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Minmaster
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So Cal
Nov 2001
time: 21:17
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I've posted this at IMG forum, but I'm not getting any responses (it might be that not many people have this game if they didn't attend MWSF) so here I go again.
First I own a G4/AGP 400/Radeon with 348 MB Ram 200 allocated to Civ3 under OS 9.
My Thoughts (taken from my post at IMG with some edits);
after playing Civ3 for few days on my G4, i'm rather dissapointed by the quality of the port. I also own the PC version of Civ3 (bought it when it just came out) which I run on a Athalon 600mhz and there is a big speed difference between the two. The mac version is really slow. I finally managed to run in OS X, and after disabling quartz text, the game is much more playable than OS 9 version.
First off, a huge problem that bugs me is that preferences do not stick. by this i mean when i change preferences, such as turning auto-save off and always wait until end of turn on from the main menu, the changes I make to prefs dont stay. they revert to default no matter what. the only way i got around this is to start a game, change the prefs within the game and then save the game. that ensures one's own prefs to be saved, but only for that particular game session. and starting postion linked by culture will be always be true since that cannot be changed before the game starts. i have always turned that option in PC version because I want random neighbors. another minor issue that might be linked to this problem is that the difficulty level always goes back to chieftan when starting new game. and i never play anything other than diety. (i've actually won my first diety game last week on pc)
Second, there is a huge performance problem under OS 9. It is almost unplayable on my G4 with 384 mb ram. i believe it needs some optimization work. everytime i scroll map or move units, there is a lag and i hear that clicking HD accessing noise. Imagine the lag when u have multiple units moving across the roads/rails. they should move smoothly, not pause and lag after every tile movement. However this does not occour in OS X. Im quite impressed by the X version, its much faster than the 9 version. One thing I figured out is that turning off quartz text for X gives huge performance boost and prevents crashes. The 9 version also seems to leak/fragment memory and leaves me about 100 mb short in memory when i exit the game.
Both of the versions have some audio problems. Music gets choppy especially in main menu setting up a game. After experimenting with turning on/off "disable music" option, I no longer can get music back. but thats not a huge loss since civ3 music is kind of bad. another audio issue is there is no sounds during battle.
Im not sure if some of these problems are specific to my mac, so if anyone else experiences these problems please post.
although the mac version seems much slower than the pc version, some parts of the game is actually faster IMO such as the time it takes to start a new game and loading saved games. anyways i hope there is a patch soon to fix some annoying problems.
Brad if you read this please reply!
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mishra
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it's the same for me, although i didn't played in os9 yet
there r a lot of sound bug and we can't play with the quarzt version TOO SLOW!
i have a b&w G3 400 with ATI128 on os10.1.2
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confusedbee
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Toronto, Canada
Feb 2002
time: 00:17
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It looks like no one's responded to Minmaster's post, but I'll throw my hat into the ring.
I, too, have been very disappointed by the Civ III Mac port. I am running on a 350 mHz G4 with 384 megs of RAM (+1 with virtual memory) under OS9.
I expected the game to run more slowly on my Mac than it does on my boyfriend's P4, but the differences are ridiculous. Jerky is an understatement. The units are playable only if I turn off all the animation options (which of course I have to reset everytime I run the game...) and there appears to be a significant problem with redrawing units. Every time I flip to a city screen or pull down a menu from the screen, there is a long pause. Likewise everytime the game shifts to center on another unit.
Perhaps the most vexing thing for me (other than the long delays between everything I do) is that scrolling across the map is incredibly jerky and slow. It makes it really hard to play the game if you can't smoothly move around and see the land all around you.
My boyfriend, a lifetime Civ addict, noted that he plays the Mac version differently because of its poor performance. That is, he tries to make moves that he knows won't slow the game down anymore than it is. Not too fun.
I was very surprised that the game was so noticeably inferior to the PC version because I have so far been quite impressed with the efforts of MacSoft. For instance, Tropico was an incredibly graphics-intensive program (moreso than Civ III, I'd say) but the Mac port worked just as well as the PC version. Certainly Civ III is a more complex game than Tropico, and perhaps all the underlying computations slowed it down in comparison, but... I have a hard time understanding why that game can play so smoothly with 100 animated characters on the screen and CivIII plays like crap with only one unit showing at a time (and did I mention sometimes the units disappear and reappear oddly?).
I have not tried the game under OSX, as I'm sure there are far more things that running OSX would break on my machine than it would at this point fix. But it seems that if the port was really intended to be playable on earlier platforms -- what, system 8.6 and up? -- the coding really needed to be ironed out significantly first.
My real question, of course, is -- is there anything to be done to improve what we have now? Are these system limitations, or programming limitations, or something in-between that can be gradually improved with patches or updates? I really want to have this game work well on my Mac, but at this stage, I just wait until I can get some time on the PC. Very sad!
Best,
Liz
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confusedbee
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Toronto, Canada
Feb 2002
time: 00:17
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Hey Cyber,
Civ III does claim to prefer 500 mHz -- though it says it works starting at 300 mHz. I would be interested to know if much (if any!!) playtesting occurred for 333-350 mHz Macs *not* running OSX. I will concede that the game does _work_, but it really ought to work a lot better.
As for Civ II, well, that plays just fine under OS 9.0.
Liz
quote:
Originally posted by CYBERAmazon
Minmaster, et al.:
I understand that Civ III requirements prefer at least a 500 mhz machine. Would that possibly have any role in the slowness you and others have experienced?
