First impressions or suggestions of Achron

I just got this game today, and right when it finished downloading I started it up. The loading screen and main page looked WAY different than I thought, in a good way. I loaded up the first mission, and found out that my graphics settings were too high for me. I found that whenever the game lags, the cursor lags and can't do anything you want it to, without being really choppy. The graphics for me wasn't too bad, the map itself is very great, although the unit graphics are pretty weird for me, because when I looked at the marines moving, they had no gun with them, but I'm pretty sure the graphics are going to get better as they make the game.

This really should be a menu setting, but for now go into My Documents/Achron/configuration.ini and set OSDrawnMouse=1. Also, you can edit graphics settings there, but I'd suggest doing that in the game menu instead (except resolution, which should also have a menu option). The easiest way to do this is hit '1', hold 'ctrl', and click on the marine, then while holding ‘ctrl’ hit’1'. Not the best solution (due to ctrl being the key for adding units to selection and making control groups), but it works.

1. Download the relevant map pack/level/mod and unzip it
2. Right-click/Ctrl-click Achron.app (The Achron game icon), and select "Show Package Contents"
3. Navigate to Contents/Resources/
4. If the download is a single level, place it into levels/
   
   • If the download is a map pack, open each folder in the unzipped file, and navigate to each corresponding folder in Contents/Resources, and add the files from the specific zipped file's folder to the Contents/Resources folder. Do not simply move folders from one to the other, just files.
   • If the download is a monitor, if it has folders, follow the same steps as above, otherwise place the .abn file into scenario_monitors/
5. Test it out in game

Just to clarify, the reason I am getting very detailed about copying individual files is that MacOS X does not merge folders. Instead, if you copy a folder from one place to another, it will just replace everything in the old folder with everything in the new folder, rather than simply adding files from the new folder to the old one, replacing anything that happens to be the same.

I'm having some problems with Achron, hopefully a patch can come out or it can be fixed. I put my graphic settings on low, and it doesn't really make a difference from medium, which is a good thing because it lags less with a slight decrease of graphics, but it doesn't really reduce the graphic settings a lot, and that's a problem, because I usually play games like Starcraft with a really fast mouse.

I'm on the 3rd mission part thing of the preview, and my units are really slow. When it tells me to go to the east side, the green team thingy is about a quarter there already, and is already into the fight when I'm only halfway there. No matter what I do, my army gets there when about 11 units are remaining for the green team. It's like the red team (grekim I think?) is targeting the green and I can't do anything, I always fail with green with 6 to 7 units remaining, and I've been doing that for about 14-20 hours.

Apple has a horrible implementation of OpenGL w.r.t. some of the Shader code Achron uses, which is why you are getting horrible fps. I have a Boot Camp setup on a 2nd gen MacBook Pro, and it runs at 30 fps at medium settings on most maps on Windows, while it barely runs at 10 fps at low settings on Mac OS. That's basically why the performance is so bad. If you have a way of getting Windows and an Intel processor, I'd suggest using Boot Camp (VMware Fusion might work, but I wouldn't recommend it for this unless you have a Mac Pro, and even then I'm doubtful it will work well.)

It's not that it is slow; it's that the OpenGL libraries on Mac OS (that is, the underlying code that allows programs to use the graphics card) is incomplete, and doesn't support all the features of OpenGL, particularly some important optimizations.