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TipTravHoot

Second Lieutenant
19 Badges
Oct 9, 2006
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So, I have an old PC that my wife won't let me replace. Naturally, then, I assumed CK2 would not be happening for me anytime soon. Then, on a lark, while looking around for other mac games I might want to try, I see . . . it can't be . . . Paradox did an in-house Mac build for CK2?

*Cue Handel's Messiah*

What's more, it's on sale at macgamestore.com for $15?!

*Again with the Messiah*

Oh Gloria in Excelsis Deo indeed!

However, some of the customer reviews on macgamestore.com were really unfavorable, saying some video issues made the game night unplayable. I'm just wondering if the mileage of folks on this forum varies at all? How is the Mac build? For someone who doesn't know anything about fine tuning a Mac, can I install and play it? Are all these neat DLCs I see available for the Mac build?

FWIW, I have a MacBook Pro laptop, OS X 10.6.8, Intel 2.4 GHx Core 2 Duo CPU, 4 GB Ram, and a GeForce 320M graphics board w/ 256 MB VRAM. So it seems I meet the system requirements.

Now, someone please tell me my fears are unnecessary and I can once more throw myself back into the High Middle Ages with abandon.
 
All the DLC is available, and the game runs pretty well. With a 320M videocard, you'll want to turn off trees in your settings, and don't drop your event pulse to less than 5.

There's a occassional CTD, but otherwise, it works just as well as the PC version.
 
The game is unplayable for me on OSX, constant flickering and slowness.

I have bootcamp set up with XP, though, which runs it fine. It's a driver issue that should hopefully get sorted out eventually, I think, but for now I can not recommend the game to Mac users.
 
All the DLC is available, and the game runs pretty well. With a 320M videocard, you'll want to turn off trees in your settings, and don't drop your event pulse to less than 5.

There's a occassional CTD, but otherwise, it works just as well as the PC version.

This is not true. It's not unplayable for me, but saying it runs "pretty well" is like saying that a broken window fixed with duct tape is "Good as new." Basically, in order for it to run passably on your Mac OS, you'll need to turn off trees as Grayfox said, play in windowed mode, and ignore the fact that every sprite on the map flickers. Also it slows down randomly, has graphic tearing issues and CTDs after about an hour of play, but turning off the game and turning it back on fixes that (for 45 minutes to an hour). I'm not saying it isn't fun, but some of the technical issues are pretty jarring.

I've heard good things about switching over to Windows using Bootcamp, or running the game through Wine (although that may not work anymore).
 
Its a great game when it works. But unfortunately the technical issues already mentioned really prevents me from playing or really recommending it until its fixed.

That said, if you keep an eye on steam, you can pick it up for $10 there. Its been on sale for that much once or twice on the summer sale already. I've seen it for $10 on amazon as well. If you want the best discount you can get it lower than $15, and take the gamble that it will be made more playable. I wish I could say that it runs perfectly, and they do say they are working on it for the next patch - but it is somewhat a gamble to grab atm.

Edit: My own comp specs as a reference to you is a macbook pro 2.53 GHz i5 with the 330M graphics card as well. So your experience will likely be similar to mine.
 
I have a new iMac and it runs fine... but after 10 minutes of play the fans on the machine are going full blast. So I play the windows version in Bootcamp instead.
 
This is not true. It's not unplayable for me, but saying it runs "pretty well" is like saying that a broken window fixed with duct tape is "Good as new." Basically, in order for it to run passably on your Mac OS, you'll need to turn off trees as Grayfox said, play in windowed mode, and ignore the fact that every sprite on the map flickers. Also it slows down randomly, has graphic tearing issues and CTDs after about an hour of play, but turning off the game and turning it back on fixes that (for 45 minutes to an hour). I'm not saying it isn't fun, but some of the technical issues are pretty jarring.

I would second this. I believe my home computer (that I use for CK2) has the exact same specs as you list. When I first tried playing it was excruciatingly slow. It was like the internet in 1995, where you would click on a tab and then wait for 60 seconds for it to open. Doing anything took FOREVER. That said, it is a fun game.

Eventually I just edited the settings file to take out everything that wasnt utterly necessary to play. no shadows, no trees, draw sea=no, draw sky=no. pretty much I only let it draw rivers and map borders, which I need to actually play the game. Then I set it to play in the windowed mode. With all those modifications to the graphics it looks like heck, and the shields and armies still flicker like spectral spirits (which is hard on the eyes) but it allows you to play at a less maddening speed.

So basically, if you nerd out for the content and not the graphics, for $15 I would happily play with the stripped down graphics. I can post a screen shot of what it looks like when I get home later tonight to give you a sense of the visual drawbacks.
 
I have a new Macbook Pro with an NVDIA 650M and it runs O.K.

I play in windowed mode and have the trees turned off though for some extra speed. During the launch of the game, there is a strange bug. When the UI fades in, I have to actually take the window and "shake it" (move it), so the decoration frame fades out and reveals the buttons.

Every two hours or so, the game gets slower and I quit and restart or it will crash.

But otherwise, it's quite playable. Yes, I know, that might sound pathetic to a player on Windows, but oh well, on a Mac you have to lower your sights.
 
Well, I have it on a mac with IntelHD3000. I can play the game pretty much just fine with draw_terrain=yes in the settings.txt file changed to draw_terrain=no.

It looks ugly, since there's no mapmodes whatsoever, just a great yawning black continent with rivers and seas (thankfully it still shows borders, or else it would probably be unplayable!), but that doesn't bother me too much. Can't speak for everyone, though.
 
