Age of Empires III update fixes bugs

MacSoft has released an update to Age of Empires III, its recently released Macintosh conversion of the popular real time strategy game. The update fixes what MacSoft describes as “several minor issues that have affected gameplay.”

Age of Empires III returns players to the Age of Discovery, when European explorers pushed westward to explore the boundaries of the New World. The game spans hundreds of years as you help different members of a pioneering clan first explore the New World then settle it, fighting skirmishes with foes and eventually building an industrial empire that links the two coasts.

New in the 1.0.1 update — available for download from MacSoft’s Web site — are corrections to the following issues:

A bug in the unit pathfinding code that could lead to native animals causing random out-of-sync errors during multiplayer games between PowerPC and Intel Macs.

A rare crash in the SFX callback system that occurred during sound buffer object deletion.

A crash in the Scenario Editor when placing objects with NVIDIA hardware and shader rendering active.

A problem with rendering dynamic shadows on PowerPC Macs.

A problem with rendering water in the Home City scenes when playing in higher detail shader modes.

Font sizing issues when playing on very large monitors with low DPIs and corrupted text in the Multiplayer post-game dialog.

Control-click + Shift can now be used with single button mice and trackpads to allow waypoint placement.

System requirements call for G4/1.2GHz or faster (including Intel), Mac OS X v10.3.9 or later, 512MB RAM, 2.5GB hard disk space, DVD or compatible drive, hardware T&L-supporting 3D graphics with at least 64MB VRAM and LAN or broadband access for multiplayer.