Getting horrible loading times on an intel Mac Mini

In the demo, every time I enter a new area I have to wait a few minutes with a black screen and the music breaking up... this is the worst in the "main" area, which takes the longest. I get a white screen while loading the main menu as well. The action parts dont seem to lag at all, but occasionally the game freezes for a bit when I enter a new room as well. My intel mac mini only has 512 MB of ram, but that RAM wasnt in the requirements.. I am using the latest version of Tiger. Any clue as to what may be causing this? If I can get this game to run well I'll most certainly buy it.

This post has been edited by Xaerock : 07 December 2008 - 05:14 AM

Try turning down the graphics options a bit - on Macs with the GMA 950 Aquaria doesn't run so well with everything maxed out. Not that it's a particularly GPU-intensive game, but still. I've noticed on my 2 GHz MacBook that there's stuttering and other issues that don't occur with my desktop machine. You also might try adding more RAM - 2 GiB is pretty cheap nowadays.

My G4 with 1.25 GHz of RAM and an Ati Radeon 9000 with 128 MB of VRAM doesn't stutter (except in a few key boss fights with lots of action on screen) but instead slows down in places. While it is as smooth as silk in places such as Naija's home cave, the frame rate will slow down in large map areas noticeably. My thought is that RAM and the video card/accelerator you're using are the primary factors with video performance in Aquaria.

hmm, so it would seem. But I was not talking about stuttering or anything apart from the times the game switches locations in the game or activates menus, the loading of those take me ridiculous amounts of time making the game pretty much unplayable. It wouldnt make sense if its a global problem with mac minis or intel GMA cards since the requirements states "or any intel mac". It would also be more logical that the action parts would lag instead of the loading times unless its some sort of glitch.

Weird. You might try posting here and seeing if Alec responds - or PMing/emailing him directly.

I'll throw in that I'm playing on a Mini (a 1.66 CoreDuo), with 1 GB of ram, and don't experience these issues. It could be that RAM makes a large difference...I don't suppose there's a way for me to disable one of my DIMMs or otherwise force Aquaria to use just one (without opening up the Mini and physically removing the RAM itself), for testing issues?

This post has been edited by GutlessWonder : 07 December 2008 - 10:06 PM

Sounds a lot like RAM limits to me. Try running Aquaria in windowed mode so you can pull up Activity Monitor and look at the RAM usage. What are the Free, Wired, Active, and Inactive counts? Low numbers for Free and Inactive mean you're out of RAM. Do the Page in/Page out counts go crazy while the game is trying to make a transition between areas?

Edit: You can upgrade to 2GB for less than the price of Aquaria from MacSales.com. Whether or not RAM is your issue with Aquaria, and I don't care who you are, at that price there's little reason not to upgrade.

This post has been edited by cheleball : 07 December 2008 - 10:13 PM

I'll check the stats on the activity monitor, I also happen to have access to a same model mac mini with 1gb of ram and that will probably run it okay. Feels sort of illogical that at half the RAM count it would break the game in such a way. I hope someone else with a default 1.66 coreduo and 512 RAM can test it out.

edit: Okay, I tried it out, on the first try it went so that the free ram always had 5 mb left but raised a little on the loadings, the inactive ram remained around 100mb. On the second try I shut down two apps I pretty much always had on when i had tried the game (safari and azureus) which both were using 20mb according to activity monitor.. but now they seem to be using 60 mb each which makes a lot of sense. What happened was that the main menu screen loading still took ages, but when I changed areas in the game loadings were faster than before, but the ram usage looked the same as with the other apps on. after a few minutes the loading phases ram usage changed completely: the free ram increased to 100 mb each time and lowered until the loading finished and the loadings were almost instant.

I should have known that those apps used so much of the RAM, its suprising that safari uses 50mb though, much more than other apps. I better put some better settings for azureus since it would seem it tries to max out its usage whenever it can. But I guess there is something learned here: aquaria needs at least over 250 mb of ram or the loading system will somehow start failing

This post has been edited by Xaerock : 08 December 2008 - 09:11 AM

Safari will take a boatload of RAM if you let it. Good to hear you know what's happening.

Well, I bought the game and am currently at the last boss... I love games with excellent last bosses and this one sort of reminds me of Okamis last boss which is the best one I've ever seen. Died on its second form though, I'll fight him more later.

The game has ran very well although near the end with the blue burst attack it caused a little lag in combination with all the other stuff going on. I find the game to definately be worth the price and it sort of reminds me of Ferazels Wand in good ways. The music and graphics are pretty much the best ive ever seen in an indie game, although the cartoony style sort of made some parts less scary than it seemed they "should" have been.

This post has been edited by Xaerock : 11 December 2008 - 02:42 PM