I was going to buy the Mac version right away I returned from taking the holidays at my Mom's house, but then my Mac's power supply died and I just got my Mac back a few days ago.

After reading about the slowdowns in town, I decided that I had better play the demo through before ordering, especially since myPower Mac g4 1.25 DP is below recommended specs for the game.

In the only town I found, my character did slow down to about half-speed or a bit less when in the streets, but not too much in the shops, houses, etc. In other places where there were NPCs (like the crypt) I didn't notice a slowdown.

This is playable for me, but I need to know, from other Mac uses who have already bought the game:
In other towns, especially bigger ones, is the slowdown worse than the town in the demo? If so, how much worse? If the slowdown is the same, then I should be albe to play all right and will purchase the game.

Thanks a lot for any info.

Jude

Anyone? Has anyone bought the Mac version who has entered a town other than the one in the demo?

Jude

I don't think that the largest town in the game runs any slower than the first village. If it does, the speed difference is negligible.

Okay, thanks for the info. I'm off to get my wallet and order the game, now.

My Mac can handle the town Aridell okay, just somewhat slow. I think having dual processors, plus a 128 MB GeForce 4 Ti graphics card, helps to offset the somewhat low CPU of 1.25 GHz. Also, I set the game color to 16-bit (thousands) rather than 32-bit (millions).

Jude

EDIT: Okay, I bought it and downloaded it. Thanks for making such a cool game for the Mac! I hope Book II has the same system requirements, so I can play it, too.

Book II is definitely going to be more processor intense than Book I because we are raising the screen resolution and adding more detail, however we are also going to add quite a bit of optimization to the engine as well.

When I was beta testing using my MacG4, the town speed was slow as you say in all the towns. But everywhere else it was normal. Even in the towns if there were few npc's moving around it would speed up a bit but once more were visible the speed would go back down. Workable and you get to practice real world skill of patience.

Nice one!

Thanks.

Another place I see a slow-down: anywhere with multiple torches. First thing I do in dungeons now is remove all the wall torches I can reach. Speeds things up for me. But now I'm carrying a LOT of unneeded torches. I've taken to buring them in broad daylight, just to get rid of the weight (character has pretty low strength). Is there any other way to unload torches?

No, not in Book I. This has been brought up before and it turns out we never thought that a person could have too many torches, but alas we were wrong.

In Book II you can dump torches. We may patch Book I at some point, but it is not at the top of our ToDo list at the moment. I suggest burning torches 24-7 like you are doing now to get rid of extras. Also, you can place torches back in empty sconces which will rid them from your inventory.