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They also dropped the Mac version. They complain there are few Mac players on Steam. Well, I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't run on the desktop OS [1] i us

by nottorp 1mo ago

They also dropped the Mac version. They complain there are few Mac players on Steam. Well, I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't run on the desktop OS [1] i use most, duh. [1] My Linux boxes are headless. And the windows boxes I have to RDP into them. That may work for a game with a beginning and and end via Steam streaming or something, but not for a forever game you just keep around.

bigyabai 1mo ago
The game runs fine in Proton, including with dfhack. You can probably get it working on your Mac with a tiny bit of Crossover/Wine/GPTK tweaking.
- hamdingers 1mo ago
  That's missing the point. There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't. Can't be too mad about it though, it was free back then too.
  - bigyabai 1mo ago
    macOS has changed a lot more than Windows or Linux did in the last decade. It's hardly Tarn's fault, here.
    - S-E-P 1mo ago
      macOS is also just a proper PITA through and through. I'm annoyed that I can't play it on my m4 but I also understand that supporting macOS has always been a nuisance. If I were making games I wouldn't support it either. Apple does just about everything to not support backwards compat.
      - evilduck 1mo ago
        FWIW DF and DFHack work flawlessly through Crossover on macOS on my M2 and my M5
        cyberpunk 1mo ago
        It’s kind of insane that we can play windows x86_64 games on macos arm almost perfectly. I got a bit annoyed with it being slightly jank and built a (linux) gaming pc for my kids in the end but it worked fine for most things for a while.
  - DarmokTanagra 1mo ago
    [flagged]
  - zamalek 1mo ago
    What benefit does a native build have over proton? I used to care more about it on Linux, until I realized that "native build" probably means "doesn't work." I can only imagine this being much worse on a niche gaming target which there are extremely few users making (and voting for) bug reports. Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense. Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).
    - msh 1mo ago
      Native build usually also means it’s a supported platform and developers will try to fix any big issues coming up.
      - bigyabai 1mo ago
        On macOS, it often means the opposite. Natively compiled games like Portal 2 stopped working when Apple depreciated 32-bit libraries and transitioned to Metal. This is why Proton is so important, since the games are theoretically supported forever as long as you port the DXVK/Wine backend to the latest APIs.
  - baq 1mo ago
    People stopped releasing Linux builds, too, since proton+win32 works better on average
  - flohofwoe 1mo ago
    > There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't They probably stopped supporting macOS when Apple introduced the notarization bullshit. Can't blame the DF team tbh, macOS is a royal PITA to support (even without notarization), Apple doesn't mind breaking stuff from one OS release to another.
    - IsTom 1mo ago
      I still remember getting support mail every time Apple released an OS update. For a week or two there'd be reports of things crashing randomly with stacktraces that didn't seem to make much sense. One of reasons why I stopped trying to make mac/ios apps.
flurb 1mo ago
I was a quarterly(-ish) contributor for years. There was no way for me to justify buying anything when they announced dropping keyboard support, when I've spent years developing muscle-memory to their (admittedly insane) control scheme. Also - I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that running DF through a terminal is (was...) possible if you're not using a graphical tileset (perhaps even with... ha)?
rkido 1mo ago
While individual game developers choose whether to support macOS, the broader phenomenon of developers dropping macOS support is Apple's fault. They either have no interest in being a serious gaming platform, or else they've made catastrophic missteps in their quest to stay relevant for gamers.
- scratcheee 1mo ago
  I don’t think it has anything to do with their gaming specific capabilities, just their general philosophy matches poorly with the games industry. Apple insist on having their own apis and they don’t maintain compatibility for older software for very long, these 2 facts explain things fine on their own. Game devs don’t want a major support burden, they’re happy to patch here and there but constant dropping of apis or even architectures is a lot to handle. The bigger impact is that macOS ends up with a lot less old games that still run, if you need a critical mass of games to become a gaming platform, that constant bleed of legacy games will always slow macOS down. As for gaming specific features, Metal is a perfectly fine api whose only real problem is that it’s different from the other platforms. Maybe not the best, but certainly not terrible. They also have a really nice capability floor, it’s practical to make a modern game work on any Mac from the last X years (maybe the neo complicates that a bit). There’s probably a few gaming specific capabilities they could improve on, mouse input especially, but that’s never been the real issue.
  - Shitty-kitty 1mo ago
    Optimization and bug hunting makes supporting multiple graphics api's a pain. I really don't understand Apple's stubborn refusal to make vulkan drivers. Between Apple and the better performance on SteamDeck, I can see PC game developers seriously considering Vulkan over directx.
    - somenameforme 1mo ago
      Sony's PS3 is an interesting comparison. It had some borderline ridiculous hardware by the standards of console development. I mean that both as a positive in terms of theoretic capability, and as a negative in terms of practical usability. Sony had a huge market, so I think they were banking on developers bending over backwards to build things to the strengths of the PS3 which would be such an undertaking that it'd almost undoubtedly have left the PS3 version of stuff as definitive, and other platforms operating as second class citizens. Unfortunately for them developers took the path of least resistance and ended up doing the exact opposite.
gloryjulio 1mo ago
Mac gaming is a pain in the **. It's Apple's fault. It's fine they can't justify the maintenance.
goda90 1mo ago
You might be interested in running games from your headless boxes with this: https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine
- nottorp 1mo ago
  I know how to stream ty :) And I do use that option, as i said, for games that you play in finite sessions and that have a beginning and an end. Also as I said, I don't use it for forever games (mmos or endless simulators like DF) by choice. My playing pattern for those is not finite and relatively long sessions. I fire them for a short break, do something in them, close them and move along. If you have to turn on a separate box for that half your short break is gone with booting and shutting down. And you may lose interest before the other box is finished booting. Same for running games under crossover. Start crossover - SLOOOW. Wait for the game to start through the layers of emulation - SLOOW. It's fine if it's a weekend and I want to play say Dishonored [1] for a few hours. It's not fine if I want to spend 20 min improving a build in Minecraft and then go do irl stuff. [1] Dishonored is an example of the type of game I'd jump through hoops to play. I've always streamed it actually. No idea how it runs in Crossover.
musictubes 1mo ago
The sad thing is that current Macs are perfect machines for DF. The recommendation was always to get as fast a single threaded machine as possible with the biggest cache. Even the least expensive Macs are monsters in those regards. The game is more multi-threaded than before but still is dominated by single threaded performance.

