Are Others Having Mac Issues?

Hi --

I have a late 2012 IMac running OSX. I have yet to be able to play any of the releases through R8. The same problem always occurs. Halfway through a cutscene load the game freezes and stops loading. As far as Moongate travel it never happens but the game freezes after portal entry. This has meant that I have been unable to play or to participate much here on these Forums as, without being able to play, I do not have much to contribute.

I asked on my Guild's Forum and not even one Mac owner said they could play. All that responded to me said they were having about the same problem I report. A few said they had just given up. So, I thought I would ask here two questions: 1) Are any Mac owners able to play SOTA under OSX rather than using Bootcamp for the Windows version? 2) If any Mac people ARE able to play what systems are they using and if they did have any trouble like this how did they fix it?

As a Knight KS pledge I invested that amount of funds because based on my past experiences with Richard Garriott and with Ultima I expected to see a vibrant Mac development effort. I am not flaming here. I respect Richard Garriott a lot. I first met him when I was an Editor on POPULAR MECHANICS and he presented me with Akallabeth for the Apple II in pre-release and I was first to review it. As the Chief Sysop of all the MAUG Forums on CompuServe for 25 years I reviewed and helped support just about every Ultima Game (even appearing as a character in Ultima III. Heck, I even wrote the short story "Stars of Opportunity" for Origin's old SPACE ROGUE game). Later, when I was the founding Editor-in-Chief of MACUSER Magazine I reviewed just about every Ultima game for the Mac. So I am not coming to this as a person with any sort of grudge against the game or its developers.

I just want to find out what is wrong and see if we can get it fixed. Thanks,

-- Thoth (Neil Shapiro)

 

I'm able to play it on my 13" MacBook Pro, 2.9 GHz dual core i7, 8 gig RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000, running Mac OS X 10.8.5. It's glitchy compared to my Windows desktop (maybe hangs on 1 out of 10 scene entries), but it is playable. It's what I used to demo SotA in class for my students, and it worked well enough for them to be able to PvP a bit on the latest release.

However, I seem to be an exception -- many Mac users are having major problems.

 

I was able to play with my 2009 MBP with dedicated Nvidia 256MB card, 8 GB of RAM, running Mavericks.

 

Really depends on your definition of "play on a Mac". If you are willing to make the follow concessions it works fine:

1. Must use PC hardware on your Mac - At least a two button mouse
2. Expect 1/10 loads to crash
3. Expect an hour or so of downtime when trying to enter Owls Head

 

I was able to play fine on my 2011 21" iMac.

Granted, I had sporadic loading issues just like everyone else did, regardless of platform.

 

I'm running on several macs and am able to play.

My iMac seems to struggle and I HAVE to run on the lowest graphic setting with no shadows. Also try running the game without Safari -- it seems to drain my iMacs GPU when I play anything decent.

 

I have a brand new iMac i bought last month, having no problems playing. Could it be your video card?
sry for your troubles

 

My home computer is a new MacPro with the D700 video cards. I had some crashes in R6, but was pretty smooth by R6. That being said, I have a MUCH better experience on BootCamp with Win8.1. Faster, smoother graphics, less jumping about. I don't measure FPS, but I have a more enjoyable gaming experience in BootCamp.

My most recent laptop purchase was not a MacBookPro for the first time in many years. (Alienware M17x with M880 graphics card)

I am sure that SOTA will be like most games that run in OSX, playable. A gaming computer will always beat a Mac when gaming.