Mac client needs to be reborn..? :(

[Reih]

FF14 was never intended to be ported to OS X. This was just considered an extra that maybe Transgaming would be able to do with their middleware. Transgaming used their middleware solucions really bad. Square saw it as acceptable, after all they are all apple users so they might have some extra money. Let's charge them for 60 with no options for collector's edition or similar. This way we can keep the money from people that didn't ask for a refund and maybe start something that might work. But for now the best we got is a third company that made 2 clicks to our software and it kinda works. Just not as intended. Not as it should be. And it turns out there are some parts of the game still showing this as a beta. not a full game.

SE should seriously thing something about the people that blindingly trusted them and got stabbed on the back with sush a crappy client. That's the least they can offer.

[Naylia]

Hideyuki,

Thank you for taking the time to address our concerns. For now I have requested and received a refund for the OS X client, but I look forward to seeing the progress you make and will certainly re-purchase if the performance improves to at least be close to Windows. A 20% hit would be one thing, but I see a 60-70% reduction in FPS at matching settings. I am intrigued in your idea to leverage both Metal and the DX11 client. They both sound promising and I look forward to seeing the results.

[urbanracer34]

Hideyuki,

I have been a Mac and Apple user since 1995, and NEVER have I heard of performance that is horrible as this. Even with middleware, us Mac users should be getting better performance for the money.

This is not acceptable, You can look on the FFXIV reddit or on the MacRumors forums and 99.9% of Mac users are or were complaining about low performance.

I agree, leveraging Metal would be a excellent way to fix the problem, but to do that, you need a native client. Please consider making a native Client. Blizzard Entertainment has done it all the time, and I have tested performance on all 3 programs on equal machines and they only get 1-2 FPS LOWER than Windows. One guy said since upgrading to the new OS X El Captian Beta, his Diablo 3performance on his system tripled! Clearly Apple is doing something right.

Who knows? You might even find more performance on/for the other platforms by changing the Mac code from a wrapper to a native client.

Thanks,

urbanracer34

[JonFarron]

I posted this in another thread but I'll post it here since it's on the front page.

I would also like to go ahead and mention that if you download the Windows 10 Preview ISO from Microsoft and install it in Bootcamp via a USB drive, you will receive a free copy of Windows 10 when it's released late July. (just be sure to log in with your Microsoft account in Win 10). So you guys could buy the PC version and get Windows on your mac for free. I would give the partition at least 150-200GBs if you have the space.

[Osmond]

Hmm reading the dev's post, in a sense blame apple for this.

[Brianmj]

Hmm reading the dev's post, in a sense blame apple for this.

Blame for what? Directx 9 came out in 2002, 9C came out in 2004. Any recent Mac that has a discrete GPU is more than capable of handling a game using the D3D9 feature set. All recent Macs support OpenGL 4.1, a superset of D3D9. Square handed us the Windows client. Many of us have looked inside the App folder, and we saw .dll files. The game is being executed at runtime, and those calls are being translated to Cocoa and OpenGL. This is overhead not found in the Windows or Playstation versions because Square expended the time and energy to develop for those platforms. This is not native OSX software. How is Apple to blame for this?

[Undrum]

This is why I just use wine and get better performance....

I've struggled to get FFXIV running under Wine on a Mac (although I understand that it tuns OK under Linux). How did you manage it?

[Wildsprite]

I would also like to go ahead and mention that if you download the Windows 10 Preview ISO from Microsoft and install it in Bootcamp via a USB drive, you will receive a free copy of Windows 10 when it's released late July. (just be sure to log in with your Microsoft account in Win 10). So you guys could buy the PC version and get Windows on your mac for free. I would give the partition at least 150-200GBs if you have the space.

I posted this in another thread but I'll post it here since it's on the front page.

that is only if you stay in the windows insider program. which means atleast every 6 months you need to install a new build possibly wiping your settings.
otherwise you need to have a legit copy of windows 7 or windows 8.1 to get windows 10 free.

[Sebazy]

Hmm reading the dev's post, in a sense blame apple for this.

And I assume you blamed Nintendo when Bleem couldn't run Ocarina of time correctly right?

In honesty, this client should either be free or native. Expecting people to pay £40 for a lazy wrapper job based on free open source software? That's just greedy =(

[KisaiTenshi]

And I assume you blamed Nintendo when Bleem couldn't run Ocarina of time correctly right?

In honesty, this client should either be free or native. Expecting people to pay £40 for a lazy wrapper job based on free open source software? That's just greedy =(

Bleem was the PSX emulator, that only worked on Windows 98 and no future version of Windows. The appeal of it was to run pirated games. Duh. That's what every PC "console emulator" purpose is.

WINE is not a hardware emulator, it's a wrapper over over the Win32 API, DirectX, etc. Somethings just can not be translated and are thus kludged together in software... typically inefficient code paths that assume things that just aren't true. The number one assumption, threading. Most Windows games, including DirectX9 games are programmed as if there was only one CPU core. WINE is developed against the pthread library. The pthread library is a "standard Unix" type of Posix Thread library. But the underlying way they are implemented can vary substantially.

A similar effort was made for the Glide API on Windows back when the first N64 emulator came out... YES that awful emulator that ran N64 games extremely well only worked with 3DFX cards, everyone else had to deal with a Glide-to-DirectX or Glide-to-OpenGL wrapper, that did, yes, the exact same thing we're talking about in this thread. Running a non-native application on another platform, with an additional graphics-hardware translation layer thrown on top.

Now more to the point, if SE simply ported the PS4 version to the Mac, we'd be having a different discussion entirely. But I'll give SE the benefit of the doubt and they were likely mislead by the middleware provider that it could be done. It was probably to gauge interest in how many people want the MacOS X version, and likely may result in a native port at some point, closer to how WoW got a native port after... I don't know how long. It predates the Intel transition in 2006 though. But oh gawd look at all the issues the MacOS X WoW client has.