by nottorp 1mo ago

bigyabai 1mo ago

The game runs fine in Proton, including with dfhack. You can probably get it working on your Mac with a tiny bit of Crossover/Wine/GPTK tweaking.

hamdingers 1mo ago
That's missing the point. There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't. Can't be too mad about it though, it was free back then too.
- bigyabai 1mo ago
  macOS has changed a lot more than Windows or Linux did in the last decade. It's hardly Tarn's fault, here.
  - S-E-P 1mo ago
    macOS is also just a proper PITA through and through. I'm annoyed that I can't play it on my m4 but I also understand that supporting macOS has always been a nuisance. If I were making games I wouldn't support it either. Apple does just about everything to not support backwards compat.
    - evilduck 1mo ago
      FWIW DF and DFHack work flawlessly through Crossover on macOS on my M2 and my M5
      - cyberpunk 1mo ago
        It’s kind of insane that we can play windows x86_64 games on macos arm almost perfectly. I got a bit annoyed with it being slightly jank and built a (linux) gaming pc for my kids in the end but it worked fine for most things for a while.
- DarmokTanagra 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- zamalek 1mo ago
  What benefit does a native build have over proton? I used to care more about it on Linux, until I realized that "native build" probably means "doesn't work." I can only imagine this being much worse on a niche gaming target which there are extremely few users making (and voting for) bug reports. Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense. Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).
  - msh 1mo ago
    Native build usually also means it’s a supported platform and developers will try to fix any big issues coming up.
    - bigyabai 1mo ago
      On macOS, it often means the opposite. Natively compiled games like Portal 2 stopped working when Apple depreciated 32-bit libraries and transitioned to Metal. This is why Proton is so important, since the games are theoretically supported forever as long as you port the DXVK/Wine backend to the latest APIs.
- baq 1mo ago
  People stopped releasing Linux builds, too, since proton+win32 works better on average
- flohofwoe 1mo ago
  > There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't They probably stopped supporting macOS when Apple introduced the notarization bullshit. Can't blame the DF team tbh, macOS is a royal PITA to support (even without notarization), Apple doesn't mind breaking stuff from one OS release to another.
  - IsTom 1mo ago
    I still remember getting support mail every time Apple released an OS update. For a week or two there'd be reports of things crashing randomly with stacktraces that didn't seem to make much sense. One of reasons why I stopped trying to make mac/ios apps.

