I’m sure there is little to no balancing for pvpAre they balancing PVP or is it going to be a shit fest? I prefer the latter.
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Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO
- Thread starter Flobee
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Siliconemelons
Avatar of War Slayer
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Kriptini
Vyemm Raider
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I remember the devs saying that this game was not going to even have PvP focus so I imagine it's not going to be balanced at all.
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Kithani
Blackwing Lair Raider
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I can hear the nerd rage now, and it brings a tear to my eye :,) unbalanced PVP, as god intended.
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Nirgon
YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE
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Someone's always gonna get the jump on someone else, or have a little better gear or any of number of reasons or factors. Just play the game imo.
Daidraco
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Ive always thought balanced classes in pvp was a dumb idea, anyways. Their should always be a rock, paper, scissors kind of focus, though imo. Tank can kill assassin, assassin can kill caster, caster can kill tank. Etc. But i wish this team the best of luck regardless.
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For anyone that would like to catch up on the history of this game's development, this video is pretty great.
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Well, it's definitely going to be easier to play on Windows. We've had a few people play on Linux - no major issues supposedly (I haven't installed Nobara yet to mess with it myself). You can play on Mac with Crossover, albeit there's some emulation performance penalties for sure on my M1 Air. If you can solve the patcher not working, could probably play it for free on GPTK/Whiskey/Wine on Mac. Parallels has a very large performance penalty I've heard. I haven't played with an Android Windows emulator yet. ShadowPC would probably work fine.
I should probably have come armed with some examples, but in general I'd say - if you like modern MMO downtimes, you'll probably still think it's super slow. If you're pretty familiar with classic & early EQ rates down to hp/mana per tick across the levels, it's a bit faster in general. At lower levels it's going to be much more similar (ie before spells, meditate skill, hp regen level increases, etc), but get some levels under your belt to observe some divergence. I think it's felt pretty good in our internal playtests (I've played clr/shm/wiz/rog/bst recently in groups around lvls 5-25), but ymmv.
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Siliconemelons
Avatar of War Slayer
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Slow hp/mana regen is integral to this whole project so I hope it stays slow. Once you start taking away pieces the whole puzzle can fall apart.
I don't want to post again so i'll add: I have not been following this very close because I've been in such a busy stage of my life since i've stopped playing early P99 Red. (how many years has that been? how time flys).
BUT , a game like this has me actually looking forward to "semi" retirement and going hard/long in a challenging old school world like they are talking about in this game.
I'm already dreaming of a High Elf Inquisitor, as an tribute to my favorite P99 red char (who was a Paladin, but I always like the self righteous "inquisitor" side of holy warrior. Was a confessor in shadowbane for same reason) . Or maybe a troll SK like way back 1999 rallos...
I love the plethora of classes, I hope they do what they did in 1999 and have a spreadsheet with all the detailed abilities of each class and ensure each has its own domain , specialty, and does not step on the toes of others (like no Root spell for Magicians in EQ, for example, as a way to starkly contrast them to other casters).
It sounds like these devs won't get pushed around by noobs like Sillius did in Vanguard (or wtf ever his name was that slowly dismantled all "hardcore" systems in vanguard).
Nirgon: oh you will be seeing me on the pvp server of course, trust.
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Nirgon
YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE
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Alrighty well let's bury the hatchet. I want a good clean grown autist show down. I don't wanna see anyone's scummy dark side, in retrospect who actually enjoys that kind of win at all costs garbage.
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So to run through all of the mac gaming options I'm aware of -I have a 15” m2 air- if you have a guide please lmk
I dont have any emu stuff on it so…
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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