Why no EQMac?

[Eiam]

I just realized that an EQ-Mac client came out awhile ago, apparently the official server was shut down just this last month... why is everyone trying to play on OS X via Wine instead of using the official OS X Client?

Couldn't you just get EQTitantium in the EQ Mac app and use that?

[jamsen]

I was part of the EQMac beta and can answer this question.

The reason the studio who ported the game gave was that they had to modify the client in such a way that was not compatible with the regular servers.

I believe this was likely intentional on the part of the studio with their typical Mac-is-better-bias (I met some people from Westlake and Aspyr there once as I worked at Apple at the time, they all this bias. Aspyr does pretty good work, but I was generally unhappy with the ports of PC games from Westlake. Sorry if this hurts anyone's feelings, it's just my opinion.)

I the Mac only server hurt the Mac version of the game more than it helped, although the community on Al'Kabor was certainly nice. The two people I knew at SoE wanted the Mac players to play on the regular servers, but I don't know how much of a requirement it was originally.

There was a push from one of the other emulated servers to gather data from Al'Kabor before it was shut down, but I didn't remember my station account to play my higher level characters in the zone(s) they wanted.

In theory, it could be done with a lot of effort but:

1) the EQMac client is PPC based, which means you'll not be able to play on Macs that ship with Lion as they don't have Rosetta any more. (I might be wrong, but I don't remember seeing a universal binary.)

2) Requiring folks to playing under Wine, Parallels, or Bootcamp is a lot easier than having to fix the server code to handle the differences between the Titanium & Mac clients.

Of course, you can check out the server code and hack on it yourself - so if you can write code, I'm sure someone will use it. (I could but I don't have time, sorry.)

:-(

Jamsen

[Eiam]

I'm just trying to find the easiest way to solve the mac problems like no fullscreen and no full mouse look. I suspect the two issues are related. I figured a native client would solve both but clearly it sounds like a can of worms =/

Thanks for the info!

[jamsen]

I understand that rationale - I can't even play full screen on either my [work's] 17" MacBook Pro when bootcamped or my Windows gaming PC and for some reason EQ doesn't like 1920x1200 for either of my systems. It's never bothered me enough to devote enough time to solving. I typically play in Windows mode on both systems but set the background to all black to avoid distractions.

Jamsen