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Any idea when The Sims 3 will be 100% compatible with Snow Leopard?
AlexRoz9
Posts: 309 New Member
Okay, so the last time a SimGuru posted anything about Snow Leopard was on August 27th, (yeah over two months ago,) and I'm admittedly getting a little bit frustrated. Has EA released anymore information either on the TS3 website, the EA website, or somewhere in this forum outside of the over-two-month-old sticky thread regarding Snow Leopard compatibility and Mac OS X?
Basically, the only thing that's keeping me from upgrading to Snow Leopard is The Sims 3. My Mac Pro has an nVidia Quadro FX 5600 graphics card. I realize that this card is "technically unsupported," but in reality, it's superior to most (if not all) of the "supported" graphics cards for TS3, especially some of the lower-end cards that EA is supporting. However, I've noticed that the third patch for TS3 turned the most expensive desk in the game black. (I don't remember its name, just that it's the most expensive desk in the game.) Since I don't know what graphics card Cider is treating my nVidia Quadro FX 5600 as, I don't want to upgrade until I'm sure that all of the "supported" graphics cards are once again compatible with The Sims 3.
I really want to install my Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" upgrade that I pre-ordered back in August, but I don't want to be unable to play TS3 if I do so. I'm just wondering if I might have missed anymore announcements regarding Snow Leopard; again, any information is useful. Thank you all in advance for your time.
Basically, the only thing that's keeping me from upgrading to Snow Leopard is The Sims 3. My Mac Pro has an nVidia Quadro FX 5600 graphics card. I realize that this card is "technically unsupported," but in reality, it's superior to most (if not all) of the "supported" graphics cards for TS3, especially some of the lower-end cards that EA is supporting. However, I've noticed that the third patch for TS3 turned the most expensive desk in the game black. (I don't remember its name, just that it's the most expensive desk in the game.) Since I don't know what graphics card Cider is treating my nVidia Quadro FX 5600 as, I don't want to upgrade until I'm sure that all of the "supported" graphics cards are once again compatible with The Sims 3.
I really want to install my Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" upgrade that I pre-ordered back in August, but I don't want to be unable to play TS3 if I do so. I'm just wondering if I might have missed anymore announcements regarding Snow Leopard; again, any information is useful. Thank you all in advance for your time.
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While I'm glad that the game works for you in SL, as it should for anyone who upgrades, I know that it hasn't worked for some people, and it's admittedly the fact that my graphics card (nVidia Quadro FX 5600) is technically unsupported, coupled with EA telling people not to upgrade to Snow Leopard that's keeping me from doing so. If my graphics card was officially supported by EA, (I still honestly don't understand why it isn't,) I'd admittedly be more willing to take a chance with the upgrade.
The only other thing that's made me reluctant to upgrade to SL, and this has absolutely nothing to do with TS3 mind you, is that my brother who works in an IT office wound up with a botched SL installation on his MacBook Pro, and wound up spending 12 hours just to get Leopard running again, before deciding he'd wait until the Holidays to try and fix the problem he was having with Snow Leopard. Considering that I purchased both my Snow Leopard upgrade and my brother's at the same time (he paid me for the disc, but I purchased them together,) and both arrived in the same box, I've been slightly hesitant to install SL. I fully intend to back up everything on my Mac Pro before I perform the installation though; that way if SL doesn't install correctly on my machine, I can at least recover my data.
Finally, it would help me a lot if I knew more about the Mac that you're using. To play The Sims 3, I run a Mac Pro (Early 2008), A.K.A. "Mac Pro 3,1" under "About This Mac..." Are you running a Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, MacBook, iMac, or Mac Mini? Each of these machines can be very different; a Unibody MacBook Pro from October of last year is similar to, but still very different from the recently released Mac Mini. To type this message, I'm using a Mac Mini (Early 2006,) with the dreaded GMA 950 chipset. The two machines are as different as night and day, so more information about your Mac, such as whether it's a laptop or a desktop, the graphics card inside of it, and even what year it was made can admittedly be incredibly useful, not just to me, but to other Simmers as well.
