Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

TJT said:

Am I reading the class descriptions right? Wizard can go melee to regain mana when they're low as well as providing melee DPS procs or something to the group? Because daddy likes that.

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Kirun said:

From my understanding, he's basically the lead? Similar to what he was in PoPish era EQ, EQ2, and then returning for OoW, I believe?

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First said:

So to run through all of the mac gaming options I'm aware of -

Parallels - I don't have first hand experience, but one of our players said it was pretty slow to run the game, it's a VM setup I believe. Cost money.

GPTK (Game Portability Tool Kit) - Apple put this together and put it out, it's basically based on a released version of WINE, not meant to be used by end-users technically...but you can set it up - I haven't investigated it because of Whisky.

WINE - So you can still roll this if you want. I've never looked into it. You'll have to solve the patcher issues still most likely. It's open source, most work done by a company called codeweavers. Which will be notable later in this list.

Whisky - This is pretty much a nice wrapper for the GPTK with a few enhancements. Neat free project. The patcher not running is likely to be the only major problem if I had to guess (patcher & mouse are the main obstacles to us building native clients for linux/mac atm). There's probably something needed to be installed within the bottle for the patcher to run. Sorry I don't know what/how. The maintainer of this project intends to limit it to GPTK versions, so as to not step on newer versions of Crossover. This is the most promising free option, if someone with technical knowledge would be able to solve the patcher not running.

Crossover - The only simple install & run option. This is a commercial product maintained by Codeweavers. It's version is usually based on a version of WINE they have brewing internally that hasn't been released to the public yet (the public release is slower - which is what Apple is going to pull for GPTK). They also have added various enhancements to help things run out of the box better. That's the case for M&M's patcher. It just works. Well, it works 99% - the patcher takes a few to load and then the patcher window is black for a bit. It will eventually display a graphic, or you can paste your password in and hit login before it loads the graphic. The only real bug with the patcher is it won't save your password (the checkbox doesn't work).

My M1 Air is a bit less powerful than your M2 Air. That said, it's probably not a huge difference. The Air's have no active cooling, and they thermal throttle pretty hard pretty fast. To minimize the throttling - if its that important - consider a stand & airflow. There is a definite loss of fps from the translation going on behind the scenes. The performance of M&M's game client is actually only slightly faster with Crossover as it is running in the Unity Editor on my Mac. Notable because there's a very large fps difference between the two running natively on PC. I get 18-24fps in Night Harbor on the Dev server - you'll likely get less in a playtest because of the other players. So that's a pretty low fps, but I will note, we're a pretty low APM tab-targeted MMO - it won't feel great, but it might be considered playable given those facts.

To increase FPS, you have a few options. Decrease the resolution. This is the main thing. You can do this on your mac's screen size, or we've now added a resolution option in our settings. It looks less pretty, but yes, you can really go down to some of the lowest resolutions. The UI scale thing is important to use at some of the lower resolutions so stuff fits, but worth noting we're still in the midst of a UI overhaul. Bumping the resolution down will bump up your fps. It won't skyrocket, but even 3-5fps extra is a pretty big jump percentage wise. We don't have much in the way of other graphics settings right now - the performance option may give you a few extra fps. Optimization is ongoing, and I think we hope to add more settings at a later date (as well as investigate offering a client with a different rendering pipeline that may be more performant for lower-end machines & handhelds (URP) someday). The only other thing you can really do is to make sure there is minimal load on your M2. In windows, I'd suggest opening task manager and killing a bunch of stuff - I'm honestly not sure what the equivilant is on a Mac (or if there is one), since I only purchased the M1 Air specifically to test M&M on Mac. Make sure to use the hide corpse settings - there's going to be a ton of corpses in noob areas, and those can be a big drag (we added those before the last few playtests).

Unfortunately Crossover costs money though. The base purchase is a 1 year thing - they do run sales. They also have like a 14 day trial, which might work fine for the playtest. If you do some internet digging, that may be able to work forever, but I'd highly recommend supporting their work in helping bring PC gaming to Mac/Linux.

Edit (forgot to add) - There are a couple of issues within the game. I haven not tested extensively (I don't have a usb-c mouse handy, have ordered one, so haven't played yet on the mac in a group - I'll try to do so sometime coming up), so there may be other things. Right now some of our old UI buttons don't have graphics. They're blank buttons. Currently we have some UI windows/buttons upgraded to our new UI framework, but some are still old. Off the top of my head, the destroy/drop buttons in inventory, and the trade/cancel buttons in the trade window don't have graphics. There may be some others. Our new UI windows have fixed this for some other major problem components that had no text previously. Last time I looked closely, there's also a couple of graphical glitches (no textures above a couple of windows stuck out), but they wouldn't impact gameplay.

Shadow PC - This is another option. It's basically a cloud windows PC you can remote into. Literally your own windows cloud box - you install to it and use it just like a windows desktop. Has a montly sub. Needs a decent connection usually, but once again, MMO gaming is usually more friendly than like FPS. I've not used it, but a friend uses it for all sorts of MMO gaming.

