Tyron Posted August 7, 2020 Report Share Posted August 7, 2020 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 View full record Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simon Stapley Posted August 7, 2020 Report Share Posted August 7, 2020 That sounds like some pretty awful hoops to jump through for apple, hopefully the Vintage story players who rely on apple will understand. Is it possible to dual boot a Linux distro on a mac? That may be a free way to keep playing for people who don't have any other options. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trying to help Posted August 9, 2020 Report Share Posted August 9, 2020 On 8/7/2020 at 7:40 PM, Tyron said: 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. This isn’t true at all, the only places I have been this stated is in the more paranoid forums. If you want to avoid the unsigned binary warning then you have to get a signature however that is the same as it has been for some years now. Catalina didn’t change anything with how it all works from a user perspective. A few things have moved around but right clicking on a binary and manually allowing the binary to run still works (and it still works in the latest betas of the next OS too). It also works forever so you only need to do it once per install. I am more than happy to share the instructions as they have been the same for almost 10 years (ever since Apple started with Gatekeeper) and I have used them on every OS since so they are pretty constant feel free to contact me via email if you’d like them. OpenGL has been deprecated but this happened many years ago now, for a small team with a proprietary library I can understand the pain for this one however hopefully in the future this might be an opportunity if you decide to expand into mobile. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tyron Posted August 10, 2020 Author Report Share Posted August 10, 2020 That is good to hear that you can still open the app, one less quirk to worry about Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EX0stasis Posted December 21, 2020 Report Share Posted December 21, 2020 I'm hoping that someday, even years from now, that this topic can be revisited to once again add support for MacOS. With the new Apple M1 Macs coming out, it seems like the perfect candidate for a portable gaming machine for a CPU heavy, light to medium graphics game like Vintage Story. And I'm not even all convinced it's that heavy on the CPU. I'm new and only assume so because Minecraft is CPU heavy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rhyagelle Posted December 22, 2020 Report Share Posted December 22, 2020 I know a few people who have developed games and releases on iOS. They have all said it was a nightmare, and that was before their recent anti-consumer changes. It's sad it came to this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tyron Posted December 23, 2020 Author Report Share Posted December 23, 2020 Yes, I'm still interested in supporting apple. In theory, upgrading to the new version of the OpenTK framework should help with that. It's what interfaces with the operating system. It'll probably require some notable updates though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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