Again, I'm glad that TS3 is working for you under SL, but I really don't want to lose the time I've put into the game if I upgrade and all of the sudden I'm no longer able to play TS3. I was hoping that EA would've announced that they'd ironed out any problems with SL by now, but hopefully this thread will "remind" them that there are still people who are holding off on a Snow Leopard upgrade because of this game.
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP51.0074.B01
Yeah, I have the same issue with that same desk - it's called Desk Historia something-or-other.
I'm sorry you're having this issue, but I'm glad I'm not the only one. It's so weird that it's just this one desk and nothing else?
I had a ticket open with EA to try and figure out what is causing this but in the end both the tech guy and I gave up - I ended up getting some free SimPoints out of it (which I can't use right now because the launcher is acting up... but it's the thought that counts... :twisted: )
I have OSX 10.5.8. My graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce GT 130, which is on the list of supported cards for WA.
I have a 24" iMac, 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 4 GB RAM; 1067MHZ DDR3.
My guess is that Cider is treating your card the same as mine, since it's screwing up that same desk...
I just don't understand why it's that specific desk and nothing else. :?:
Last information I got (last week) was that they were still working on the incompatibility issues with Snow Leopard.
On the other hand, according to the tech guy, with my card it should be safe to upgrade.
I'm a bit reluctant to upgrade just because the EA guy says so, though...
I'm also afraid SL might totally screw up my Sims 1 games, which are running like a dream right now (better than they ever have, in spite of the fact that this Mac is centuries beyond what Aspyr wishes to support...
KarinL, thank you for the desk name; I keep forgetting it, because to me it's become "that jet-black desk," which it wasn't when I first installed TS3 back in June. I'd say that you're right, it is weird that it's only this one desk, but that's the textbook definition of a "bug" in a game--a single problem that affects many users. My guess is that the black desk is a direct result of how Cider handles things, but I could be wrong; it should be something that's easy for EA to fix, but I honestly think that they're only reacting when enough people complain constantly about a problem, much they way that they did for the PC/Mac problem with getting the exclusive cars to download and the Simpoints to work.
Hmm... you and I are both running OS X 10.5.8, so the game shouldn't have any problem on either machine. If the "base game" doesn't officially support the GT 130, I'd think Cider would try to treat it as a similar card, I just wish I knew what card Cider was treating your GT 130 and my Quadro FX 5600 as.
I think you're probably right about Cider treating both of our cards as the same card, what I don't understand is why EA didn't include a "generic" set of graphics drivers that'd run as many cards as possible. Sure, the game might look better with a GTX 285 and GTX 285 drivers than with "generic" drivers, but a set of "generic" drivers would at least let us play the game without any wonky bugs like the "black desk bug" that a few of us have experienced. I think the second update caused the problem on my machine, so my guess is that EA has a poorly coded line of programming somewhere in Cider that they haven't found and thus haven't fixed. If we knew of a "supported" card having this problem, we might be able to figure out what Cider is treating our graphics cards as.
Thank you for letting me know that EA is still trying to make TS3 SL compatible. I'm glad that they're working on it, although in truth, it should've been compatible (even if slightly problematic) on August 22nd when Snow Leopard launched. EA had the chance to download the developer builds that Apple kept sending out, and they could've anticipated problems for over a year before Snow Leopard was available to the general public. Even if SL compatibility had been ready by September I'd have been happy, but it's now November and TS3 isn't officially supported under SL, and that's pathetic for any company, especially a company with the resources of EA.
