Star Wars: The Old Republic

EdGonz said:
The latest version of Parallels allows you to set up to 1GB of video ram, this is supposed to help. Also, giving the VM more RAM also helps. There are mixed results here, some people can play the game just fine, and others (like me) can't play it even after throwing all those resources to the VM.
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For playing latest games i recommend using bootcamp instead of Parallels. The 3dmark06 benchmarks on my machine (early 2011 15'' Macbook pro, Radeon 6750M, using latest parallels and vmware fusion) speaks for themselves (rounded to fifties):

Code: 
Version      Mode              Version          Score    Performance
Windows 7    Bootcamp          Catalyst 11.11   9600     100%
Windows 7    Parallels Desktop 7.0.15052        7550      79%
Windows 7    VmWare Fusion     4.1.1            6550      68%
Windows XP   Parallels Desktop 7.0.15052        5300      55%
Windows XP   VmWare Fusion     4.1.1            5550      58%

All machines was set to 3GB ram and 2 cores. Graphics settings was on max.
NOTE: Windows XP cant use more than 256MB GPU RAM that is the reason why it scores so low.
NOTE2: Also, this table does not represent the performance on NVidia GPU's, on NVidia this may be completely different.
 
Great info!

I agree with your findings; today's games push hardware almost to their limits and I think a virtual machine won't be able to perform as well as accessing the hardware directly.

I, too, run SWTOR in Bootcamp, but I'm just puzzled as to why it works for others (unless we're not getting accurate information from them). I have the latest iMac (April 2011) with 12GB RAM and 1GB video card, and still can't run SWTOR from a vm. OTOH, Rift runs quite well...at times.
 
Some success with SWTOR and Parallels

After quite a bit of experimentation yesterday, I have SWTOR working for the most part under Parallels. I have an i7 machine running 2.8 gHz and 8 gig RAM, so this might not work for other machines. I am allocating 4 cores, 3 Gig of RAM, 512 vram, with Windows XP and Parallels Desktop 7. This seems to work fairly well except for cut scenes which hang 10% to 50% of the time. Hangs seem zone dependent. When the cut scenes hang I go from (Parallels) full screen to windowed mode and back to full screen and this remedies the cut screen problem. One other thing was that I updated Parallels yesterday. The update notes indicated nothing to do with Windows, but may nevertheless have played a part. I also downloaded all Windows XP updates and installed. Hope this helps others as SWTOR is pretty good game so far. I really like Parallels, but if running minimal hardware, you might be better served by Bootcamp at this time.
 
During the stress beta weekend, I got a trial of Parallels to see how well it worked. Aside from the mouse issue, I was extremely happy with how it played, so I purchased a copy of Parallels.

However, it seems that if I am anywhere other than the starting planet or the imperial fleet, the system has a complete meltdown. The game gets stuck on the loading screen, or when the game sometimes, it will freeze when the map is brought up.

Since the game worked fantastically up to this point, and I see no complaints like this from other parallels users, I was wondering if I was doing something wrong.

Set for 3G mem, 1G video, 3 cores.

Hardware is the latest 27 inch iMac, i5 with 8G ram.
 
SWTOR no longer working

SWTOR seemed to work for a while, but is now failing miserably. IDK if it's parallels or Windows XP, but others I had talked to seem to have success with Windows 7 under Bootcamp.
 
Dirk the Daring said:
Yea, works great under bootcamp-- but that is a suboptimal solution.
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For the gaming, using bootcamp IS optimal solution (nothing is emulated, and you have 100% of your computer performance).

Anyway, EA/Bioware is considering MAC version of the game. If so, most likely will be ported using Cider (many games on Mac use it as only minimal modification is needed for the game).
 
Julusp said:
Anyway, EA/Bioware is considering MAC version of the game. If so, most likely will be ported using Cider (many games on Mac use it as only minimal modification is needed for the game).
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Where did you hear this? Last thing when I checked forums at Bioware, they had no intentions of doing such a thing. They're already busy trying to iron out bugs for the Windows version of the game.
 
EdGonz said:
Where did you hear this? Last thing when I checked forums at Bioware, they had no intentions of doing such a thing. They're already busy trying to iron out bugs for the Windows version of the game.
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Ray Muzyka:

We’ve done a lot of Mac ports before of our games. We haven’t announced any details yet for The Old Republic, but we know that’s an important and large audience.

Greg Zeschuk:

That’s definitely one of the things we’re looking at next. We want to get this launch under our belt and everything stabilized and happy, and then we’ll look at other platforms, and that’s obviously one of the first ones

source
 
If you already have a star wars old republic account you wont have to purchase the game again, most likely able to download the new mac client (if it happens) from the website and log in with the same details. Like World of Warcraft.
 
Don't expect that client for at least another 6 months, if not more. Games like this take a long time to get them to work on another platform, and then we'll have to see if they did a good job or just cookie-cuttter one (which happens a lot).
I've sort of given up on Parallels, and use BOOTCAMP primarily to play this game.
 
Hey, there!

Ok, got a problem with the mouse, spinning, tried it with a second mouse, but no go. Still spinning. Do I need to do something else so I can get it working properly?!
 
JuiceD said:
If you already have a star wars old republic account you wont have to purchase the game again, most likely able to download the new mac client (if it happens) from the website and log in with the same details. Like World of Warcraft.
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At this point, this is mostly speculation. I would expect to not have to pay for the mac version, but that's not guaranteed. I could see them charging for it since it's an additional development effort. Who knows.

EdGonz said:
I've sort of given up on Parallels, and use BOOTCAMP primarily to play this game.
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I've also given up on getting this game to work in Parallels, which means my purchase was basically wasted. The game runs acceptably through Bootcamp, which is good enough for now.

JuiceD said:
The 2nd mouse idea is when you plug it in you assign it to the VM and not OSX.
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I got this to work following some of the links posted in this thread. It does fix the the mouse spin problem, but then the mouse cursor disappears. I just can't win.
 
Here's my current fix for spinning and missing mouse:

1. Make sure smart mouse is off in Parallels.
2. Boot Windows.
3. Launch SWTOR
4. Either at the character selection screen or in-game press Alt+Enter to exit fullscreen (Mouse should now appear and be working).
5. Then adjust swtor graphic settings, (I play with Low settings and Shadows off). Press Control+Shift+F to display current FPS in game.
 
Julusp said:
Forget about smartmouse.

Here is OderWat's workaround from http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=113589 :

Use second mouse (!) and plug it into an USB Port. Then enable that Mouse using the USB Devices Menu of Parallels 7. Windows will install driver software for the new mouse detected.

After this you have 2 working mouses in Windows. And the USB connected one seems to just work as expected for mouselook and scrollweel funktions!

Besides of this irritating problem I found that a lot of games work pretty well with my iMac i7 with Parallels 7 booting my Bootcamp partition based Windows 7 64Bit.

This worked for me as well.
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This worked great for me! Thanks.
 
I have the following problem when I try to run SWTOR unter Parallels 7 with Windows 7.
After the game is launching through the launcher, it stops directly after the intro screen with error code 6.
Error code 6 says: Temporary file could not be created. Are there a minimum of 2 GB free space available?
Well, I do have more than 2 GB of free space.
Any suggestions what to do?

I'm running it on a 27" iMac (mid 2011) i5, 12GB RAM and ATI HD 6770m.
 
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