Yeah, I know Cliff said not to ask for help with the Mac version here, but I wanted to warn EVERYONE:
IT. F***ING. SUCKS.
You can’t scroll across the screen, long loading times, graphical problems everywhere! And I only played it for about a minute! I hope everyone who has a Mac here bought a PC emulator and the PC version, instead of this Mac Port crap. It doesn’t even have any expansions, and it’s patches are in .exe’s! And if the patch fails but you have PC emulator software, don’t worry, you can use that to… wait, no you can’t. BECAUSE THE PATCHES ARE NOT RE-RUNNABLE! Thinking about modding? Too bad. All the .dds files are turned into .png’s, (and yes I know you can change them to .dds files, but most mods have a LOT of files to change.) And, of COURSE the PC version stops working for me again for no reason (both the ship design and battle screens are black, yet I can still push buttons and hear things).
What type of Mac are you running? I have a Macbook Pro(unibody) from a couple of years ago and it works OK for me. To scroll around you have to hold down the mouse button. I haven’t noticed any problems with the game yet. Red Marble just posted the expansion packs, plus a deluxe version (wish I knew they were going to do that before I ordered the basic version).
The only thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to change the difficulty. I’ve completed all the missions on normal.
meh. maybe it’s because I’m also frustrated by the fact that I’ve run into a serious problem with the PC version as well, making the game unplayable completely. I’ll make a seperate thread
I’m another mac user and I feel it’s appropriate to update this thread and let potential mac users know the OP’s concerns have mostly been addressed by Red Marble, the company handling the mac port. As of this posting, all expansions except Nomads are available for the mac, load times and graphics both seem to respond in an utterly reasonable manner, and on 9/12, patch 1.46 was released to mac users, including a fix to the game’s auto-updater to supply future patches via Red Marble instead of Positech, the upshot of which is that patches aren’t unusable .exes anymore.
The mac port seems to be about a month behind the original version of the game in terms of new content and patching, but I’m sanguine enough about waiting. My only real complaint about the port is that, on my MacBook Pro, with Snow Leopard 10.6.4, the track pad multitouch seems to cause huge instability; the game often doesn’t respond to clicks at all, and two-finger right clicks on the deployment screen cause a crash more often than not. There is a very easy workaround for this, however. I just plug in a mouse and everything runs fine.
As to modding, I’ve found it takes about ten minutes worth of work with GraphicsConverter to change all those .dds files to .pngs, and the data files that refer to the graphics don’t need any alteration at all; somehow the program seems to obtain .png files of the same name even when the text calls a .dds. If none of that makes any sense to you, this is something you don’t need to worry about at all, and if it does and you’re thinking about installing some mods, grab graphics converter and the unarchiver (to get self-extracting archives or .rars to open) and you’re good to go.
So, “friggin’ terrible?” Not really. Just a little more work for modders and a little slower to release content. If you’re okay with those things, I’d absolutely recommend picking it up, because this is a really great game.