As far as upgrading goes, your card isn't listed in EA's sticky (neither is mine,) and if they're claiming WA support for it, there's a good chance that they've tested it to some degree, so you might be able to upgrade without a problem, but in truth, I'd only upgrade after A)backing everything on my drive up, and
I actually just picked up The Sims Complete Collection earlier this year while waiting for TS3, and it does run incredibly smoothly under Leopard. From what I understand, one person has claimed that SL has caused TSCC to stop functioning under SL, while all other users have reported that it's working just as well as it did under Leopard. If you're running an Intel chipset, it's running under Rosetta anyway, so as long as you install Rosetta you shouldn't have any problems. I admittedly checked for SL compatibility with TSCC as well. Aspyr supposedly recompiled the entire game for the Mac port of the "Complete Collection," making a G5 a "requirement," while noting that "unofficially, it should work on any system that the original games ran on." I don't think your TS1 games would be totally screwed up, but as I said, I'd back up everything--and I do mean everything--on my hard drive before upgrading to Snow Leopard. Backing-up should be something people do regularly anyway, but it should certainly be done before an OS upgrade; that way if SL does cause problems, you could effectively "remove" it by restoring your Mac via a time machine back-up. I had a botched 10.5.7 upgrade on my PowerBookG4 (the "Delta" update Apple sends out via software update caused problems for several people,) and wound up restoring to a 10.5.6 back-up, downloading the "10.5.7 combo" update, installing said update, and had no problems afterwards. Again, before any upgrade, even a point upgrade, I recommend backing up your data.
Finally, before I forget, Cider isn't entirely to blame here. Even native Mac Ports of games have issues; just look at Civilization IV which has an excellent native Mac Port. The game was scripted in the Python scripting language though and the Windows and Mac versions of the game use different versions of Python. There was a great thread on the CivFanatics forums about this where one person pointed out that Windows' Users-->Documents and Settings-->My Documents isn't the same as OS X's User-->user-name-here-->Documents, and that even native ports can have problems. In the case of Civ IV, custom DLLs won't run on the Mac port because of the Python differences. (Modified games with generic DLLs will run though.) This means that many of the fan-created mods for Civ IV, a game ported by Aspyr, admittedly don't work with the Mac. Granted, Aspyr handled Civ IV better than they handled Civ III, which didn't include a port of the map editor, at least not a working one; if I want to create my own maps, I'd have to fire up my old Windows machine and copy said maps to my Mac.
At least EA has tried to make the custom content for TS3 "universal" without any ridiculous modifications that would exclude Mac users from said content, which admittedly isn't an uncommon occurrence. As far as your Launcher problems go KarinL, blame EA for apparently programming around IE rather than any of the other cross-platform browsers. IE is the only browser with no Mac support whatsoever. (Microsoft dropped it in 2003, Apple was willing to continue supporting IE for OS X alongside Safari.) EA could've designed the launcher to work best with Safari, a cross-platform browser that they have easy access too. If EA didn't want to use Safari, they could've designed the launcher around FireFox, which is admittedly my browser of choice. Again, it's cross-platform, unlike IE. If they didn't want to use FireFox, they could've designed the launcher around Oprah, which is also cross-platform. I could go on, but I think you get my point. What I don't understand is why EA designed a Win/Mac game and then based their entire store and exchange around IE--a Windows-only browser, and a poorly coded browser at that. As a result, Cider has to not only emulate the game, it has to make a website optimized for IE work under Firefox and Safari, and that's pretty difficult to do. IE doesn't really follow the HTML standards the way virtually every other browser does, so things that work in IE don't work in any other browser, and things that work in every other browser don't work in IE. I've had to deal with EA techs who were ignorant of this as well. I remember calling EA with a problem accessing custom content back in June, telling them I had a Mac, and after a few hours of trying to fix my problem, EA's tech just told me "well, I got your promotional cars to work under IE;" I was furious--I had no way to use IE, and Safari and Firefox weren't responding. Eventually EA did get my cars to work, and I commend them for that, but not without a month of me having to constantly contact them after support ticket after support ticket expired. I just wish that EA was paying a bit more attention to the Mac version of the game. As I've stated before, I really wish they'd make some of the code OS X native to avoid future problems; I mean, they could still use Cider to port most of the game, but native graphics support based around OpenGL would be nice to have, especially since it seems to be the biggest problem with the port.
However, I was having issues since the 1.4 patch, which came out before Snow Leopard did -- I have a feeling this all stems from problems with the fact that, in the end, Sims isn't technically Mac native. There seems to be little-to-no similarities in the end when comparing problems - some people have cards that work, other don't - some people have installed custom content, other's haven't - it's like us Mac users are hit or miss!
