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OS X Elder Scrolls Online

TheBunny said:
I hear you and feel the same way.

I have been shipping Mac games since the Mac Plus
So about 20 years now.

Games on the Mac has just not been a focus of Apples...
well at least till IOS 7 and 10.9.

Apple has actual game teams now building much needed tech.
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Fingers crossed they pass their magic wand over Macs in general. My impression is that Mac suffers from game performance mostly because of the way games are developed, plus whatever other bottlenecks the MacOS has. One thing that really shocked me this last cycle is when they took the dedicated graphics out of the MBPs except for the top end model. Bastardos! The MacOS is outstanding for everything I do except... games. :p
 
antonis said:
I did. Twice ;)
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You know they ban anyone that does that ;)

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TheBunny said:
You know they ban anyone that does that ;)
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Honest I have no access to "THE BUTTON"

We had something like 4 million people sign up for beta.

From that we have to invite people slowly as we need them.

See beta testers are always excited to play a new game.
But after that maybe 50% return for later testing rounds.
So when you need 500K players to show up for a weekend
you need to invite like 1 million.

You can'y just invite everyone up front if you want good stress testing etc.

Anyhow we have months of testing left, Mac clients not even out yet.
 
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TheBunny said:
You know they ban anyone that does that ;)

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Honest I have no access to "THE BUTTON"

We had something like 4 million people sign up for beta.

From that we have to invite people slowly as we need them.

See beta testers are always excited to play a new game.
But after that maybe 50% return for later testing rounds.
So when you need 500K players to show up for a weekend
you need to invite like 1 million.

You can'y just invite everyone up front if you want good stress testing etc.

Anyhow we have months of testing left, Mac clients not even out yet.
Click to expand...

Regardless, I'm wishing the best on this one. I have great expectations as a huge fan of elder scrolls games. If it has even half of the single-player's atmosphere, this will be the next MMO to call home.
 
Been thinking about this more the last few days.
But ESO Mac is NOT a port done after the fact.
it is a an actually Mac version of the game
made and designed to run on OSX
Not an emulation layer etc.
 
My impression is that all the territories of the elder scrolls games will be represented as zones? I'm curious to see how true theses zones will be to the versions of ES they represent or will they be reimagined? An example would be the map of Cryodiil I still have. The best I would hope for would be the same geographic features, but I would not expect the dungeons to be in the same places with the same names, but maybe? :)
 
I'd be happy to get some more details about the Mac client: is it 64-bit? What version of OpenGL are you using? Did you use Xcode for it?

Is the launcher/patcher a Cocoa app?
 
yoavcs said:
I'd be happy to get some more details about the Mac client: is it 64-bit? What version of OpenGL are you using? Did you use Xcode for it?

Is the launcher/patcher a Cocoa app?
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That last question is odd... why does that part matter?

ESO is 32 bit on mac and windows currently...
Might actually be 64Bit on the new consoles.

The reason the game is 32bit is making a MMO you try and support the largest user base possible.

This means targeting DX 9,10,11, OpenGL.

and making the engine scale as much as possible.

ESO runs all the way back to windows XP, and though that
may not be as a big US user base anymore, it is in places like China.
Possibly because of large scale piracy vs windows 7, or ease of piracy.

On the Mac we use OpenGL 2.1 and Cg + recommended extensions....
Which kind of gets you OpenGL 2.5 as I call it.. or most of the way to shader model 3.0.

The reason we use OpenGL 2.1 and not 3 or 4 was that when we started the Mac version of the game OSX was on 10.6 and we chose Cg as our library to port HLSL to OpenGL.

Now Cg only really recommends ARB shaders as the preferred profile.

Now planning ahead I chose to support 10.7 on up.

That means that in the future we could move to 64bit
and or GL 3.1 etc and not effect the current user base.

Yes I use Xcode for everything.
We use a wonderful open source project called PreMake
which is a very simple to use Lua based project generation system.
It can take files / folders and generate project files or make files for most IDEs.

Since our code base runs across Xcode ( CLANG ), Visual Studio,
Make ( GCC ) this lets everyone code in the IDE and or style they like.

We do not check in project files to source control we simply pull down the current source code and regenerate the projects for our platform.

The patcher is currently licensed 3rd party patching tech
with a CEF / web / CSS front end.
 
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TheBunny said:
That last question is odd... why does that part matter?
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It's a signal for me how serious the developer (ZOS, not you personally of course) is about supporting the Mac.

Using some cross-platform generic porting library like Wine leaves a taste of "we aren't really serious about this Mac stuff", in my eyes (witness Guild Wars 2 and their perpetual Mac client abandonware).

Going the extra mile to develop a truly native Mac client using Mac technologies and adapted for various Mac conventions and idiosyncrasies shows some serious investment in the Mac platform, again IMHO.

Now, I fully realize the patcher not being a Cocoa app isn't directly correlated to how serious ZOS is in supporting the Mac, but having some Java generic patcher pop-up on my screen as my very first interaction with a program already sets me up for disappointment.

I view Blizzard and WoW on the Mac as the gold standard.
 
yoavcs said:
It's a signal for me how serious the developer (ZOS, not you personally of course) is about supporting the Mac.

Using some cross-platform generic porting library like Wine leaves a taste of "we aren't really serious about this Mac stuff", in my eyes (witness Guild Wars 2 and their perpetual Mac client abandonware).

