Mac OS X Support

[X-Trade]

It would be really nice to see Avorion available on OS X. If you already have a linux build then it tends to not be too hard to add as a build target, of course testing without a mac tends to be the problem.

 

Personally I'm accustomed to all OS, as a developer myself, but I use a Mac as my every day machine.

 

 

As an alternative, would you recommend some other way of running on Mac, such as through Wine?

[koonschi]

Mac support is definitely something we want and you summarized the case perfectly. We have to get a machine to build and test it on. Will most likely happen further down the road.

 

I don't have a lot of experience with neither Mac nor Wine, maybe someone else can chime in?

[Kane Hart]

I think Mac is Unix based kernel system? The game already had Linux builds and might actually be able to work on Mac tbh. I don't also have a mac to test on but mac has terminal mode and the works. Idk if they can run these same kind of linux build binaries from scratch.

 

Wine is Wine is actually originally for just Linux but I think works on Linux, mac, and BSD, etc. It allows you to run DX9 or something like that on those OS with a little bit of a performance hit and bugs and not everything works perfectly. I think a lot of Linux users for example would use Wine to play say World of Warcraft.

 

I might be wrong on some of this and I'm sorry :)

[koonschi]

It probably won't run natively since macos uses different syscalls than the other linux kernels. It's unix based, but that's about it.

What wine does (very simplified) is map windows system calls to linux system calls, making windows software run on linux.

If there's a wine distribution for mac, it does the same with mac system calls, so it might work. If it does, good for you, but no official support from our side yet.

[X-Trade]

Yeah, linux binaries won't run on OS X. Of course a lot of tools and software these days are in interpreted or VM/bytecode languages that will run, so a lot of end user and developer tools do work.

 

I've had a play around with the windows version, via Wine on OS X (from homebrew), I managed to get it installed but it doesn't run. It has an access violation on the glew32.dll library. Unfortunately this is my first experience of Wine so I haven't made much progress beyond that.

 

 

I'd really like to give this a look, I guess I'll try a linux VM. I only just recently deleted my Windows bootcamp partition since it was using up a lot of disk space for something I hardly ever used ::)

[Ellert van Koperen]

In fact SDL2 runs fine on OSX since 10.5 , which was a very long time ago.

Freetype works,

(lib)Png works,

sndfile works with homebrew and through other routes,

GLEW is an interesting case, is it really needed ? OSX provides all GL functionality out of the box. But it seems possible to get it to run, see this thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12229714/building-glew-for-mac-osx

 

So, no huge problems off the bat. For sure I would not mind a mac version.

[ze_robot]

So, no huge problems off the bat.

 

That's a type of Windows executable.

 

I believe those tools support Mac OS X because someone took the time to port them.

 

Has anyone had any experience with Fink?

Fink is not an option without having the source AFAIK.

 

EDIT: I think I can answer a few questions from this thread.

I think Mac is Unix based kernel system?

It is. At least, all modern Macs are.

 

Wine is Wine is actually originally for just Linux but I think works on Linux, mac, and BSD, etc. It allows you to run DX9 or something like that on those OS with a little bit of a performance hit and bugs and not everything works perfectly. I think a lot of Linux users for example would use Wine to play say World of Warcraft.

I've used WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator) a lot in the past. You got the explanation of what it does wrong; it's supposed to be able to run ANY Windows executable. It's a compatibility layer for -Nix OSes. What this exactly means is lost to me, but from what I've read it's similar in practice (not in terms of code) to how Windows 10 runs Windows XP programs.

 

In terms of what to use, I would suggest either WineBottler or Crossover. I'm more familiar with WineBottler, as Crossover costs money. I've also tried WineSkin in the past, but I can't recall what kind of successes I had with it.

 

In terms of things going wrong, you might get anything from graphical glitches to it just not working. I would still highly recommend trying it if nothing else works. Be sure to install the correct Winetricks to your bottle and check the error logs to see what Winetricks you may have missed.

[Ellert van Koperen]

ze_robot, 'off the bat' is an expression, meaning 'from the start' or 'at the beginning', it does not refer to windows batch files.

 

It should be possible to compile Avorion for OSX, making it a native application.

 

Wine is a road towards disaster that everyone should stay away from, specifically for applications that lean heavily on openGL.

[ze_robot]

ze_robot, 'off the bat' is an expression, meaning 'from the start' or 'at the beginning', it does not refer to windows batch files.

 

That was an attempt at making a joke.

 

It should be possible to compile Avorion for OSX, making it a native application.

 

Definitely. It's usually not as simple as typing a different compile command. There are some shortcuts you can take.

 

Wine is a road towards disaster that everyone should stay away from, specifically for applications that lean heavily on openGL.

 

I've had some success with it before. That isn't to say I've had problems with it as well. Those who are tinkerers with some time on their hands might want to take this route if they're too impatient to wait for a native application and don't want to run Windows. For those who are ok with running Windows: Bootcamp/virtualization are currently the most headache-free ways of running Avorion on a Mac.

 

I believe openGL on WINE isn't as big of a problem as Direct X. I wouldn't be surprised if it also struggled with openGL, though.

 

EDIT: Something else to note is that it would appear that most versions of WINE for Mac are 32 bit. There do appear to be some 64 bit builds available for Wineskin. From my tests, it would appear that the Avorion demo is 64 bit.

[BlackNoir]

I can confirm that there are opengl issues, repeating errors in the log and the game sticks at the loading screen, when i tried to run on a windows vm using fusion.. which is a bummer.