Mac Public Beta in Steam

[tarasis]

Thank you, I just claimed ZRC37-MVJ6X-K6K4A and its downloading now.

To test on a 2009 13" MBP 2.53GHz, 8GB Ram, 500GB SSD, NVidia 9400M

[antti]

I just updated the Mac version (new version: 1.3.4) on Steam and your Steam clients should download the update shortly. Custom dungeon fixes are the biggest improvement so if you had issues with those, see if it works now with the new build!

[Tcha]

So here's my initial testing results:

Game loads and runs. Editor loads and runs. I did not test the editor at all. ( ...yet )

- What I Played -
Version 1.3.4
Level 1 of Standard Dungeon, party of 4, Hard
Levels 1 - 2 of a Custom Dungeon (Tomb of Zarthos), same party of 4, Normal
Resolution was 1900x1200, Fullscreen.
The below notes apply to both the Standard and the Custom Dungeon.

- Graphics -
Vertical Sync adjustment caused no errors or crashes on any setting.
Adjustment of Texture Filtering, Shadow Quality, and SSAO Quality caused no errors or crashes on any setting.
However, adjustment of Texture Resolution causes consistent crashes on High, and initially caused crashes on Medium. The crashes would happen within 1-5 seconds of loading any saved game, or starting a new game.
Oddly, beginning at Low and later upping Resolution to Medium did not cause a crash.
Crashing the game did not yield any errors upon close.

- Sound -
I heard what could only be described as quick thumps at random intervals during movement. They occur at the beginning of a movement animation. I could not replicate any pattern of actions to cause these errant sounds. They did not sound like any in-game effect. Rather, they sounded somewhat like pops in a poorly-encoded mp3 or other compressed audio file. (I may be stretching my imagination to describe them...)
I'd be happy to record these sounds in-game with some screen recorder software if you need that.

- Gameplay -
Nothing to report here... all behaviors, objects, and animations were as expected!

[JohnWordsworth]

Very kind of you to give out more keys, I just wanted to give some initial feedback from this morning's session(s) - each was about 60 minutes long.

Machine 1. iMac 27-inch, Late 2009 (3.06Ghz Core2Duo, 12Gb 1067Mhz RAM, Radeon 4670 w/256Mb RAM, OSX 10.7.5).

Played: Level 1 and 2 of main dungeon with 4 custom characters on Normal difficulty.
Settings: 1920x1080, Windowed, V-Sync: Off, Render Quality: High, SSAO: Off, Textures: High, Shadows/Texture Filtering: Low.
Average FPS: ~30fps (OpenGL Profiler).

While I could run the game in full settings and/or at the full screen resolution for my iMac, the framerate was very low (15fps, which was expected - this wasn't a gaming machine when it was bought 3 years ago and the Radeon with 256Mb of RAM plays virtually nothing with any punch now). However, turning off SSAO and V-Sync it was more than playable at 1080p with High Resolution textures and even smoother with render quality set to Low. No crashes reported and everything seemed to play smoothly, but I did find the same audio bug as Tcha - I've included a report below.

Machine 2. MacBook Pro 13-inch, Early 2011 (2.7Ghz I7, 8Gb 1333Mhz RAM, Intel HD 3000 w/512Mb RAM, OSX 10.8.2).

Played: Level 1 and 2 of main dungeon with 4 custom characters on Normal difficulty.
Settings: 1280x800, Fullscreen, V-Sync: Off, Render Quality: High, SSAO: Off, Textures: High, Shadows/Texture Filtering: Medium.
Average FPS: ~30fpts (OpenGL Profiler).

Played through the first 2 levels of the dungeon and didn't notice any hitches. When played with 'Render Quality' on Low (filtering, shadows, SSAO all greyed out) it ran at a very smooth 60fps, which was lovely. No crashes, no matter how much I played with the settings. I didn't notice the audio bug on this run through, but the sound is noticably worse on my MacBook compared to my desktop and wasn't overly loud (I actually played this run through first). I will test to reproduce later.

I think there's another thread about this, but I found using the trackpad a pain during combat (due to having to right click so often). If you could perhaps offer a check box to switch left/right click operations on the character portraits (and only on the portraits) - that would probably be enough to resolve it. I know that leads to a confusing "right click a portrait to pick up a weapon, but left click in the inventory to pick up an item", but something like that would actually make it a joy to play on a Magic Trackpad instead of a pain.

Audio Bug

I can second Tsch's report of errant sound problems with the walking animation sounds. It only seems to occur when 'other' sounds are playing (often in combat, but sometimes as you walk past a burning torch) and it sounds like the audio volume spikes very high for maybe 1/10th of a second. It was off-putting the first time I noticed it as I thought "I didn't know there was a pressure plate there!". I could reproduce this bug in any 2x2 room... When walking in a square (Key movement WDSA) repeatedly, it would not occur, UNLESS I threw a dagger at the wall and as/before I moved forward. It felt like the audio volume was high from the dagger hitting the wall and that was affecting the audio volume of the walking animation sound effect for a fraction of a second.

See the attached video for a (very low frame-rate, as I was recording on the iMac and playing) reproduction of this bug;
Legend of Grimrock 1.3.4 Audio Bug.

Hope this helps, will play more in the next day or two!

[Frostyglitch]

Occasionally it takes more than one click to change which characters inventory I'm looking at. Otherwise; Sound, graphics and controls etc are all working as intended from what I have seen. Settings have been left at default outside of customizing movement controls. I haven't finished the game yet in the beta so this is inconclusive of course. On a side note, is it safe to assume this is going to have SteamPlay? Meaning people who bought the Windows version will get the Mac version automatically? In my experience with Steam, just because the Mac version of a game is available on Steam, doesn't automatically mean it has SteamPlay.

27-inch, Mid 2010 iMac
OS X 10.8.2

[Komag]

I'm curious if the end-game stuff (final encounters, unique things going on in that region) might be different enough that a few mac people should finish the whole game to be sure it's okay?

[JohnWordsworth]

@Komag: Agreed - I guess those bits are relatively complex and will likely be the least tested. I intend to play it through on my iMac/MacBookPro (haven't decided which yet) through to the end. But it will take my a couple of evenings / sneaky hours at work!

[Komag]

You could probably port over a save file from "near" the end section

SpoilerShow

a good spot to test onward from might be just before putting the prison key in the lock to open level 12 for the first time

People are saying windows version save files load just fine as well, so I could send you some different "near the end" save files to test, different party make-ups and equipment, that sort of thing

[Cantello]

Used XLWXC-65MLY-QKGYG, will try out tomorrow. Great to see such progress here!

[petri]

About the audio bug: I've verified everything at least three times and I've tried all sorts of insane tricks to workaround this but the problem persists. It seems the bug is in Apple's OpenAL implementation and it seems to be VERY hard to workaround. I believe OpenAL is reusing channels internally and when it reuses a channel that was previously playing a sound with high volume to play a new sound with low volume, you hear the volume spike. The OpenAL implemention by Apple is probably using some sort of low pass filtering on gain, but there seems to be no way to bypass that.

Only some systems running OS X 10.6 and 10.7 seem to be affected.

About the only option left would be to rewrite the whole audio engine to not use OpenAL. This would be lots of work...