flurb 1mo ago

I was a quarterly(-ish) contributor for years. There was no way for me to justify buying anything when they announced dropping keyboard support, when I've spent years developing muscle-memory to their (admittedly insane) control scheme. Also - I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that running DF through a terminal is (was...) possible if you're not using a graphical tileset (perhaps even with... ha)?

rkido 1mo ago

While individual game developers choose whether to support macOS, the broader phenomenon of developers dropping macOS support is Apple's fault. They either have no interest in being a serious gaming platform, or else they've made catastrophic missteps in their quest to stay relevant for gamers.

scratcheee 1mo ago
I don’t think it has anything to do with their gaming specific capabilities, just their general philosophy matches poorly with the games industry. Apple insist on having their own apis and they don’t maintain compatibility for older software for very long, these 2 facts explain things fine on their own. Game devs don’t want a major support burden, they’re happy to patch here and there but constant dropping of apis or even architectures is a lot to handle. The bigger impact is that macOS ends up with a lot less old games that still run, if you need a critical mass of games to become a gaming platform, that constant bleed of legacy games will always slow macOS down. As for gaming specific features, Metal is a perfectly fine api whose only real problem is that it’s different from the other platforms. Maybe not the best, but certainly not terrible. They also have a really nice capability floor, it’s practical to make a modern game work on any Mac from the last X years (maybe the neo complicates that a bit). There’s probably a few gaming specific capabilities they could improve on, mouse input especially, but that’s never been the real issue.
- Shitty-kitty 1mo ago
  Optimization and bug hunting makes supporting multiple graphics api's a pain. I really don't understand Apple's stubborn refusal to make vulkan drivers. Between Apple and the better performance on SteamDeck, I can see PC game developers seriously considering Vulkan over directx.
  - somenameforme 1mo ago
    Sony's PS3 is an interesting comparison. It had some borderline ridiculous hardware by the standards of console development. I mean that both as a positive in terms of theoretic capability, and as a negative in terms of practical usability. Sony had a huge market, so I think they were banking on developers bending over backwards to build things to the strengths of the PS3 which would be such an undertaking that it'd almost undoubtedly have left the PS3 version of stuff as definitive, and other platforms operating as second class citizens. Unfortunately for them developers took the path of least resistance and ended up doing the exact opposite.

gloryjulio 1mo ago

Mac gaming is a pain in the **. It's Apple's fault. It's fine they can't justify the maintenance.

goda90 1mo ago

You might be interested in running games from your headless boxes with this: https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine

nottorp 1mo ago
I know how to stream ty :) And I do use that option, as i said, for games that you play in finite sessions and that have a beginning and an end. Also as I said, I don't use it for forever games (mmos or endless simulators like DF) by choice. My playing pattern for those is not finite and relatively long sessions. I fire them for a short break, do something in them, close them and move along. If you have to turn on a separate box for that half your short break is gone with booting and shutting down. And you may lose interest before the other box is finished booting. Same for running games under crossover. Start crossover - SLOOOW. Wait for the game to start through the layers of emulation - SLOOW. It's fine if it's a weekend and I want to play say Dishonored [1] for a few hours. It's not fine if I want to spend 20 min improving a build in Minecraft and then go do irl stuff. [1] Dishonored is an example of the type of game I'd jump through hoops to play. I've always streamed it actually. No idea how it runs in Crossover.

musictubes 1mo ago

The sad thing is that current Macs are perfect machines for DF. The recommendation was always to get as fast a single threaded machine as possible with the biggest cache. Even the least expensive Macs are monsters in those regards. The game is more multi-threaded than before but still is dominated by single threaded performance.