As for the lost preferences ... well, that irks me. I haven't purchased Civ III yet, but plan on doing so once I acquire one of Apple's new "iLamp" iMacs within the next several months. Hopefully the folks from Macsoft and Westlake will pop up and give word on the status of a patch to fix these problems you mentioned.
On a related note, does Civ II work fine under OSX.1 or OS9.x? I don't want to lose that game simply because a new computer — 500 mhz or higher — is too fast for it. I understand that the new iMacs ship with OSX.1 installed ... but what about OS9.x?
CYBERAmazon |
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Gatekeeper
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United States of America
Feb 2000
time: 23:17
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quote:
Originally posted by confusedbee
Hey Cyber,
Civ III does claim to prefer 500 mHz -- though it says it works starting at 300 mHz. I would be interested to know if much (if any!!) playtesting occurred for 333-350 mHz Macs *not* running OSX. I will concede that the game does _work_, but it really ought to work a lot better.
As for Civ II, well, that plays just fine under OS 9.0.
Liz
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I happen to have a 333mhz iMac right now, but am using OS8.5.1, which means no Civ III for me. When the time comes — a month or two, perhaps — I will simply kill two birds with one stone by acquiring a 700mhz iMac (the "iLamp" as I call it) with OS10.1 *and* buying Civ III.
In the meantime, I shall continue to enjoy Civ II. I am more than happy to hear that it works fine under OS9.x, because it's my understanding that the newest iMacs, while shipping natively with X, will also have 9.x for the Classic environment.
CYBERAmazon
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d_dudy
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i'm not disapointed at all and i use a 333mhz machine.
but i would like the preferences to stick and i wish civs would start at their real locations on the earth map. is this ever going to be corrected? is there any way i can fix it? it kinda sucks to start out where you're supposed to but then no one else does.
one note: the game ocasionally pauses between turns-will this stop if i turn off autosave? i guess i'll try it.
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d_dudy
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quote:
Originally posted by Wiglaf
I think a patch for that is in the works. |
i hope so.
maybe bradman or someone can enlighten us...?
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bradman
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Westlake Interactive, Civ3 Mac Programmer
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Chandler, AZ, USA
Mar 2000
time: 22:17
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quote:
Originally posted by confusedbee
I expected the game to run more slowly on my Mac than it does on my boyfriend's P4, but the differences are ridiculous. |
Sorry for taking so long to reply, but I seem to have troubles with the server whenever I go to post.
Anyway, I'll get straight to the point. A 350MHz Mac isn't going to compete with a P4 (you didn't mentoin the clock speed, but it's probably at least double). If you have any expectation that it will, it's time to dismiss yourself of that notion.
Civ3 runs, MHz for MHz, nearly identical to the PC as on the Mac. So if your Mac is twice as slow as the PC, expect it to perform that way. An easy way to test this theory is with a stopwatch and the same save game. If you can find a situation where the Mac is _dramatically_ slower (taking into consideration the CPU speed differences), please let me know.
Having said that, there are a few optimizations we made for the patch. For starters, Quartz no longer extracts a speed hit under 10. Second, map scrolling is roughly 40% faster. Those two are the lone areas we were able to identify in the initial release that were slower on the Mac than the PC. All other reports we had were well in line with what you should see.
Brad
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bradman
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Westlake Interactive, Civ3 Mac Programmer
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Chandler, AZ, USA
Mar 2000
time: 22:17
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quote:
Originally posted by d_dudy
maybe bradman or someone can enlighten us...? |
A PC patch is in the works, yes. A Mac patch is also imminent, but it'll probably lag the PC patch in a number of fixes as we concentrated mainly on Mac issues this time around. As you might expect, we'll try to up with the PC patches as they release them.
Brad
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Txurce
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Santa Monica CA USA
Mar 1999
time: 05:17
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I have a G3 with 128 RAM and 400 Mhz, with OS 9.1.. I have no PC to compare it to, but have found the game to be slow but smooth. It doesn't pause very oftern, just sort of... ambles. There's no comparison to Civ 2's speed, but I've adjusted, and am enjoying it. Nothing affects gameplay so adversely that I think of saying "screw it."
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Mavfin
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Having a fine time with Civ3/Mac on a
G4/500 (chipped up blue/white tower, 100 MHz bus)
PCI Radeon 32 MB DDR
512 MB RAM, 384 given to Civ3
System 9.2.2
no, repeat no, virtual memory....I don't care what they say, Mac still runs better in 9.x without virtual mem if you have enough real RAM!
BTW, for anyone running 9.x, the 9.2.x patches made some real good performance improvements...I'm using Apple's Radeon drivers since patching, and it's working better than it did before...
So, if you're all having too much trouble with comparable machines, configure the dang thing right and it will work better..
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Skula Hardnox
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Toronto
Mar 2002
time: 00:17
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I've been playing for the past few weeks on my first-generation G4 Titanium on OS 9.1 and haven't noticed any performance issues aside from the kind of load times others have reported on these boards (ie, hangs at 2 percent, 57 pervcent, etc.). I'm getting very swift movement (now that I've been able to fanagle coal from the bloodthirsty Aztecs and have railroaded every tile within my grasp). I haven't noticed any improved speed since applying the latest patch (1.17g), but at least it has eliminated some of the more annoying bugs you identified. Although there is definitely a lot more work to be done before this game can be considered anything more than a work in progress.
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14-01-2002 12:49
thos Jag Warriors
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