I view Blizzard and WoW on the Mac as the gold standard.
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Whats funny about this is theres almost no Mac game programmer out
there to hirer, Even had a job posting for one up for a year or more and never saw a single resume.

I thought the GW2 wrapper was not bad, performance seemed good etc and there was some customization...

From my limit experience it seems like with a bit more effort / customization of the GUI etc it would have help much more mac like and not abandoned etc... regardless of the Wine style wrapper.
( anyhow that was at least my personal opinion )

Personally trying hard todo the Blizzard approach as much as possible.
 
TheBunny said:
Whats funny about this is theres almost no Mac game programmer out
there to hirer, Even had a job posting for one up for a year or more and never saw a single resume.

I thought the GW2 wrapper was not bad, performance seemed good etc and there was some customization...

From my limit experience it seems like with a bit more effort / customization of the GUI etc it would have help much more mac like and not abandoned etc... regardless of the Wine style wrapper.
( anyhow that was at least my personal opinion )

Personally trying hard todo the Blizzard approach as much as possible.
Click to expand...

The GW2 Wine wrapper prevented the Mac client running in 64-bit mode, which removed the ability to have hi-res textures. Already making Mac users feel second class.

The fact more than a year after release it's still labelled Beta and has had minimal if not zero updates speaks volumes.

On top of that they missed out on some basic Mac customizations, one example is remapping the fn keys while in the game. WoW does this wonderfully: the fn keys at the top of the keyboard become F1, F2, F3... keys for the course of the game running, then revert back to their usual behavior.

In GW2 you had to force the fn keys into Function mode on a system-wide basis.

It's these small details that show how much a dev cares.

I've got high hopes for ESO as an MMO, and your participation here on the forums is an added bonus.

Happy holidays!
 
Was the High res textures in the initial release on windows?
I did not think the Mac art looked any different... well this was on a 13" laptop vs the 23" screen on the PC.

F key idea sounds nice.
Im nots sure how to make that work in ESO... will have to look into it.
I would love the F keys to just work with out the need of hitting FN etc.
 
TheBunny said:
Was the High res textures in the initial release on windows?
I did not think the Mac art looked any different... well this was on a 13" laptop vs the 23" screen on the PC.

F key idea sounds nice.
Im nots sure how to make that work in ESO... will have to look into it.
I would love the F keys to just work with out the need of hitting FN etc.
Click to expand...

The Windows 64-bit client allows the use of a hi-res texture pack. On Win 32 you only have access to the regular textures. And since the Mac client is a Wine wrapper you only have 32-bit support.

Re the F-key idea, check out KeyRemap4MacBook for some ideas. It's a utility that allows you to remap the F-keys on an app by app basis.

Another question: does the launcher support Retina displays? Too many times I've seen the launcher/intro window of a program sport graphics that aren't Retina-optimized and come out looking fuzzy. It might be a niggle, but again, when you run a program and the very first screen you see is fuzzy and pixelated due to not having Retina @2x graphics it sets you up for disappointment and says "unpolished"...
 
Just curious what kind of performance I'm gonna see with my MacBook Pro retina with 750m. Hopefully at least medium setting at 45 fps running on an external 1080 monitor. Any kind of input TheBunny? Cannot wait to get a Mac beta invite, have received a couple of Windows beta invites. =P
 
NTurner42 said:
Just curious what kind of performance I'm gonna see with my MacBook Pro retina with 750m. Hopefully at least medium setting at 45 fps running on an external 1080 monitor. Any kind of input TheBunny? Cannot wait to get a Mac beta invite, have received a couple of Windows beta invites. =P
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Gen 1 MBP-R with a 650M is a good machine.
It gets about 35-45 FPS in most areas on high at 1400x???
Which is to say running at Apple's recommended settings.

This is the machine I test with from home and enjoy playing on.

On the down side the fans area going to run at Max and the laptop may burn your hand off ;) ( they get really hot on top left side ). YMMV

I do not know how much faster the 750m is... nor if it can handle the external display at 1900x???

Some of the new iMacs from this summer handle the game full res on ultra beautifully. ( I need to check on the model, I assume it was the 750m GT or better GPU )
 
TheBunny said:
Gen 1 MBP-R with a 650M is a good machine.
It gets about 35-45 FPS in most areas on high at 1400x???
Which is to say running at Apple's recommended settings.

This is the machine I test with from home and enjoy playing on.

On the down side the fans area going to run at Max and the laptop may burn your hand off ;) ( they get really hot on top left side ). YMMV

I do not know how much faster the 750m is... nor if it can handle the external display at 1900x???

Some of the new iMacs from this summer handle the game full res on ultra beautifully. ( I need to check on the model, I assume it was the 750m GT or better GPU )
Click to expand...

Great, I cannot wait to get a beta invite! Not been this excited about a game in a looong time. Might even check out the Xbox One version as well, would be nice to play with some friends that are planning on getting the game.
 
Any news or updates about the mac client beta?

I am starting to get concerned about the Mac version of the game...the fact that all the combined efforts of Bethesda/Zanimax are up to 1 (one) developer is worrying. Are we, Mac users, going to get all the patches and DLC at the same time of the Windows users or are we going to lag behind?

I think I might as well buy a second ssd, install bootcamp and win7 register for PC beta and probably get a Beta key before the Mac beta even starts....
 
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