Finally got the game to work and I love it!

I have been eyeing planet zoo for the longest time now and always wanted to play it, it was basically the sequel for zoo tycoon 2 I have been waiting for.

The funny story is that I do not own a PC at all, I am an apple person and have been using my macbook pro for work and consoles for my games as I like to seperate the two. I never got around to invest in a gaming PC as I do not have the space to set one up, but I really wanted to play the game if possible. On a whim, the game was on sale and I got the deluxe version from steam, and I have been playing older PC games on my mac with Parallels desktop, so stuff like the sims, roller coaster tycoon, and zoo tycoon were possible. At first the game was not that great to run, unsurprisingly given the method I am running it. The frame rate was choppy and unbearably slow and the assets were so polygonal that it looked like I was playing a game from 2004. I then gave up trying to run the game and carried on with whatever life threw at me.

I often visit this side of the forums over and over and I did notice the game was greatly patched since I purchased it, and I think it was optimised in one of those patches. So I went and downloaded all of those patches (about 7GB) and when I turned it on, the game worked! And not only does it work, it works in a much smoother framerate and the graphics are detailed. It was really weird given the circumstances but I love it! I finally got around to finishing the first tutorial swimmingly 😭

And so far, I really love this game for what it is. It is easy to understand and the animals are full of charm, I especially like the voice acting and worldbuilding the game has. One thing I also enjoyed is the construction of habitat for the animals. It was very detailed and complex, but done in a way that is not a headache or guessing game to understand. I would say it is like the pickiness of the original zoo tycoon, blended with the creative freedom of the sequel, and a bit more thanks to the manipulation of fence height to prevent escapes, and temperature modifyers to create the perfect setting for the animals.

I just wanted to share this silly story I have, and I'm definitely looking forward to this game's future! Really happy to be able to play two of frontier's business sim games, will look forward to have all 3 playable by the end of the year! 😁👌🦁
 
Rather than running the game on parallels, you should look at running windows 10 in bootcamp. Will run far better..
Also you can run win 10 without a licence key (it moans about being unlicened, and you're unable to change the desktop background), so no extra cost.
 
Rather than running the game on parallels, you should look at running windows 10 in bootcamp. Will run far better..
Also you can run win 10 without a licence key (it moans about being unlicened, and you're unable to change the desktop background), so no extra cost.
I think I might actually do it, I was hesitant at first because parallels was convenient and more modern games may not work as well (my parallels runs windows 8), but I do have 500GB of extra storage, so I will try out bootcamp and see if it could run these games much better. If so, I will slowly expand it and include my other games. Plus my macbook may definitely run a bit cooler too. 😅
 
@mikekim . I am writing this post on the new Bootcamp I installed. It is working really fast compared to the virtual machine. I am currently downloading the game and I am excited to see how the game could run with windows 10 naively on my mac book pro. I think it may be better as the virtual machine I used to use probably limited my ram and processing power. Will look into the new results! Thanks for the tip :D

@Moonfox Yes!!!! I am excited to be here :D I hope the new setup will allow for better quality graphics, that way I could share my photos and park ideas with you guys. Thanks for the warm welcome :)
 
@mikekim . I am writing this post on the new Bootcamp I installed. It is working really fast compared to the virtual machine. I am currently downloading the game and I am excited to see how the game could run with windows 10 naively on my mac book pro. I think it may be better as the virtual machine I used to use probably limited my ram and processing power. Will look into the new results! Thanks for the tip :D

@Moonfox Yes!!!! I am excited to be here :D I hope the new setup will allow for better quality graphics, that way I could share my photos and park ideas with you guys. Thanks for the warm welcome :)

No probs on the tip, as bootcamp is non emulated it will run a lot better, I used to use VMWare Fusion years ago when i had my MacBook, and found that it was good for basic Emulation of apps, but when it came to gaming it was a Nightmare..
You should hopefully be able to run the game at speed / resolution that does it justice.

be prepared to waste hours building :ROFLMAO:
 
No probs on the tip, as bootcamp is non emulated it will run a lot better, I used to use VMWare Fusion years ago when i had my MacBook, and found that it was good for basic Emulation of apps, but when it came to gaming it was a Nightmare..
You should hopefully be able to run the game at speed / resolution that does it justice.

be prepared to waste hours building :ROFLMAO:
Definitely, when I got Parallels, I used it on my old 2010 MacBook pro. I only ever made the upgrade to the highest specs MacBook in 2018, and with the added storage and performance boost, I notice that now is a great time to make the jump to Bootcamp.

The game not only runs smoothly, but all graphics are set to high by default. Your suggestion has made my mac gaming experience jump to 11! ⭐
 
@mikekim I hope you could answer a silly question of mine. Everything works really well (I am surprised I did not do this sooner), I just remembered that my keyboard does not have a delete button. Is there a way to assign my backspace as a delete button? Or something similar for planet zoo?

Actually, I think it is Fn+backspace for it to be registered as delete. Thanks anyway!
 
yep fn+backspace works the same as delete..

you can also bring up the virtual keyboard (listed as on screen keyboard if you search for it)
 
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