Running Furcadia on Mac OS X

Getting Furcadia up and running on Mac OS X does take a little more work than installing directly on a Windows PC. However, Dragonfire wrote this guide to help walk you through the process and make it as painless as possible, along with providing a few tips for making the most of Furcadian life on a Mac.

Although a premade WineBottler installer was once available to do this, it quickly became outdated, was hard to apply updates to the required programs on the user’s end, and was overall subject to a number of quirks that could cause numerous roadblocks along the way for some users. Installing Wine in the manner detailed below should help Furcadia be more accessible for many Furcadian Mac users.

Requirements:

• Mac OS X version 10.9 (Mavericks) or higher. OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) may work, but is not guaranteed.
• Wine.app/WineBottler 1.8 or higher (installation detailed below).
• Keep your software updated for best results!

NOTE Before you begin: Back up all of your important Furcadia files if you are coming from a previous installation. This includes your character files, online.ini (Pounce list), logs, maps, Dragonspeak files, patches, etc. Copy everything you wish to keep to another safe location in your user directory.

Installing Wine

Remove older copies of Wine first

Remove any older copies of Wine or WineBottler installed (particularly those copies that came with the previous Furcadia OS X installer).

To do this, drag any existing installations from your Applications folder to the Trash. An automatic cleanup utility for additional files is available from WineBottler’s developer (see RemoveWinebottler). Finally, restart your Mac.

If you use a package manager (such as Homebrew or MacPorts), it’s probably safe to leave those alone. (This has not been tested, however.)

Downloading Wine

Download the latest version of Wine from the developer's website.

When the .dmg window for the WineBottler Combo has opened, drag your cursor over both Wine and WineBottler, and move the icons to the Applications folder.

Run Wine from your Applications folder. The first time it is opened, it will ask you if you’d like to check for updates automatically; click to allow this in order to ensure your software will stay updated in the future.

A system tray icon for Wine will be added to the top of your screen (near your Wi-Fi settings and other icons there); it looks like a wineglass. Click on this icon, and select Configuration from the menu options there.

The first time you do this, a ‘prefix’ will be created. Allow this to run until the Wine configuration menu appears. From the dropdown menu at the bottom of this window, select Windows Version: Windows 8.1. Click Apply, but do not close the window.

Next, click on the Desktop Integration tab at the top of the window. At the bottom of this tab is a section labelled Folders. Check the file path next to the My Documents folder; this may be set by default to:

/Users/[your OS X username]/Documents

If it is, you can click the OK button and continue on. If it is not, click on My Documents, ensure that the Link to: box is checked, and enter the above path into the box beside the Browse button, substituting in your OS X username. Hit Apply again, and then OK.

Downloading and Installing Furcadia

With Wine installed, you can now download and run the Furcadia installer just as if you were on a Windows PC.

Once the installer has finished downloading, open it (either by double-clicking on the .exe file, or directly from your browser). A new window from Wine will appear. Select the option that says “Run directly in:”. Do not change the dropdown menu option, then click Go.

The install should then proceed exactly as on a Windows computer, except for the following:

1. Click to “Show Advanced Installation Options” on the first screen of the installer.

1. You may get two options:

• If the installer does not detect any previous copies of the installation:
• Select “I am a new user…”.
• Select Browse to choose where the client will be installed when prompted. Skip to step 3!
• If it does detect an old copy:
• Select “Let me choose destination directories from a list” when given the option.
• The resulting list may show “C:\Program Files\Furcadia\”, plus any other installations that were detected.
• Click “Remove the directory” to get rid of everything listed.
• Click “Add a directory”.

1. Scroll up in the list until you find your OS X username, and select that one. (There should be a number of directories below that read things like Desktop, Documents, Downloads, etc.) The list of directories should now show “Z:\Users\[username]\Furcadia\”. Continue the installation by pressing Next.

Finally, do not click ‘Play!’ when the install finishes (as this can cause the program to hang or crash). Close the installer instead.

Your Furcadia install (including the program launcher, map editor, Fox editor, etc) can be located at [home directory]/Furcadia.

Setting a local directory

Before you launch Furcadia, you can also choose to set up a local directory file so that your logs, characters, and Pounce settings will be easily available to you.

