Leopard: plays well with WoW, not so well with Vent
For those of us who are both Mac users and WoW fans, there are two very important types of software release: a new patch for WoW and a new version of Mac OS X. Patch 2.3 may not be out yet (although we can always hope for next Tuesday), but Mac OS X 10.5, AKA Leopard, is released today! This is no place for a comprehensive review of the OS refresh (you'll have to head over to TUAW for that), but I would like to talk a bit about how 10.5 and WoW interact.
To put it bluntly, it's exactly the same. On my MacBook Pro, I'm not perceiving any difference between 10.5 and 10.4. The good side of that is that there are no crashes, stability issues, incompatibilities, or anything like that (at least not that anyone's come across yet). The bad side is that I'm not seeing any performance increase, which is a bit of a disappointment, since 10.5 apparently comes with a new version of OpenGL. There have been mumblings in the WoW Mac Tech Support forum that this update might help some people for a little while now, but at least for me, that does not seem to be the case. It still plays fine, certainly no worse than it did under 10.4. And the "stuttering" issue reported by players with the NVIDIA 8600 graphics card is, according to multiple forum reports, gone.
I have discovered one trick that I can do in Leopard that I couldn't do in Tiger, and it has to do with Spaces. Traditionally, I run WoW in windowed mode, since I like to be able to easily switch out to Firefox, Adium, etc. However, if there were an easier way to switch apps, I'd prefer to run it in full-screen mode, since there's fewer distractions that way to pull me out of the WoW experience. Enter Spaces, Leopard's new virtual desktops feature. It allows you to keep different sets of windows available, and switch to them using (by default) control-arrow keys or control-numbers. Naturally, my first thought was to put WoW in its own space (you can set it up so that particular apps "belong" to particular spaces), fullscreen it, and just switch to my "everything else" space when I wanted to look at my email or whatever.
That didn't work, because in fullscreen mode, WoW captures all keystrokes you throw at it, including the control-up I was trying to use to get up to my other space. I was briefly flummoxed, before I thought of one option that I've never understood the use of before: maximized mode. In WoW's video preferences, right under the checkbox for windowed mode, there's one for maximized mode, which makes the game basically act as if it's running in fullscreen mode -- no title bar, no menu bar, etc. However, as it turns out, it differs from fullscreen mode in at least one important way: it doesn't capture all keystrokes. Finally my fullscreen and my app-switching desires can live in harmony, thanks to maximized windowed mode.
One final note: WoW itself may run well under Leopard, but apparently Ventrilo does not. They claim a proper fix is just around the corner, but in the mean time, here's a workaround (adapted from this post on the forums): just run the following lines in the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app). You'll be asked for your password after the first line.
sudo -s
cd /Applications/Ventrilo.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/main.nib
cp objects.xib objects.xib.old
cat objects.xib | sed 's/rowHeight">0</rowHeight">20</g' > objects.xib.new
rm objects.xib
cp objects.xib.new objects.xib
exit
For the wary (and you should be), this script runs a new shell with root privileges, moves to your copy of Ventrilo, makes a backup of one of its resource files (objects.xib), modifies one of the settings in that file, and then logs out of the shell.
Have you installed Leopard yet, and if so, what are your WoW experiences like?
