Just saw that Steam was updating The Cave, no idea what was fixed, gave it a new try in a break, but it’s still the same:

a) The same glitches as before, a.o. those flickering dark lines/areas. *1
b) Sometimes characters get beamed/repositioned/respawn into the ground without that they can get out again, f.e. in the time traveller area. *1
c) Save only saves new regions instead of really saving where you ended.
d) Gfx settings don’t seem to be saved/connected to the interface. You need to setup everything each time you start, resolution is unknown. No matter if vsync is checked or not you still need to exit to the menu, disable vsync, return to the game, exit to the menu, enable vsync, return to the game, vsync is enabled.
e) And most important, switching characters or using their abilities can result into annoying reposition/death with reposition so that certain riddles are impossible to be solved (twins elevator) or a pain because you need to replace all characters according to where they might end up after getting repositioned after you switch a character (>= 2 switches with a separating element).
f) Switching between gamepad and keyboard/mouse doesn’t work properly, you first need to die with the appropriate input device which makes it a pain to switch between gamepad and keyboard/mouse where you can’t solve a riddle with the gamepad.

[Specs: Power Mac Pro, 4GB, i5, GT330M, Mac OS X 10.6.8, tattiebogle.net 0.11 driver, Xbox 360 controller. Works fine in many other games/apps.]

*1:

Just started the game without Steam, progress is lost but *boom* the gamepad steerings works as intended (no weird death/teleportation when switching a character).

taumel - 29 January 2013 05:05 AM

e) And most important, switching characters or using their abilities can result into annoying reposition/death with reposition so that certain riddles are impossible to be solved (twins elevator)

Just reproduced this bug on my MacBookPro running OS 10.6.8 and Steam with 2 XBox360 controllers.

This was the first game my wife has gotten into since Real Myst too. Maybe I’ll start over with safer characters (ones without bugs reported on the forums) while hanging onto my buggy save file in case the next update catches this.

Loving the game so far. Thanks for all your hard work guys.

hmmm

Before i forget about it, there were a few errors in the german translation, nothing dramatic, just a missing comma here, wrong upper/lower case there and so on.

On my MacBook Pro Retina (15”) the performance in this game is really best described as terrible. I made sure the discrete GPU is being used. I tried it at first in 1280x800 resolution with all the visual options turned on (a rough equivalent of what the game is on PS3) and the game was chugging at approx 20FPS or less from the first section on. I tried lowering the resolution, disabling all the visual options, and it really didn’t help much at all. Even at 800x600 and all options off, the resulting framerate is fairly unstable and barely ever 30FPS. For comparison, every other multiplatform game on this laptop runs much better than it does on PS3, but The Cave definitely runs much better on PS3. I tried the game under my Windows 7 partition, and the performance was far better (relatively stable 30FPS (or more, I’m not sure, but it was quite smooth) at 1600x1050, with all options on). So it’s not the hardware, it’s the Mac version of the code.

Is this normal, expected performance for the Mac version, or am I just particularly unlucky (or the game is incompatible with Retina laptops)?

Marconelly - 11 February 2013 07:02 PM

On my MacBook Pro Retina (15”) the performance in this game is really best described as terrible. I made sure the discrete GPU is being used. I tried it at first in 1280x800 resolution with all the visual options turned on (a rough equivalent of what the game is on PS3) and the game was chugging at approx 20FPS or less from the first section on. I tried lowering the resolution, disabling all the visual options, and it really didn’t help much at all. Even at 800x600 and all options off, the resulting framerate is fairly unstable and barely ever 30FPS. For comparison, every other multiplatform game on this laptop runs much better than it does on PS3, but The Cave definitely runs much better on PS3. I tried the game under my Windows 7 partition, and the performance was far better (relatively stable 30FPS (or more, I’m not sure, but it was quite smooth) at 1600x1050, with all options on). So it’s not the hardware, it’s the Mac version of the code.

Is this normal, expected performance for the Mac version, or am I just particularly unlucky (or the game is incompatible with Retina laptops)?

Have you updated your copy of The Cave? There was a bug in the 1.0 release that caused bad performance on some OSX GPUs, including the ones in the Retina MBPs. If you get latest updates from Steam, I bet you’ll be right as rain.