Hit CMD-spacebar to open Spotlight, and type in and open TextEdit. Make sure your Preferences are set to save as Plain Text documents, as circled in red below.

In the blank document, at the beginning of the file, write the following line:

C:\Users\[your OS X username]\My Documents\Furcadia

(For example, for my install, the line reads: C:\Users\courteney\My Documents\Furcadia)

Save the file to your Furcadia directory as localdir.ini and then close the file.

Importing character files or pounce settings

If you have any character files or Pounce settings that you would like to import, now’s the time!

Your character .ini files, log files, and other files that would normally be located in Documents and Settings are located at [home directory]/Documents/Furcadia.

Character .ini files (if you are using them, instead of the accounts system) can go directly in that folder. Your Pounce list (online.ini) and settings files will also be located there, in the folder Settings. If you do not see the folders now, they will be created when you launch Furcadia for the first time, but you can create them and place files in them now if you wish. They will not be overwritten.

Launching Furcadia

Now, from your Furcadia installation folder, you can launch Pounce with furc_on.exe! Pounce will be added to the system tray at the top of your screen, and you can double-click that to open up your main Pounce window at any time. You can then open Furcadia from Pounce as normal, and log in with your account e-mail and password.

The Dream Editor, Fox Editor, and DS Editor are all launchable from your installation folder, as well, or you can just use the appropriate buttons inside the Furcadia client.

Creating a Quick-Launcher File

There is no quick and easy way of creating a launcher that can be placed in your Applications folder or your Dock, unfortunately. Instead, Dragonfire has kindly created a simple AppleScript file that will function as a shortcut for those uses, with some minor tweaking. You can download it here.

Open the file using Script Editor (this should be the default program). Go to File -> Export.

Change the Where: to your Applications folder. Change the File Format to Application. Finally, hit Save.

You should now be able to launch Furcadia directly from your Applications folder. You can also make an alias of it and place that in your Dock or desktop for a shortcut. (Using this launcher will also cause a Terminal window to open, but you can ignore it or close it if you like.)

If the launcher does not work, you probably installed Furcadia to a different location than the default! The location can be tweaked in the installer using Script Editor, as well.

Common Problems and Getting Help

Furcadia on OS X is largely stable, but there are a few issues to be aware of when playing.

First off, there are a couple known problems that will cause Furcadia to crash. They’re not necessary for play, and there are ways to avoid triggering them. The two major issues both have to do with Whisper Windows.

Whisper Window images crash

Any whisper that opens in a whisper window and contains an image - whether this is a specitag or a Beekin badge - will cause a crash. This is most easily solved by opening config.exe from the folder that contains your Furcadia programs, clicking on General in the Whisper Windows area from the list to the left, and checking the box labelled “Do not show images in Whisper Windows (faster)”.

There is a way to allow whisper window desctags to be shown, but it requires having access to a copy of Windows, and performing a DLL override of ole32.dll in Wine. Unfortunately, doing this will cause other problems - the 32-bit Fox Editor will not launch in Wine, and the Furcadia Pounce icon will be removed from the system tray.

Copying text in whisper windows crash

Text in Whisper Windows cannot be copied, whether using CMD/Ctrl-C or from a menu. Doing this will cause a crash. It’s just best to avoid copying directly from whisper windows! You can, however, open your logs or your whisper history and copy text from there instead.

Pasting into a Whisper Window works, but can occasionally suffer from issues where the text will either not paste, or what has been written in the text entry field already will vanish. Copying and pasting work fine in the normal client - the above issue only affects Whisper Windows.

Sleep mode causes lag

Putting your Mac to sleep while the client is running will cause lag and animation jags/speedups when you wake it back up again, and you will likely be disconnected regardless once it catches up, but you should be able to reconnect without issue.

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Aside from these issues, the client is largely stable and should run without problems.

If anything begins working incorrectly or seems to break, especially after an update to Mac OS X, please ensure your copy of Wine is fully updated to the newest version. Performing updates will generally fix many issues! For example, many features in Furcadia version 31 will absolutely not run without at least Wine 1.7.

If you do experience problems with your installation, or with running Furcadia on OS X in general, feel free to seek help in the Mac Technical Support area of the Furcadia Forums.