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pohl 7 hours ago

Been wanting to play this. Alas, macOS support is table stakes for me.

gloosx 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah it's very sad for me as well, I was a big fan of supreme commander and I really wanted to play BAR. They have a special Notice for Mac users, which explain that they don't support Mac because:

1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple.

2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures.

The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate it all to Metal automatically at runtime. Surely performance will suffer a bit, but it should be playable.

The second one is quite absurd though, ARM processors is not something exclusive to Mac, Windows-on-ARM laptops are becoming increasingly common, ARM market share in the broader PC space is forecast to approach 20-30% in the coming years as Windows-on-ARM software compatibility matures. This prevents a huge number of people from playing the game due to the ancient streflop library, and really this notice should be "Notice for ARM users" not "Notice from Mac users"

UPD:

Actually there is a guy who is trying to invent a direct OpenGL-to-Metal translation layer just to play B.A.R. it seems, and the progress is pretty huge at the moment:

https://appgl.pages.dev/

p2004a 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That notice is not worded in the best way and hasn't been updated for a while. However, progress has been made.

On the Recoil engine releases (https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/releases) page, we have had experimental Linux arm64 builds since March of this year.

Additionally, several people are trying to get the graphical pipeline and overall build working on Mac; you can follow their progress at https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/issues/936

The challenge with arm64 is that Recoil Engine does deterministic lockstep simulation using actual native floats for performance. Porting all of those operations (which were implemented using the mentioned library) to work on arm64 and produce the exact same bit-perfect results as on x86_64 has been challenging.

gloosx 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's great to hear, yeah I researched this topic a bit further and there are clearly some very determined people who want to bring BAR to more platforms, excited about the progress! Floats will be a big pain in the ass for sure and will cause countless desyncs, same story prevented playing supreme commander FAF on ARM processors, though a lot of attempts have been made