DF Nathan - 11 February 2013 11:08 PM

Have you updated your copy of The Cave? There was a bug in the 1.0 release that caused bad performance on some OSX GPUs, including the ones in the Retina MBPs. If you get latest updates from Steam, I bet you’ll be right as rain.

Sounds good, I’ll give it another try when I get home. My post reflects experience from the day the game came out, and in the meantime I was only playing it on PS3.

Are you maybe planning to release the game on the Mac App store as well, like you did with Psychonauts? I prefer that store for Mac a bit, because it doesn’t require launching any kind of client app (can’t beat Steam for dual platform compatibility though).

Yes, the update has rectified any performance complaint I could possibly have. With everything bar SSAA enabled, game runs at seemingly locked 30FPS at 2048x1280 resolution, and if the framerate was unlocked it could probably run at even higher rate. I think it now runs even better than under Windows on the same machine which surprised me.

I do however now see flickering dark lines just as outlined in the picture above, but that’s a far smaller problem.

Marconelly - 13 February 2013 05:37 PM

Yes, the update has rectified any performance complaint I could possibly have. With everything bar SSAA enabled, game runs at seemingly locked 30FPS at 2048x1280 resolution, and if the framerate was unlocked it could probably run at even higher rate. I think it now runs even better than under Windows on the same machine which surprised me.

I do however now see flickering dark lines just as outlined in the picture above, but that’s a far smaller problem.

Glad to hear the performance is fixed for you!

The flickering black lines are an SSAO precision issue that appears specific to some cards/drivers and we haven’t figure out exactly why yet. If it really bothers you, you can disable SSAO until we’re able to fix it.

Btw. this weekend i was giving someone a tip regarding The Cave and updated via Steam and at the beginning there still was the bug with the partly distorted text fields, happened on Mountain Lion this time with a Nvidia GPU again. No idea if the steering issues have been fixed as we didn’t play this far where it really got an issue.

The game doesn’t work, it’s all rubbish, ..., no, not really. This has nothing to do with Mac issues as well.

I just had a interesting experience when visiting a zoo. In the area where they had some sea lions they also built a ship with a couple of glass fronts in order so that you can see the animals swimming under the water too. Now due to that some machinery also was causing some waves and a certain part of the glass front was only party covered by the water you could see this damn sexy waterline having fun and dancing up&down; which instantly reminded me of the waterline in The Cave.

It’s very beautiful if you watch it in real, the rather simple but due to all the added frequencies interesting and complex movement, different depending on how closer you got to the edge, sometimes building tiny swirls near the surface,  the nice lightning and the nice colour of the water. Due to lots of particles in the water you also could see how the forces were applying under the water. Could be some real fun trying to simulate this with compute shaders.

I wonder if the waterline in The Cave also was inspired by a zoo like (looking at water through some glass) experience.

03.06.13
Dear Double Finers,

I was so happily surprised with the release of The Cave that I downloaded it instantly on my Macbook pro Retina 13” through the Appstore. Worked wonderful until I read that there might be issues with resolution and so I updated. Since then The game has started with a white screen, SEGA logo, DF logo and then the FROZEN Loading icon in the top right corner. I hear the lovely evening sounds but Loading stays and the only thing that remains is CMD Q :(
In the appstore I keep having the option of updating so that is what I have done about 4 times over the last week. When that didn’t do anything I removed the entire game and reinstalled it. To no avail. I am out of options and I love this game so much!
Do you have any suggestions? Much appreciated!

Thx for the amazing games anyway!

03.08.13
Fixed it today. With some ENTERing and ESCaping I got into the menu. Turned off SSAA and all went back to normal.
I’m off spelunking once more! Yet still wonder why the App-store keeps showing me the Update sign when I look up the game. Shouldn’t it just tell me to play it?

Cheers.

On a macbook pro playing through steam, the game worked fine yesterday but today it started to work worse and worse, turned off all visual options to try and fix it, then the sound went out, then the whole thing just crashed completely. Don’t know why it wouldn’t work now as I’ve already had a whole play through before but with different characters. Maybe the scientist and monk levels take more power to run? Anyway, just reporting the problem.