue everyday/7 a week; sometimes the game runs like a top. i'd really like to see/hear some direct, detailed, and thoughtful answers to what the exact problems are and what their potential solutions are:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EQczZJxj38npLbysCEjSa_xiWwx7jQ9zFgvX9yPg2xY/pub