A question for our OS/X Users

Love hearing about OS X improvements.

Its a HUGE improvement, I finally get more then 4 fps (on total low) With all settings totally maxed I am getting 60fps.

This is on the new Mac Pro. Side note, has anyone figured out how to get fullscreen on Mac ? The keyboard short cut is listed as alt-enter. That does nothing. I have even tried ctrl, cmd and all sorts of combos with the shift key.

Noda.

HDR is fixed for me! yay! No more total darkness!

Performance is definitely improved; UI responsiveness seems to stay more consistent for longer.

First, some bad with the good. I can still induce graphical errors by pumping the graphics settings too high, but it seems like that bar has been raised; requires more punishing settings to see those errors now. I'm not sure how to refer to them, but the planet appears to be composed of sets of 'tiles', some of which either don't load, or load as funky moire-inducing patterns - I've seen some interesting ones. So, whatever that is, I'll call it "tile errors" here.

That's easy enough to avoid in these patches now though (yay!), and I can chalk that up to an over-utilized video card (mid 2012 retina macbook pro) which is already probably stressed by supporting the retina screen as well as a 27" external (and sometimes a third 24" too). So what was bothering me the most in the previous builds was that those tile errors would even appear on low settings, and once they showed up in a game was about the same time that UI responsiveness would nosedive.... I'd drag the cursor, wait for the box to follow, wait for the units to highlight, wait for the box to disappear, wait for the stuttering move as I scrolled the map, then finally click to a destination or target, wait for a second as the click registered... it was hard to endure. My APM is already fairly low - to be further limited by the UI lag was demoralizing. Since these latest changes though, the UI responsiveness seems to stay nice and fluid, and the fps stays somewhat reasonable, even when there's plenty of units on the board, and the tiles aren't loading right. This is so key to making the game playable. Big games had become hard to play from a Mac, to the point that I stopped trying. With the huge improvement I see in single player games so far, I'm very encouraged to try the larger games again. Now i need just need to find the time.

A few osx client bugs/whinges... I usually play under windows 8.1 which is great by comparison (osx version to me is unplayable... not just because I'm using a touchpad on a macbook pro to play).

When you quit the game, it always leave processes behind:

ps -ef | grep -i planet
501 58321 298 0 12:22am ?? 38:07.89 /Volumes/steam/Steam/steamapps/common/Planetary Annihilation/PA.app/Contents/MacOS/PA
501 58323 58321 0 12:22am ?? 1:33.21 /Volumes/steam/Steam/steamapps/common/Planetary Annihilation/PA.app/Contents/MacOS/host/CoherentUI_Host --coherent-options=host-3607b375-fa09-41d5-90f2-6cb67ed93aa4
501 58325 58323 0 12:22am ?? 2:18.91 /Volumes/steam/Steam/steamapps/common/Planetary Annihilation/PA.app/Contents/MacOS/host/CoherentUI_Host --type=renderer --coherent-options=7A410CB2-113F-2040-9875-C5315BD05CB0
501 58326 58323 0 12:22am ?? 0:00.34 /Volumes/steam/Steam/steamapps/common/Planetary Annihilation/PA.app/Contents/MacOS/host/CoherentUI_Host --type=renderer --coherent-options=41125BC5-8157-AA3E-8912-5BD693274DF2
501 58327 58323 0 12:22am ?? 0:00.72 /Volumes/steam/Steam/steamapps/common/Planetary Annihilation/PA.app/Contents/MacOS/host/CoherentUI_Host --type=renderer --coherent-options=864C10CA-2900-D0AF-F989-351A19874FE2
501 58328 58323 0 12:22am ?? 0:00.59 /Volumes/steam/Steam/steamapps/common/Planetary Annihilation/PA.app/Contents/MacOS/host/CoherentUI_Host --type=renderer --coherent-options=D3A89F14-A348-B175-4E2C-BC01FDC4CD14
501 58329 58323 0 12:22am ?? 1:14.42 /Volumes/steam/Steam/steamapps/common/Planetary Annihilation/PA.app/Contents/MacOS/host/CoherentUI_Host --type=gpu-process --coherent-options=F9573873-DDE5-897B-1875-919900B2AA65
501 58334 58323 0 12:28am ?? 0:52.86 /Volumes/steam/Steam/steamapps/common/Planetary Annihilation/PA.app/Contents/MacOS/host/CoherentUI_Host --type=renderer --coherent-options=E1D7F8BB-0181-3435-6AA8-CC1DC2E9B98B
501 58335 58323 0 12:28am ?? 1:08.18 /Volumes/steam/Steam/steamapps/common/Planetary Annihilation/PA.app/Contents/MacOS/host/CoherentUI_Host --type=renderer --coherent-options=AD20E7B5-0F74-A424-957F-C82400385EE6
501 58468 58384 0 1:41am ttys000 0:00.00 grep -i planet
meow@mbp:01:41:15:~... ps -ef | grep -i planet | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs -e kill

The HDR is still not right, it is much harder to see what is going on compared to windows.

