As long as EQ requires DirectX to run, there will be no native OSX client. Thanks Micro$oft for killing the DirectX on OSX project years ago! Your best performance will be to use BootCamp and a copy of Windows 7 64 bit rather than emulating a windows environment. Sure, you "can" do it, but the performance sucks and you will eventually pop onto SOE's radar for using a virtual machine or emulation software to run EQ.
I don't know much about this stuff, but according to netmarketshare.com, Windows has 91% of the desktop market. Would you happen to know if the segment targeted by SOE is significantly different?
You cant go by that site for market share. Hell, they show for console games a 76.73% share for Playstation and the remaining 23.27% as Nintendo Wii LOL
As I said, I don't know much about this area, but StatCounter shows similar numbers for desktops in 2013-2014, with MacOS rising from 7.61% to 8.85% and Linux fluctuating between 1 and 1.6%. Windows is 88.81% as of May 2014. Perhaps the audience targeted by SOE is different, but I am not sure how we could check it.
Let's be very clear about this: WINE (which includes Crossover) is not a virtual machine. It just emulates Windows calls within an Intel CPU environment. virtual machines are something very different (and much cooler, but that's not the issue here). I agree that being one of the few major MMO developers that ignore Apple is a growing problem for SOE. I'd be interested in genuine home sales figures for both that are real and current; installed base (and new sales) contains a lot of business machines that distort the game playing market.
I wonder how many people there are who a) own a Mac, b) would be interested in EQ, and c) aren't aware of what recently happened to players who played the Mac version of EQ.
To be fair technically speaking it is an & a variation on what virtual machines do & SOE may consider it to fall under that category based on their limited restrictive policies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)
No, WINE is not a virtual machine, yes, it is an . The difference is big, and important. A VM emulates a machine - instruction set, CPU architecture and all. It then runs code native to that CPU, often an operating system. An like WINE has to run on the appropriate CPU, and emulates a subset of the emulated operating system calls. The reason that this is important is because of the reason that SOE say they ban VM users: you can hack a VM's externally undetectably. With an , hacking a processes memory is easier to detect. I'm not sure that is actually a good reason to ban, but I can sympathies with the desire to come down hard on game hackers.
Trust me, I think the whole issue is stupid & unnecessary but SOE are pretty limited in how they view anyone on a Mac playing EQ. They expect you to play on a Windows system or not play at all. You can use Boot Camp for Windows just for EQ or run on another system that is Windows based but otherwise you are at risk of being unfairly banned due to this asinine policy.
Well, I said I would report back further after more play time so here I am. Running a single instance I find it works great and runs stable. I did not experience any crashing or other issues in well over a dozen hours of play that featured plenty of zoning, logging various toons in and out, visiting the guild lobby, interacting with the UI in all manner of ways, etc. There was one additional setting change I found I had to make for acceptable performance and that was to turn shadows off. Anywhere there is a bunch of PC or NPC characters with shadows on it's lag city. When I turned them off performance was fine. I did some limited testing of running two accounts and was not satisfied with the results. The basic issue was CMD + TAB to switch between full screen instances didn't work well and I would have preferred that it did. If I was willing to run two instances windowed at something less than full screen resolution I'm sure it would have worked fine so it is doable for somebody wanting to. It's just immersion breaking for me as is boxing to begin with but to each their own. This seems to be a viable option to rebooting as far as I can tell. It's nice logging out and being instantly back at my OS X desktop. Wine does not fall into the category of virtual machine software at all and is also technically not even an either. Wine basically just translates Direct X function calls to OpenGL function calls, etc. It is not a virtual machine and it is not emulating hardware. It is doing translation and sending the translated calls to OS X which then handles them like any other native application. For anyone interested in the details of virtual machines vs emulators vs Wine I'd say the Wikipedia would probably cover it fairly well. I would not expect SOE to have any issue with Wine at all. The Mac version of Guild Wars 2 by ArenaNet actually runs on a licensed variant of Wine called Cider by a company called Transgaming. I mention that as an illustration of a case where the use of technology extremely similar to Wine was not considered a risk for hacking by a professional development company and publisher.
