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Need testers!

Posted: August 30th, 2010, 8:59 pm
by BasiliskWrangler
Hey Mac people- go here, test this:

http://www.basiliskgames.com/forums/vie ... =10&t=4362

Re: Need testers!

Posted: August 31st, 2010, 2:27 pm
by macdude22
I've experienced no issues for a couple hours, on the following configuration.

Mac Pro (2006 1,1)
10.6.4
6GB RAM
Radeon 4870

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 6:58 pm
by Dragonlady
Using my laptop (Mac OS x 2.33GHz Intel Core2 Duo) I HAVE been having problems. When I load it in, make a character and pick either the full screen OR the 'windowed' screen it looks fine though a bit pixelated (so used to book2 crispness!) and not as nice as I remember. Shrug. BUT, if I save the game either QuickSave or by 'name' and quit the game and later reload up the game. The background has those white splotches all over the place! I can walk over them, but they stay there. I've tried reloading, etc. and it always comes out with white areas no matter what I do. If I play the game without saving and stopping the screen looks fine.

One other thing, on creating a character, I was able to get higher than level 5 in a skill even though the screen said you couldn't. I thought I had used up all my points and went back to change stat points. Looked at the screen and 3 points had been put back in the skill 'box'. I popped a point into Arcane Elemental (had 5 already) without thinking and got 6 points! I used the other points elsewhere.
(had: 6 elemental, 2 lt. armor, 3 Mercantile, 1 pic loc, 1 unarmed)

And lastly, the 'windowed' screen looked a heck of a lot smaller than I remember. My son has been fiddling around with the laptop so he might be able to fix some of the problem. :cry:

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 8:29 pm
by BasiliskWrangler
Dragonlady - what version of MacOS are you running? Is your system fully up-to-date for whatever version of MacOS you have?

And to be clear- Book II runs fine but Book I is screwy?? If so, that doesn't make much sense to me. The actual graphics drivers and rendering system is essentially the same between the two games.

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 9:04 pm
by MyGameCompany
Works fine here on both of my machines. I ran it in both fullscreen and windowed.

Here's the specs:

Mac Pro (my desktop workstation, 2 years old)
2x2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 4 GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 8800 GT, running OS X 10.5.8

MacBook Pro (my laptop, which I bought in June, so it's very recent)
2.66 GHz Intel Core i7, 4 GB RAM, NVidia GeForce GT 330M, running OS X 10.6.4

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 9:43 pm
by IJBall
Dragonlady wrote:One other thing, on creating a character, I was able to get higher than level 5 in a skill even though the screen said you couldn't. I thought I had used up all my points and went back to change stat points. Looked at the screen and 3 points had been put back in the skill 'box'. I popped a point into Arcane Elemental (had 5 already) without thinking and got 6 points! I used the other points elsewhere.
(had: 6 elemental, 2 lt. armor, 3 Mercantile, 1 pic loc, 1 unarmed)
In Book I, you were "allowed" to go Level 6 in a Skill in character creation, provided it was your Character Class' starting Skill - yeah, you've always been able to do that with your Starting Skill, IIRC.

However, I do now note that it does say:
"You cannot raise any skill more than 5 points per character level."
at the bottom of the screen (I never noticed that before!!).

While that is technically true of the Starting Skill (starting Level 1 + 5 points = Level 6), it is not true for any other Skill (3 points for Level 1 + 4 more points = Level 5, for a total of 7 points!).

I don't know how BW wants to handle this kind of minor issue. I'm not sure I have a ready suggestion for it!... :mrgreen:

Edit: Maybe the quote can simply be changed to:
"You cannot raise any skill more than 5 Levels per character Level-Up."
I think that is a true statement in all cases...

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 10:16 pm
by BasiliskWrangler
IJBall wrote:I don't know how BW wants to handle this kind of minor issue. I'm not sure I have a ready suggestion for it!... :mrgreen:
I'm going to overlook it, for now.

I have no plans to change anything about the way the game plays, or fix any existing bugs, or even correct any typos. As it is now, so it shall be forever....

...except for small tweaks to ensure it is playable on all three platforms, as we have advertised it to be. That's what this "Version 1.06 project" is all about...getting the original Book I back to a playable state on current OSes.

