Come on ESO your Mac M1 issues are not compiled game code

mark.hetrickb14_ESO · November 2021

Just some background. Have played ESO off and on since Beta. Yes I have a monkey for those in the know. Played on an iMac because back in the day the game was great on an iMac and then switched to PC when iMac support dwindled for a time. Do have some programming skills.

Fired up ESO on my new Mini M1 (what a potentially great little box). Could not get the mouse to work at all. Set sensitivity to minimum and camera would not settle down. I tried setting user settings.txt with minimal results. Yes I know how to adjust configuration txt files.

Then I launched the game directly from the program bypassing the launcher. It works great! This tells me there is a configuration file in the launcher startup containing a variable that is messed up. I'm still looking but am loosing my patience with the lack of info from ESO.

No Matt you don't have a massive OS/chip compile problem on the Mac M1. You have a "you let go anybody that understands txt setup files" problem. The native processor support was solved by much smaller publishers, like Eve and comparable publishers like WoW. Sorry for the vent, but go ahead and factually prove me wrong. So buy an ARM compiler or we will assume you are tacitly admitting that the game will be abandoned in a year or so.

How about this as a fix. Publish a list of all ESO config files for Mac with variable values and let you user base fix the problems. I will bet they have both the skill and time to fix these files. No, no-one can hack your game with info on configuration files. If they could then you're a... will not a very smart person.

Ok for those great forum members that have pulled this great game out of Oblivion over the years, do you know what the launcher is loading that breaks the mouse in the game? It appears that the launcher is loading some sort of interface file for the mouse (probably a Big Sur callout) that is incompatible. or even worse is calling out some in-house ESO code. Mouse is acting like an analog device with any movement continuing after the mouse stops. And please, I have read all the Catalina fixes. I'm on Monterey which is a completely different OS.

Thanks for any leads.

Cortinus · November 2021

I had spinning mouse issue a week ago on M1 MBP and this fixed it.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/437539/eso-amp-macos-mojave-spinning-issue-solved

BlueRaven · November 2021

Great write up!!

It is so strange. They give the impression of a large company, but then issues like this makes it seem like they have about two people working on the code.

A lot of the issues here feel like basic problems (like the ones you pointed out, and the game controller issue, or my personal issue of zone crashing) that feel like can be solved quickly. They just seem unwilling to actually even try to fix the problems.

vgabor · November 2021

BlueRaven wrote: »

It is so strange. They give the impression of a large company, but then issues like this makes it seem like they have about two people working on the code.

Well, each large company made up from smaller departments, and for the ZOS MacOS department the two people might be an optimistic estimation, it rather feels like just an occasional part time contractor now and then

BlueRaven · November 2021

vgabor wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

It is so strange. They give the impression of a large company, but then issues like this makes it seem like they have about two people working on the code.

Well, each large company made up from smaller departments, and for the ZOS MacOS department the two people might be an optimistic estimation, it rather feels like just an occasional part time contractor now and then

Agreed.

zindro · November 2021

Is ESO really much more complex than WoW? Blizzard came out with native M1 support for WoW, a YEAR ago. Most code just requires a recompile. I can’t imagine in this day and age ESO relies on code written in x86 assembly…? As a software developer who is generally curious, I’d love to get more details on the challenges in supporting M1.

zindro · November 2021

Also, I just want to add, there is a chicken and egg problem here. In order to build support on the Mac, you need a Mac client that is on par with the Windows client. But in order to do that, you need to put effort into it rather than treat it as a side project. Like with public transit, no one is going to take it if it is unreliable, slow, or intermittent. You first need to make it reliable, fast, and predictable before (not after) it becomes popular..

Balgrim · November 2021

It is obvious, unfortunately the silence of Apple, which has lasted too long in the direction of professionals and the recent acquisition of the parent company by Microsoft do not bode well for the Mac platform, I hope I am wrong.

sean.plackerb14_ESO · December 2021

Balgrim wrote: »

It is obvious, unfortunately the silence of Apple, which has lasted too long in the direction of professionals and the recent acquisition of the parent company by Microsoft do not bode well for the Mac platform, I hope I am wrong.

I honestly don't think the acquisition by Microsoft will make any difference. For better or worse.

Look at what happened when they purchased Minecraft. People freaked that they would pull it from everything except Windows and Xbox, or dramatically change the game etc. It's still available on all the same platforms, and Microsoft has let the studio do what it wants.

Making your game playable to as many people as possible is particularly important for MMO's. So, I don't see any reason that Microsoft would interfere in any way when it comes to the game being on Mac. They don't have any problems with it still being on Playstation, the Playstation version was updated to run with better graphics settings and higher res at the same time the xbox series x/s update came out.

ZOS support for the Mac client has always been pretty poor, it's just continuing to stay that way.