If you have Intel 3000 or Intel 4000 HD graphics (e.g. 2011 and 2012 Macbook Air), the current Mac version stinks, the graphics hardly move (I'm not exaggerating), though the Windows version runs smoothly on the same hardware, so the hardware itself is up to it, but the support for the Mac Intel drivers is poor. Other demanding games (e.g. Dragon Age Origins) run fine under Mac OS X, so its not a limitation of Apple's Intel Drivers per se.

EDIT: in case it wasn't clear, CKII runs absolutely fine on a Macbook Air in Windows via Bootcamp, but I resent having to so this and would prefer a Mac OS X native port that actually worked properly...
 
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Edit: My own comp specs as a reference to you is a macbook pro 2.53 GHz i5 with the 330M graphics card as well. So your experience will likely be similar to mine.

If you would be so kind, I would greatly appreciate it.

Also, it's good to hear Paradox is supporting the Mac port and trying to fix the issues. Any rumors as to when some fixes will come out? I'm not opposed to picking it up now and just letting it sit until there's a patched version.

Dear Paradox people, thank you so much for starting to develop for Mac. This is absolutely a step in the right direction.
 
I'm not actually sure they are "working on it." I was more than a little annoyed when I had all these problems. Irate is probably a better word, because frankly I think the game should actually function on the minimum operating specs, and that is only marginally a true statement. Moreover, on later macs that are beyond the minimum specs it is entirely nonfunctional (wont load and crashes when it reaches the "loading graphics" page). In the help forum on here it explicitly says they only provide help to PCs and that mac users should contact two different carriers of the game, and then provides links to companies that no longer exist. That pisses me off. If you charge me $40 or more for a game, and usually considerably more than the PC version costs, by high heaven I want it to minimally work and I want some degree of responsibility for ALL the players of the product.

So I eventually hunted down and submitted a help ticket to paradox. The help guy was very polite and very quick to respond. Unfortunately the response from the paradox IT guy was this:

"Unfortunately Intel HD cards aren't supported at this point. The problem is the OpenGL drivers provided by Apple. In Windows we run the game on DirectX which gives us a better performance. OpenGL simply aren't as good as DirectX and there's nothing we can do about it. We hope to be able to patch the game to work on Intel HD in the future but that most likely require Apple to first improve their drivers."

Which essentially sounds like they are just going to wait for apple to change to suit them, not the other way around. I wrote back kindly requesting that in the next staff meeting he mention that the EU2 graphics run just fine on macs and perhaps they could consider releasing a mac version that actually worked on macs, even if it had dumbed down graphics, because i would take dumb but functional graphics/game over nearly non-functional but supposed-to-be-pretty game any day. because truthfully, I dont think any of us are playing this game because it has such breathtaking graphics.
 
Same problems on Mac...

I appear to be having the same issues as above but I'm curious how this is a graphics problem, it really doesn't seem to be.
I have a late 2011 MacBook Pro with an AMD Radeon HD 6750M (1024MB) and the game runs completely fine under any resolution.
After a while the game slows and becomes jerky, the clouds jaggedly cut across the sky and buttons become unresponsive and slow, basically everything crawls.
This starts after about 30mins of play time and comes and goes thereafter. After about 1-2hours of play the game will either freeze and CTD or fade to black then CTD.

It's odd though because the slow downs seem to happen when i open a menu such as the player info menu or try to interact with character related things (never when I'm upgrading holdings or whatnot). Also, as soon as I close these menus (apart from after a longer period of playing) the slowdown disappears and the game is back to normal.

It's almost like the menus themselves are causing some kind of problem, this makes me think maybe it's not a graphics issue, but something wrong somewhere else.
Also, I'm noticing huge spikes of CPU usage just before crashes and during the slowdowns... I'm no coder so I've no idea how this might be related but it suggests something is wrong here...
 
The units/flags/borders flicker like crazy, so no, I wouldn't consider it a worthy purchase on OSX. If you can, use Bootcamp, but we all know how much of a hassle it is to boot into another OS for a short gaming session.

Honestly, unless you are going to Bootcamp, you'd be wise to just save your money.
 
As cranky as I am about the whole thing, I think I was mostly irate because I expected it to work, and it didn't work well. that said, am I still playing it and totally addicted? yes, yes I am. They just did a summer sale where you could pick it up for $10 and at that price I would say it is totally worth suffering the lousy interface.

@TrueOriginal: I am no coder at all, so I certainly cant say for sure, but I will say that my game used to do the same thing, like it would get all jerky in a menu as though it was trying to do too much at once and it all got caught up in a vicious traffic jam of non-processing, and often it would crap out on me and if I restarted the game it would go well again. All I can say is that when I modified the settings file to turn off absolutely everything I possibly could (sky, trees, water, shadows etc) it worked MUCH better and I have not had it totally crash out or seize up on me since, which seems to suggest that the graphics may actually be playing a role in the problem. open your settings file and change some of the graphics options to "no" and see if it improves things for you.
 
Ahhh

Well if you had the same problems then I will sure try, thanks Airyn124. I've had a dig around in the SteamApps folder, and gone through pretty much every file i can find for CK2 but can't find something that looks like a settings file. Could somebody please explain which file I need to modify please? Many thanks in advance.
 
I play it on an imac and I don't have any flickering or graphical issues but it is slow as hell. I still use snow leopard though so I'm not sure how it'd run on lion.
 
Well if you had the same problems then I will sure try, thanks Airyn124. I've had a dig around in the SteamApps folder, and gone through pretty much every file i can find for CK2 but can't find something that looks like a settings file. Could somebody please explain which file I need to modify please? Many thanks in advance.
Just put settings.txt into Spotlight. Further Tech Support must be done in that forum, not here - thanks.