Hey everyone,
I appreciate everyone being patient with the mac port (those who are patient that is). Naturally we hit some bumps but once again we got a patch out as soon as possible, it would have been faster but stupid STEAM had to go out and have vacation with their families over Thanksgiving....where do they get off....
Anyway, the latest patch that's up addresses every issue I can address and the purpose of this blog post is to inform all you Mac people the same things Windows people were informed of when they got the game. We did a blog post when that version came out, might as well do another one for the Mac right?
Minimum Requirements:
The iMac that SMB was developed on is a 2008 with the following specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz
2GB 800 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM
ATI Radeon 2600 HD
For all intents and purposes, these are the minimum system requirements for Super Meat Boy on the Mac...not so much the processor but the graphics card. You need to have something pretty decent to run this game. We never officially supported GMA 950 or any of the Intel Integrated HD graphics even on Windows. The game will "run" on configurations with integrated graphics, however it does not run well and there is no way I can make it run well at this point.
Mac Book Pros and Integrated Graphics:
I've run into quite a few people with Mac Book Pros that put my development iMac to shame that were having significant lag issues with the game. After digging around I found out that Mac Book Pros have integrated graphics and Nvidia / ATI setups that the machine can switch between since about 2010. I have an Alienware laptop that is the same so I know the frustration of running a game, having it run slow and go "But this fucking thing has an NVidia 330M in it...". It seems like quite a few mac users aren't aware that their Mac Book Pro does this, so we're going to cover how to turn this off in order to play the game correctly.
(I don't have a Mac Book Pro, so I stole these images from
here)
Step 1: Go to your System Settings
Step 2: Go to Energy Saver in the System Settings Menu
Step 3: Select High Performance (I think this is a checkbox in later OS's)
Step 4: Restart the computer
There is also a Apple Support page for changing the graphics settings:
How to Set Graphics Performance
How to Set Graphics Peformance on Older versions of OSX
And for determining which graphics card you are currently using:
How to Determine which Graphics Card is in use.
Accessing the Command Line:
Many people are confused on how to set command line options in Steam. We covered this a long time ago but with the release of the Mac version we need to cover it again
Step 1: Open up your Steam client, hit the button at the top that says Library (just like you're launching the game).
Step 2: Right or Control Click and hit Properties
Step 3: Click on the Set Launch Options button
Step 4: Type in your command line options
Supported Command Line Options:
The command line allows you to change detail, resolution, and windowed/fullscreen status. When setting multiple options they must be separated with a space.
Fullscreen / Windowed
-fullscreen Sets the game to run in full screen mode
-windowed Sets the game to run in windowed mode
Resolutions
-640x480 Sets the game to run at 640x480
-800x600 Sets the game to run at 800x600
-1024x768 Sets the game to run at 1024x768
-1280x720 Sets the game to run at 1280x720
-1920x1080 Sets the game to run at 1920x1080
These are the only supported resolutions from the command line.
Detail Settings. This will help address lag issues if you are experiencing them.
-ultralowdetail
Runs the game at the lowest detail, parallax is taken out, particle effects are ignored, animals are missing, set pieces are gone, lighting is ignored, images are lowest possible resolution (made for integrated graphics though not officially supported)
-lowdetail
Runs the game with with lowest resolution images, lighting is ignored, particle effects are ignored (use this if you are having lag on CHAD, Dr. Fetus, or levels where you die from moving platforms)
-meddetail
Runs the game with medium resolution images (mid range setting, run this if you are having slight lag)
-highdetail
Runs the game with highest resolution images (run this if you meet my minimum requirements listed above)
So lets say you wanted to run in fullscreen at the highest resolution at the highest detail, your command line would be:
-fullscreen -highdetail -1920x1080
lets say you were having laggy framerate issues, your command line would be:
-windowed -lowdetail -640x480
Custom Controls:
Update:
Due to an unfixable bug in the Mac version, we don't support 360 controllers on Mac. I do apologize for this. The bug is unfixable because I can't again risk killing everyones game with another update. The game incorrectly assumes that no more than 12 buttons will ever be on a controller. This is mainly true, however Mac controller drivers map the JoyHAT as 4 different buttons it seems, which makes it so you can't map B X and Y properly. This also messes up the start and select buttons. It was a mistake on my part. The bug could be fixed, however there is a significant risk that fixing it will break other things to the point where its unplayable with the keyboard which we would then have to go in and fix and start a whole new cycle of updating the game / breaking something in an update, rinse, repeat. I am sorry about this, do know that it is fixed in our new engine for game 2. Also, non Xbox 360 controllers appear to work fine. Joy2Key esque programs may remedy this issue, but it has not been tested by me. Again, we are sorry about this.
You can now customize the controls of Meatboy himself. This customization only applies to Meat Boy since it's the most important aspect of the game. There is a file in the install directory called "buttonmap.cfg" (It was buttoMmap.cfg when I first uploaded it...I was quite tired). So it works like this. There are two sections in the file, keyboard and gamepad. You can set the movement, jump, and special / run keys to anything you like (within reason) through this file. So you lefties that wanted WASD, here you go. The config file is case sensitive, so just make sure its all lower case. Some buttons that do not have alphanumeric represtation have special names like:
Enter: return
Left Shift: shift
Right Shift: rshift
Space: space
Left Control: control
Right Control: rcontrol
You can only bind an action to one key.
For Joysticks you can customize the jump and special / run buttons by putting in the button number. For instance, the default is set to 1 and 3, which correspond to A and X on the Xbox 360 gamepad. 1 and 3 correspond to the equivalent of B and Y on Logitech controllers. We only support up 10 button codes, so if your controller's buttons map to numbers above that we can't support it.
There is another option called useanalog. This is set to true by default. This property allows the game to use the joystick as the dpad. If you are experiencing weirdness, set this to false and it will disable it.
Note: These controls only affect Meat Boy, Menu's are hard coded with controls.
Getting in touch with me to report bugs
The best way is to email me a crash dump and to send an email through our contact us form. Twitter also works though I'll just ask you to email me if the problem can't be solved immediately.
That's about it. This should fix every problem we are able to fix with the Mac port. Again I appreciate the patience and I'm sorry the Mac port was delayed so long and had a rough start. There's a super long story to all of this, why it took long, blah blah blah, but it's moot. I actually wasn't supposed to do the port but we had some issues at the last minute and Super Tommy had to come to the rescue...as he does every time...though his power source is draining. He needs to work on something other than Meat Boy.
ANYWAYS, everyone take care, thanks for being good fans, we love you and if I can help you with your problem, you know I will:)
Tommy
