macOS Experience

Hello everyone,

I am thinking of returning to MapleLegends. I posted a while ago that I was leaving because I didn't find the reliance on people having umpteen mules, the fact that HP washing is even turned on and allowable, and leeching to be a rather fun experience however I think I am wearing myself thin on other servers that remove these aspects of the game as they have less content. The removal of those things is great, not having things to do beyond endlessly grind is not. MapleLegends shines for its content, party quests, maps, and community. It makes being at a natural disadvantage for not HP washing, and not having a mule for every single skill in the game tolerable.

There's one kicker though, I'm on macOS. Before the regular train of "mac sucks windows is good" (which is a very silly argument in both directions for an incredible amount of reasons), I hope this can be an intelligent discussion rather than flame wars on operating system types by people who don't have systems-programming or operating systems experience etc. So, I want to say that the macOS experience I had on Legends wasn't very good.

First of all, the resolution lock at 800x600 isn't great. My main monitor is 2560x1440. 800x600 on that is so small it's hard to read text in Legends and what not without leaning and hunching over. I could use dxwnd to scale the client up say 20% (as I do on other servers I've tried). That's a good fix for the game (as I know it works) but the Wineskin bundle provided blocks the use of start.exe – that is not default behaviour and has either been intentionally added or was already present in the boilerplate used before Legends makes it's own Wineskin. Simply enabling start.exe would alleviate a lot of those woes, even though other servers provide variable window sizes for MapleStory e.g. 1280x720 where you can actually see more of the game at once (which would be great but is far more a development effort) simply allowing the use of start.exe would allow people on high resolution monitors to scale up the game.

Secondly, the Wineskin bundle provided relies on XQuartz to function properly – as far as I know having tested 3-4 other servers macOS's default drivers work perfectly fine, and XQuartz is highly inefficient to the point where CPU utilisation peaks as high as 80% for Legends, sitting around 60% usually with CPU core temperatures of 90C from usual idle of 70C. Meaning things run hot, those numbers are far too high for the type of application this is (it shouldn't ramp up the CPU that much leading to hot temperatures, regardless of cooling ramping the CPU up that high is for things like other high-computation operations). Thermally throttling a CPU for hours on end just to play is not good for the longevity of hardware and it also means clock slowdown can occur. I think some optimisations could be made to the Wineskin wrapper being used here, or at least open sourcing the wrapper in-use itself (there is nothing worth privatising the wrapper for) to allow for community improvements. The Wineskin wrapper is not MapleLegends-core, it's just a preconfigured Wine setup for running the game.

Overall, the Wineskin wrapper runs resource hungry (more hungry than say League, or Heroes of the Storm, or CS:GO, etc) and restrictively on macOS. This is due to the Wineskin wrapper in use, not the operating system.

I don't want to devalue the effort gone into supporting multiple operating systems but it is known that people use macOS and so I feel if the devotion to supporting it is continuing (as it has for years) that the extra margin of effort to make that experience good is of great value; I personally won't be playing until those two things are met and the argument of downloading and installing Windows is moot because I don't want to partition 50 GiB of drive space and have to literally shut down everything I am doing, load a new operating system to do one thing, and then do the reverse when I am done playing. Sometimes I play while watching videos, I'll have to install my password manager and secure Windows to signin to those accounts. What if I want to do some project work and have a quick 30 minute break for Maple in-between? I'll have to spend 5 minutes getting into Maple, and 5 minutes back out. Imagine if you could not multitask at all; that's what installing Windows to play Legends would be like.

What are you thoughts?

 

I've been using macOS (lower case m) since 2012 when it was still OS X. I'd have to disagree on the wrapper specs.

There are a few discussion topics on the internet that people who don't know much about tend to have very tribal opinions on: Windows vs Mac, and Apple vs Samsung. "Windows sucks because it can get viruses", "Macs suck because they are expensive and cannot play games". Both of these statements are idiotic and essentially all discussion on this topic in most forums is done by people who don't understand how an operating system, software works or general computer science.

"Windows sucks because it can get viruses". So can macOS, less people use it. Why develop malicious software for a smaller target audience? Windows also has a notably terrible API that makes it easier to exploit but that does not mean macOS cannot be exploited also.

"Macs suck because they are expensive and cannot play games". Macs are expensive yes, I've personally – literally – never had a single problem with the 3 I've owned since 2012 which means no time spent with support, goofing around trying to fix things etc. Also, a strict and small list of hardware support keeps resource consumption low which is why these systems can run on typically leaner hardware. DirectX is developed by Microsoft. Most games use DirectX. Of course games companies are going to choose a software ecosystem that provides both the operating system AND graphics library AND can be run on any hardware. No games company is going to develop OpenGL (free software) to further graphics development there.

That's about all I have to say on non-nerdy topics related to this.

I do socket programming in C with the Linux kernel (winapi's is very similar) for fun, and for some projects. Enforcing security on the client at the expense of the server is never the right thing to do if the client is manipulating a server. It's much easier to simply reject malformed packets at the server than to cover the umpteen ways by which a client can circumvent whatever checks at balances you put in there – and most of the time, it just makes things annoying and crushes legitimate use cases.

Why would virtualisation be a problem here? Only Neckson enforced the one-client rule which either had to have clever workarounds to circumvent or virtualisation as a friendlier, albeit more resource hungry, alternative.

Also, start.exe is specifically for launching bash scripts or non-target applications for the Wineskin wrapper.

No it's not. That's a straw-man argument. MapleStory was created in 2003, this version patched to 2006/2007, you'd expect it to run less resource hungry given computational resources back then were literally magnitudes lower than today. Which would perform faster, a consumer computer from 2006/2007 or 2019?

The entire point of Wine is to provide an abstracted winapi to non-Windows system. It's literally the entire point. Games that don't run on Windows 7 that do run on 2000 or XP don't because the winapi they are trying to access is either depreciated, or mismatched. In version X doing ABC operations are supported then in version Y only B and C may be supported while A drops. This is why Wine allows you to select your target Windows version to select the winapi you want to expose. This entire point you've made is moot.

It's not stable, I constantly have to reinstall the game when it self-borks after a few times running doing nothing other than opening the game and playing, no tweaks.

2017 Macbook Pro. Discord. VSCode. Spotify. Docker. Vagrant. Brave Browser.

Non-MapleLegends = 65C at the CPU, 10% utilisation.
With MapleLegends = 95C at the CPU, 80% utilisation. It's MapleLegends, very easy to see the processes consuming it all.

I'm not making any comments without suggestions; unsure how you came to that conclusion given I literally said if it were open sourced then anyone could help improve it and that enabling start.exe in the Wineskin wrapper would alleviate the entirety of my first concern with the wrapper.

Asus MG279Q. I'm not going to change my resolution and destroy any ability to do anything else just to play MapleLegends, like I said before I do other things also and having to mess around with resizing literally every single window after increasing the resolution when done is not a suggestion.

Wine is not a virtual machine. It exposes the winapi to programs. It does not virtualise anything.