this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
72 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
30522 readers
221 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't like this decision, since I know the lack of support for different platforms than Windows as someone playing on Linux. Valve invests into proton and thus game support on Steam Deck and ChromeOS, so I'd have thought they'd make sure CS runs on macOS too.
I’d have thought the pain point would have been the processor architecture (ARM64) rather than operating system - MacOS still supports AMD64 using a compatibility layer but it would probably be quite a drawback to game performance.
Not really, unless the game code was written in X86-64 assembly language, does low-level VM allocation for some reason, or otherwise has special dependencies on Intel CPU-isms. With a few exceptions, C/C++/Objective-C code written for X86-64 can be easily recompiled for ARM64.
The PowerPC to X86 transition was much rougher, because of the byte order change + PPC allowing integer division by zero while X86 disallowed it.
What’s your experience here? I’m interested to hear about projects that you have done this for.
The source engine has code that’s over 20 years old. A monolithic project like a game engine, which is statically and dynamically linked with god knows how many libraries they don’t even have code for, let alone permission, to compile in a different architecture, is not gonna be an easy thing to do.
I've brought various apps, bundles, and frameworks from PowerPC to Intel to 64-bit to ARM ever since macOS 10.0 first launched. Usually the most difficult parts were:
But yeah, usually the most difficult part of the transition is managing the dependencies. Whenever Apple transitions CPU architectures, if your app depends on a closed-source third-party library or kernel extension made by developers that went out of business years ago, you're more or less screwed unless you can find or build a replacement.