Thank you. I think I may try Wineskin on a laptop, although I really like my 27" monitor . I have a crashing/locking problem in heavily populated zones when resolving large numbers of players/NPCs, so I'll try your shadows trick. My second instance is much more prone to crashing than my primary one, but I suspect that is due to some fiddly setting I chose in CrossOver when installing (if only I could remember what it was).
Most players using Windows do not play with shadows. Since its introduction many years ago it had never been optimized. Drop the amount of names visible. To also run a test drive with stick figures, open up eqclient.ini and add the following line StickFigures=1 (change it to 0 to turn it off).
Something I neglected to mention above was that by default Wineskin apps will only run a single instance. Clicking or double-clicking the app icon will not start a second instance. However, it does include a way to work around this that works fine. Within Wineskin there is a setting to create additional executable files (apps) which just makes a special launcher within the app itself. I just dragged that directly to the Dock as the means to start my second instance of EQ. You could also create an alias to it and put that where you like to fire it up. If I recall correctly though, I found I could not CMD + TAB between instances doing that. I tried then just creating a copy of EverQuest.app that I'd already made and running two separate installs and that would let me CMD + TAB. In full screen I didn't like the behavior at all which was for the menu bar and Dock to display over EQ at the top and bottom until I would hit CMD + Return but then I observed that the mouse pointer was off a little vertically and to fix that I needed to go into EQ options and select windowed and then full screen every time to fix it. That was why I'd mentioned earlier my dissatisfaction with switching between full screen windows. Now, if I was already setup for windowed instances of EQ none of that stuff would be a problem and so that's the way I'd recommend to go for boxing with Wineskin. I had no crashes but I also did not test boxing much at all so your mileage may vary as they say. I'll just add that I can see how on a 27" screen windowed instances might be pretty nice actually. It would be so easy to just click the tops of windows to switch, etc. I hope all that isn't too confusing.
Well, if you want to do it on a Mac, you would need to familiarize yourself with how to create a Mac app from a Windows app using Wineskin. For that you can find all the info you need following the link I gave in an earlier post to the Wineskin site where you can also download it. It is free software. Otherwise, once you've become familiar with using it the information I posted earlier specific to EverQuest would be all you'd need to know to recreate exactly what I did here which works very nicely for a single instance of EQ at a time and with some fiddling can also work for a second and possibly more instances. If it is Linux you want to try it on, you could probably find the needed info on the WineHQ site for how Wine is installed and used in general with Linux. I used to know this but it has been a lot of years since I did that now so I don't recall and it has also probably changed somewhat. I am not aware of any tool or app that makes the process so pain free as Wineskin does for OS X on the Linux side but maybe there is something. As for setting it up once you cross that bridge, more often than not entries in AppDB which is also located at WineHQ as a link off the main page, cover installs/setup for Linux and EverQuest is covered there. As a Mac user I check those entries to glean what useful info I can and then apply it to use with Wineskin and that works out well because ultimately, Wine is Wine. It works the same way and has the same basic settings on either operating system.
I didn't have shadows enabled, so it's not that. For CrossOver on a Mac, the process is: Install CrossOver (download, drag and drop - there is a trial available). Create a default bottle (mine is winxp). In Configure->Manage Bottles choose install software, and add: DirectX 9, Core Fonts, Microsoft Visual C++ and Microsoft XML Parser. Check the 'Use Legacy X Window System' box in Advanced and then click the 'Reboot Bottle and Enable X Window System' button. Copy your EQ directory to the bottle or install via Launcher (I did the latter). Launch Everquest, and turn off hardware shaders (alt-O, display, advanced). And disable GLSL: http://www.codeweavers.com/support/wiki/mac/faq/cxgamesmac_enableglsl (regedit for Direct3D and set useGLSL = disabled), but enter the string value as 'disabled'.