Any future updates to the game, including new content and the correction of obscure bugs, will be part of the "Eschalon: Book I Collector's Edition" release, which will be replace the standard edition of Book I. Book I 1.06 will be removed from existence and replaced with Book I CE 1.0.

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 10:45 pm
by MyGameCompany
By the way, I tried Dragonlady's issue about saving a game, quitting, and restoring. I didn't see that problem on either of my machines.

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 11:04 pm
by Dragonlady
BasiliskWrangler wrote:Dragonlady - what version of MacOS are you running? Is your system fully up-to-date for whatever version of MacOS you have?

And to be clear- Book II runs fine but Book I is screwy?? If so, that doesn't make much sense to me. The actual graphics drivers and rendering system is essentially the same between the two games.
Well, it was my son who copied it from my G4 to the laptop, perhaps he got the wrong one? I'll have him check it tonight. I was already in bed watching tv last night. He was also backing up my computers, which he does lately at the end of every month. I'll ask him for the stats on the computer.

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 11:43 pm
by Blue Mist
I just loaded the Book I Beta Demo and having previously installed Book I (ver. 1.04) and Book II (latest version) which both seemed to look and work just like they are supposed to, I was surprised that the Beta Demo graphics looked so stepped and with a lot of white splotches on the ground. Since both Book I versions save in the same place, I tried to load a few of the older versions saved games. While a few did not load and crashed the application, the one that did load gave me the same results. Perhaps something went wrong when you compiled this Demo version.

I'm now using a new 27" iMac with iOS 10.6.4.

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 8:47 am
by IJBall
Dragonlady wrote:Using my laptop (Mac OS x 2.33GHz Intel Core2 Duo) I HAVE been having problems. When I load it in, make a character and pick either the full screen OR the 'windowed' screen it looks fine though a bit pixelated (so used to book2 crispness!) and not as nice as I remember. Shrug. BUT, if I save the game either QuickSave or by 'name' and quit the game and later reload up the game. The background has those white splotches all over the place! I can walk over them, but they stay there. I've tried reloading, etc. and it always comes out with white areas no matter what I do. If I play the game without saving and stopping the screen looks fine.
It should be noted that this problem with the "white splotches" that Dragonlady and Blue Mist are seeing has been reported before with previous versions of Book I (both Steam-only and "regular" editions).

I can't tell from this thread whether this issue was seen in v1.04, but it was definitely seen with v1.05.

In that thread, restarting the computer was reported by a couple of people to have fixed the problem.

Having said all that, it would probably be good if we could track down, isolate and eliminate this bug with v1.06 - so any additional info people can report on this "white splotches" issue would probably be really helpful. (Sending BW a Save Game with this might also be worth a try...)

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 12:32 pm
by BasiliskWrangler
I posted a request to help test this 1.06 version over on the developer forums that I frequent- nobody there seems to have an issue with this Mac build. So, we are just down to Blue Mist and Dragonlady- it looks like it could be something to do with their systems.

I am just going to go ahead and release this as is. I know for a fact the bug fixes will help far more people than the potential for glitchy graphics will hurt. Maybe with a wider release we can pinpoint the cause of the glitches.

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 2:43 pm
by Blue Mist
I just restarted my iMac to see if it would get rid of the white splotches in the Book I Demo. They are still there.

As I mentioned before, the latest release versions of Book I and Book II work just fine. So...no problems here. Good Luck with finding this bug!

Re: Need testers!

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 4:33 pm
by Dragonlady
BasiliskWrangler wrote:Dragonlady - what version of MacOS are you running? Is your system fully up-to-date for whatever version of MacOS you have?

And to be clear- Book II runs fine but Book I is screwy?? If so, that doesn't make much sense to me. The actual graphics drivers and rendering system is essentially the same between the two games.
I don't know what is going on. I've rebooted. Turned machine off and on, etc. And now it gives me the 'snow patches' even after creating a new character. The first time I tried it, it didn't do that, only when I saved and reloaded. sigh.

Here's what I think you asked for:
Version 10.4.11
2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

I hope it isn't the old program messing things up. Probably machine too old and not updated. Shrug. Sorry.