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  • Dropping (official) Mac OS Support


    Tyron
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    Dear Apple Users,

    [Edit 25th Sept 2020:]
    It has come to my attention that Mac OS Catalina will still allow applications to start, which is great. Also please bear in mind that this whole post is not presenting facts, but merely a personal opinion of mine which is not devoid of flaws.
     

    with a heavy heart but also some level of relief I have to announce to you that I will no longer consider Vintage Story officially supporting MacOS. As much as I would like to continue supporting this platform, the lack of stable libraries and frameworks as well as Apples general developer hostile approach makes this goal untenable for me. It has already been a herculean task to get the game working on MacOS and Apple is not making it any easier going forward, particularly in light of recent events.

    Can you elaborate some more?
    - The rendering back-end, OpenGL, is officially considered deprecated by Apple, to be replaced by their own proprietary rendering API that only runs on their systems. If OpenGL is officially removed, it would mean I would need to program a completely new rendering back-end just for Mac OS. Not to speak that the OpenGL driver on mac os has a lot of strange quirks one has to take into account during development.
    - Apple has announced that starting from Mac OS Catalina it wants to quite literally forbid you from launching apps outside the App Store unless the developer goes through some very complicated and non-free certification processes.
    - It also seems that Mac OS Catalina completely broke the mouse movement API within OpenTK, a library that Vintage Story relies on.
    - In the near future Apple wants to switch their hardware from Intel to ARM processors, which would mean more drastic changes on how software has to be written for their platforms.
    In short, Apple is hostile to open, cross-platform software development.

    What about the future? Can I still play on Mac?
    I will continue shipping new versions with a Mac OS build for at least 6 months for those players that still run the game on Mac.
    It is also still possible that official support will come back some day, but for the near term I will de-prioritize Mac OS support.

    I got the game, what are my options?
    1. You are free to request a refund if you got the game and do not wish to await an uncertain future.
    2. If you can still run the game on Mac OS and want to continue doing so, I recommend you do not update to Mac OS Catalina.
    3. Alternatively, most modern 400 dollar laptops can quite decently run Vintage Story on low settings, in some cases even better than old Macbook pros. Intel. Be sure to look up its graphics card, and that it has at least 1000 benchmark points on videocardbenchmark.net (2000 recommended)


    Thank you for your understanding,
      Tyron
     

    Edited by Tyron

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