Well, the problem with full screen switching is solved to my satisfaction now. In Wineskin I chose to use the Mac driver instead of the X11 driver and voila! I now get the expected behavior when switching screens - almost. As a bonus, I do not need to boost gamma in Wineskin and the gamma setting control works in EQ's options. When using the Wineskin solution to run a second instance of EQ, OS X sees them as the same app creating confusion when you try to task switch with CMD + TAB. You cannot tell which is which and also the icons do not display on first press. You need to press it twice to bring them up and switch. This doesn't work for boxing so I tried running two separate installs and while that does eat up twice the disc space, it works and you can easily identify which instance is what according to what you named each EverQuest app. I went with EverQuest and EverQuest 2nd Acct to make it easy to tell in a hurry. It still requires pressing CMD + TAB twice but switching is very fast so it works. This isn't entirely an elegant setup in my mind but it certainly is useable even in the heat of battle. For me I tend to run two instances when I want to log in a toon to buff another toon or to swap items from one account to another. So I did want this to work and I'm glad to report it does now if you can live with two installs. Again, not the most elegant solution but to me it sure beats rebooting so I'll take it. And it doesn't cost me anything which is a plus. This is only needed if like me, you prefer your instances to run full screen. Windowed instances you could simply click on, etc. Who knows, maybe I will try boxing with my heroic Mage and Enchanter. They would make a good pair. We'll see. ;-)
CrossOver is one solution, and is the one that I happen to use. Qelil uses Wineskin, which I believe is free. There are others. I use the same approach as Qelil for multiple instances: two installs of EQ inside CrossOver, both full screen.
Well, some time has passed since we were last talking about this stuff and I've had more experience with running two instances of EQ. What I found was that a second instance would often crash and it wouldn't take all that long for it to happen. Once that happened, the first instance would crash too not long after. I might have been to blame there though. I'm not sure as I didn't test further to rule out something I was doing, whether it was the culprit or not. Once the second instance crashed I could not restart it until I killed the Wine processes associated with it. There is a way within the app you create to fire up Wineskin itself and do this. However, it defaults to killing Wine everything associated with the app. That I think was how I was managing to kill the first app probably because the two of them were likely sharing two processes in particular. That meant for every crash (which was far too often anyway) I would have to open a terminal and kill two particular processes unique to the individual instance that crashed and not kill the other two that the other instance was still using. I hope I did not make that too confusing in explaining it. The bottom line? I would need to do more work to find out if it is possible to identify what is causing the second instance to crash so often and fix it. However, I'm fresh out of ambition here. Let me up! I've had enough! I bought a Mac so stuff would just work! Haha! Of course, then I have to run a Windows program on it so I guess I cannot blame Apple for any of this can I? I can blame SOE though. They should have ported EverQuest to the Mac many years ago and simply kept it current after that. I guess they don't like our money or something. I think Smedley secretly laughs at our addiction and knows we'll do pretty much anything to play this game. And so they never did EQ2 for Mac either while their major competitor Blizzard did with WoW and look how that all turned out. Now with EQ Next once again they couldn't be bothered with Mac users. I don't get it really. Most companies would be quite happy to increase revenues even a few percent. Why not? It's all good money. Anyway, I digress above. Sorry. I'm done messing with Wineskin for this. In fact, my recent experiences with crashes have lowered my confidence about it being reliable in general even for a single instance though admittedly I haven't tested this very well so maybe I am bailing early. So currently, I am on the fence between rebooting to play (which I really dislike doing) or buying Crossover with the hope that one instance will run reliably and that I can get away with running and then exiting from a second instance just for the occasional buffs, money and loot trading between accounts, etc. I can live with playing one toon at a time, especially now where I can have a merc to accompany me when I'm not in a group. That works for me just fine anyway.