Parsec - This is a free option....but it's basically remote desktop software. So if you have a buddy or family member with a gaming PC, you can actually remote in and play it on their box. I sometimes remote into my desktop from my laptop for dev stuff. Unfortunately my work, mobile, and home connections aren't great, so I've actually never tried to game on it, but if you got a good connection on both ends, it definitely has been used for that by others.



There may be some stuff I'm not aware of out there, and there's definitely some other Mac gaming software out there intended to replicate a sort of steam game display thing, but I'm not aware of them doing something that may be helpful for M&M.

Long-term, we're really hoping to be able to support Mac, Linux, and Android (Android handhelds to be clear is the aim). It's just a hope, and it's not clear when or if we'll be able to put the effort into that sort of stuff. Likewise, we hope to eventually have decent performance (not mind blowing) on, as I said, handhelds, and thus integrated graphics of all sorts. We're hoping Unity 6 & maybe being able to roll a URP version that is less demanding might be a big boost there. Ali and I both purchased M1 Macs (myself an Air, and him a Mini), as well as Odin (Android) handhelds with this in mind a bit. A few team members have Steam Decks and Ally's also. Who knows if we'll get there, but that's the dream.

Lastly, if anyone else is curious or just worth noting, PC specs. We don't have official specs. MMO's are probably somewhat playable even sub 30fps, but obviously that's not ideal. My old laptop with a 4-core 7th gen Intel (kaby lake) i5 and a 1060 6gb @1080 tends to run at like 25-40fps in NH right now (it varies depending on where in the city, and noting that there's no other players on screen). It's playable, and yes, I have done a couple of playtests on it just to get a feel for a low spec machine's pain points. We're usually CPU bound atm unless your gpu is just super weak vs cpu (thus my recommendation to try to reduce load on your cpu). We're still hoping to see increases - potentially large % ones long-term, but it's not been a major focus since it's playable on a wide range of gaming PCs going back 7+ years - we just sort of do passes every so often to hit a few things as needed. If I totally go ultra low resolution, I can run it at like 18-24fps on my 12th gen intel integrated gpu....but at 2560x1600, it's like 3-5fps. Someone ran it on an Ally last test with a keyboard/mouse/monitor plugged in (1080p) and said it was pretty good.

If you're on a PC, you can use some external upscalers too I'll note. Driver-integrated stuff works (AMD has driver-level FSR1 for example), but Lossless Scaling is a pretty great (and cheap) Steam-store program that does external upscaling. It's got some caveats and you have to set it up (it's not too bad), and you'll want at least 30fps (and recommend 40fps+) going in, but you can upscale, use it for frame gen, or both.

Hope this helps. Happy to see some Mac interest btw - one potential benefit of Unity is being able to support more platforms that otherwise a tiny volunteer team would be able to, so I really hope we can have something native long-term.

Couple of mac shots - note the buttons in the bottom left (corner of inventory) on 2nd shot -
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Kirun said:

From my understanding, he's basically the lead? Similar to what he was in PoPish era EQ, EQ2, and then returning for OoW, I believe?

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First said:

That's probably fairly accurate but only in a very general way. We don't have titles really, just sort of general "areas". That said, Shawn, Ali, and Nick are the owners of NWC and they make final decisions when needed/appropriate. If we had titles, Shawn might be labeled something like Producer and Content Lead. Ali might be best viewed as Lead for DevOps/Programming, and Nick as Lead for Game Design/QA/Project Mgmt.

That doesn't really capture how we operate though or all the hats everyone wears. Everything is very collaborative and input comes from all quarters in a professional manner, while respecting each area. Examples - have had phenomenal ideas from artists and programmers for content/lore/quests, and we have people on content who can dabble in art, code, and technical solutions. I'm not just spouting business speak or fluff, that's really how it works.

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TJT said:

I haven't caught up on a lot of this until this week. I have read that Magician pets actually provide minor group buffs as well now? That's a nice update. Melee have a spellbook like casters do so its not just autotattack city?

What other class synergy enhancements are there? Do Mesmerized/CCd mobs have a visual indicator on them this time?

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TJT said:

I haven't caught up on a lot of this until this week. I have read that Magician pets actually provide minor group buffs as well now? That's a nice update. Melee have a spellbook like casters do so its not just autotattack city?

What other class synergy enhancements are there? Do Mesmerized/CCd mobs have a visual indicator on them this time?

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Kithani said:

Ok but if I need to make sure my Troll can work it and twerk it, who do I talk to

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Siliconemelons said:

Solid 30-35FPS in the PoMeat with the M3 - also the mouse works like one would expect, on the m2, it would jump around odd when right click camera moving - it would always jump back to center rather than, appearing back where you started the right click... if that makes any sense...

some icons on the menus are blank white / black - but this is not "in game" so we will see once I can play for real..

Also - this is a crossover thing I guess, but it never "keeps" the MnMlauncher in the bottle as an app - I always just go to the bottle, press install, non listed program, direct to MnMlauncher (dont use MNMexe directly it wont work always) - then it says it is "installing" and then launches and works.

Not a big deal, glad it works and I am looking forward to playing!

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TJT said:

So what are some cool things rogues can do this time?

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