The keyboard controls are pretty stuffed too. Makes me wonder how it's tested because the commands that don't work are the most common commands used in the game IMHO. Control+1 to set a group units to be group 1 doesn't work. And return doesn't open up the chat. I have to hit function+return to get the chat to open up.

OSX has a number of nice touchpad and magic mouse based selection alternatives which would be awesome for area selection/zoom/etc.

The osx client is a lot better than last time I tried it about a month or two ago but I can't see why anyone would put themselves through this sort of pain.

My two thoughts on the whole what version of osx to support thing. 10.9 is a free upgrade. So just support that imho.

Just to add another voice to what some have already said, I'd have no problem with 10.9 as the minimum platform. I'm really happy with Mavericks on my Macbook Pro Retina.

Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time working with other applications on this system, and I've become pretty addicted to the trackpad and gestures like two finger natural scrolling... so when, out of muscle memory, I try to scroll in PA, I zoom out of the solar system. I'm not too concerned since it's in beta, but some control options will be needed in the final game if it's to be playable on the Mac, in my opinion.

I'm not much of a gamer, these days, but TA was a favorite years ago, so I'm really looking forward to killing some free time with PA. Nice work, from what I've seen so far!

Just a quick thought;
I'd try to keep the lower end OSX req's to 10.8. Mavericks (10.9) acts so much like a beta version that quite a number of people I know would prefer not to use it (at least until all the kinks are worked out).

Simple: no Rosetta. I have a bunch of applications I am not willing to part with that require Rosetta to run.

Excellent point, shadefell. I don't still run anything that needs Rosetta, but I can understand why that'd be a deal breaker for upgrading OS X.

Rosetta is 10.6 and the minimum in this discussion was 10.7 with OpenGL 3.2 vs 10.9

Are you running the latest PA build on 10.6 and on what hardware?

I'm 95% certain the game will not run, period, on 10.6. So if Rosetta is limited to 10.6, I can't imagine you're running a system that can run the game. We use libraries that simply didn't exist back on 10.6.

Unless I'm missing something.

Not only that, there was no support for 64bit UI apps either, so it wouldn't be possible for the game to run either.

I'm not sure how well VMWare Fusion supports 10.6, as I've seen some discussion (new user, can't provide a link) around improving support for it... but something like that would be one route if someone really needed to run old apps through Rosetta on an AP-capable Mac. That extra layer of virtualization probably wouldn't be too much of a killer, as hardware has improved a lot since PPC applications shipped.

I upgraded to Maverick because of the drivers. I havent tried it with HDR ON yet.
What kept from updating prior was:
- apparently no "save as" function for most programs, which I didnt realize they put back in.
- more RAM usage in the background while "idle" / although not so much of a problem
- and because I'm usually critical with upgrading mac systems too early... I'd rather wait until the issues and bugs are ironed out.

can we have full screen on MAC please...pleeeeeease and with sugar on top?!?!

ok HDR works for me (since 10.9.x), so far so good.

I'm on 10.8 right now. I had a very bad experience last time I tried to do a full upgrade of OSX on my air (to 10.8 that time). I encountered some sort of bug in the upgrade process that left it unable to complete the upgrade but also unable to abort and return me to the OS. I had to call apple support, go through the recovery partition, and try various things. Until in the end I was forced to reformat and reinstall my entire mac, and then go through the slow process of setting my computer back up from my backups (I don't trust time machine, my backups are at the file level so they're slower to restore from). I was left unable to do my job for a few days.

So naturally I've been extremely hesitant to upgrade OSX and have been putting it off till I have time to ensure that everything is backed up and I can handle the possibility of having to reformat everything again.

same here; my mac is essentially my work place for writing, so one messed up update without sufficient backup (what IS sufficient backup anyway?) kills my ability to work for days... that's why I usually wait a long time before updating systems.

It's pretty simple, Mac OS updates tend to break things. I'll probably wait a while when 10.10 (or whatever it will be called) gets out until majors complications are solved.

For example, a decent number of users complained about the Mail functionalities during the upgrade to Maverick.

that JUST got upgraded in 10.9.2... had the same issue: work mail not shown or not forwarded correctly but now it works fine! I have to say, as hesitant as I was with the upgrade, the more I'm surprised how smoothly it went down with maverick.
but generally, I'm with you: updates tend to break things...