I have the same uogrades, so its good to know that it nit just my mac thats having problems. I only have one family 'cause whenever I try to move it a family to a house or lot it will quit sims 3 and go back to the main screen. is there any way I can contact EA games to ask the to fix this?
You can attempt to contact the EA support line - but I don't think it'll be that helpful, from my experience. I went back and forth for over a month, and it never helped me.
The game would not run for me when we upgraded to snow leopard, it would not even load the launcher. I got my tech-y boyfriend to see if he could help and he got it running and it's fine on my old macbook pro (specs: 2GHz intel core duo, 1GB memory, ATI RadeonX1600).
This is what he did. He turned on the root console on the mac and it reported an error with a profile that was not in the home directory, shared area. Once he saw the error message, he renamed the file and restarted the sims 3. The game regenerated that profile and was correct and ran fine afterwards, though I do have to run it on a low graphic setting.
Hope this helps, good luck. I'll cross my fingers for you.
Solarspork, the card may be "supported," but I think the problem is that EA has yet to officially "support" Snow Leopard itself, and judging by the looks of things, not only do we not have SL compatibility, we now can't receive the patches needed to play World Adventures. (The only consolation I have right now is that my old Apple Studio Display just died at 11:00P.M. last night, so I won't be playing any Sims games until it's either repaired or replaced, and I'd like to avoid replacing it until Apple upgrades the 30" Cinema Display.)
It's funny you should mention that you upgraded specifically for improved functionality under Adobe CS4. I actually am avoiding the purchase of CS4 and sticking with CS3 (I can live with the quirks under SL--I've been tolerating the quirks of CS under Leopard on my PowerBook G4 for awhile now,) until CS5 is released, because Adobe decided to be totally ignorant of multiple "notices/warnings" from Apple on how they planned to handle 64-bit OS X. I admittedly skipped CS2 and CS4 because I didn't see enough of an enhancement in the way the programs ran to justify an upgrade. (The ability to run both Final Cut Studio and Premiere Pro on my Mac, coupled with native Intel coding were enough to push me to CS3 though, and if I had the money for it, I'd be running Avid as well.) I will of course be upgrading to CS5 Master Collection when Adobe releases it; my Mac Pro was a BTO machine designed with the idea of 64-bit Photoshop in mind, and my 16GB of RAM should allow me to take advantage of 64-bit OS X when the time comes.
As far as the lack of SL compatibility goes, it's really starting to annoy me now; my brother's MBP recently needed to have its video inverter board repaired. (This involves either replacing the Main Logic Board, or soldering off the video inverter ship and replacing it.) While it was being repaired, he also had a new hard drive installed. When the machine came back from the service center, they'd given him a (much needed) new enclosure/case for it, and salvaged his botched Snow Leopard installation. (The techs lost his Windows partition, but my guess is that it might have caused the botched SL installation in the first place. The new case was nice considering that the one he originally had was falling apart, scratched, and missing the feet on the bottom thanks to the amount of use his machine gets, and the fact that he's working at a University's OIT department.) Since my brother wasn't around, I signed for his laptop and tested it, I was very impressed with SL, especially considering that I ordered both of our upgrade DVDs, and admittedly annoyed that my SL DVD is still sitting in its shrinkwrap while I wait for EA to make their game SL compatible.
I could understand EA not being ready in August--Apple kept saying they had an "October target release date," because they didn't want to interfere with the iPod event in September, and didn't expect it to be ready before then. However, EA should've been ready by October with an SL patch, and in truth, they could've been ready by August if they had been following the developer builds of SL which were available for over a year before SL was released to the public. The Cider emulation layer may be the cause of some problems, and while EA could (and should) solve 90% of them by adding native OpenGL support for TS3 under OS X, the rest of the problems are the result of EA's ignorance of the Mac platform. Hopefully these will improve with time, but if that's going to happen, EA needs to put together a "Mac division" and not just emulate Windows every time they want to port a game. Besides, if you ask most programmers, they'll tell you that programming for the Mac is "more fun" than programming for Windows anyway, and happier employees generally lead to higher quality products.