[chief1983]

Ok, I want to eliminate any chances of strange error due to my lack of understanding how Macs work.  I typically install the program kind of like I would a Windows app, but it seems like that's not really necessary.  I usually create a Freespace2 folder inside of Applications, and put all my retail VPs in that, and all my mods and MediaVPs inside their own directories under Freespace2.  I then get the OS X binaries and put them in the Freespace2 folder as well.  Finally I grab Soulstorm's launcher, put that in Applications, and point it to the FSO binary inside /Applications/Freespace2/.  Is there any other way to do this, that might work better than how I'm doing it?  Also, at some point I will try to hook up a joystick to my Mac.  I have a few to choose from, a Sidewinder Precision Pro USB, a Saitek Cyborg 3d Rumble or a Saitek x45 HOTAS.  Any ideas what kind of effort is needed to get one of these to work?

[Admiral LSD]

That's pretty much how I have it laid out only I have Soulstorms launcher in the Freespace2 folder with everything else. As far as joysticks go, as long as it's HID compliant (most are I would imagine) then you shouldn't have too many problems.

[134th Barracudas]

Hm... I think no, you can't install other ways. Maybe you can use other folders, but not other ways of installing.
It's just like windows... All in a folder, launcher included.
About the joysticks, all joysticks I tried with a mac worked. Just plug in and you are finished, teorically. To configure controls, just open Freespace and set up the controls as for a keyboard

[chief1983]

I know the Launcher _can_ go in Applications, at least in some situations.  I did it at least once and had it working reliably on OS X Tiger.  But as I was having problems with Leopard recently, I wanted to try to see if maybe there was a problem there.  I will try putting it in the Freespace2 folder this time and see if the situation improves.  But as a universal binary, since you point it to your FS executables I really didn't think it matter whether or not it was in the same folder as they were, since the launcher is not coded like the launcher on Windows.  Its config data sits in the same place no matter where you put it, so I don't see how it should matter.

[Admiral LSD]

I keep everything together mostly for organisation reasons. As long as the FSO .app can find the data it needs and the launcher can in turn find FSO, it shouldn't matter where in the filesystem each part is...

[neoterran]

I'm running Freespace with a recent Freespace OS X build, 10.5.6, and the 3.6.10 vps. Everything is working very well, with of course the unfortunate exception of normal maps in fullscreen mode. (you can get them showing up in a window, but the performance and experience is horrible in a window). I've given up on normals for now. 

[chief1983]

Ok, so just to clarify, if you turn off normals, in full screen mode everything else is pretty much ok?  What graphics card do you have?

[neoterran]

I'm running a macbook pro (early 2008) with an nvidia 8600M GT, 256 MB.

I have a clean SCP Install, baseline from turey's installer, 3.6.10 mediavps.

In window, with glsl on, i can get the normal maps to show up. But the performance is very slow in the window; its super laggy, unplayable.
In fullscreen mode, I get the white textures / white environment thing, unless I use no_glsl, in which case it looks pretty much like no normal/env mapping, and the lighting is off a bit. It still looks pretty damn good tho, especially because of 3.6.10.

[Echelon9]

neoterran,

Unfortunately this is a known issue with the Mac OS X builds since the GLSL code was introduced (approx.). Currently there is no known practical fix without turning the graphics settings back (and as you'd notice windowed mode experiences degraded performance).

There's also problems with the Mac OS X build not fading the shadows properly between faces (best seen by the 'jumping' of each face in the Techroom).

Let me tell you there are a few of us who'd love to see a resolution to this issue and are looking into it. In fact I am in the process of upgrading to the newly released 10.5.6 to see if the comments in release notes of improved graphics will see any improvement for us.

[neoterran]

Cool.

Yeah, sorry to dissapoint you, but they don't. I wish I knew a dedicated Mac OpenGL guy, because i'm sure there is a workaround for these issues. Since around 07 my only computer is this macbook, and being able to play freespace on it is really awesome. It's a shame when it's so close to being perfect to have only those issues, especially with all the hard work everyone has done.

Macs are getting a resurgence now because there is this thing called CIDER which allows people to port DirectX games over. So besides Freespace, I can also run Oblivion and a few other games on the Macbook Pro, even tho they're not official for the platform.