Take a look at that screenshot. Notice anything? Yes, well, Torn Stars, and Unstable Space for that matter, run very nicely on OSX. How is this possible? Well, if you have a copy of X3 The Reunion, it is quite easy. That game is wrapped in a program called Cider, which is used to simulate a windows environment for the program it wraps. On a whim I tried Edge of Chaos in Cider, and lo! with just a little tweaking it worked. Specifically you need a noCD dll for EoC, and compressed textures must be turned off in EoC's graphics options. The game runs very well. In that screenshot it is being run in a window, which more than cuts the performance in half. When it is run fullscreen, I easily get 30-70fps, depending on the number of objects on screen. Plays smooth as butter. There is only a very tiny issue with the way certain point lights are displayed by the engine. Barely noticeable. So good in fact, that I actually develop Unstable Space on OSX, and only switch over to my VMware virtual windows install when I need to ascertain whether a bug is legitimate, or some artfact of EoC being run in Cider. However, so far that has not happened and the game appears to run almost as good as natively.

So there you have another great reason to love Independence War 2 and Torn Stars! You can play it on a Mac! So if any talented Mac coders/artists out there want to jump on board to develop this mod to it's full potential, please do so!

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