[Suggestion] Time for a native mac client

I play this game on multiple platforms, including pc and ps5, but when I travel I bring my mac with me. I just upgraded to the Macbook Pro M1 Max, the 'ultimate' and best mac that apple has available. And this has demonstrated one thing, the poor performance of the mac client is software not hardware. The m1 max has the equiv of a 3070/3080 laptop gpu. I only get about 30-50 fps at 1600x900.


Shadow of the Tomb Raider gets about 100 fps.
By making a native mac client, truly native, we could get the benefit of iPad versions and iPhone as well.

I play exclusively on a Mac and I rather not do this. Not many play on Macs and that would severely limit grouping and end content. I like that they have cross play, but that is my opinion.

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Originally Posted by Titivillus

I play exclusively on a Mac and I rather not do this. Not many play on Macs and that would severely limit grouping and end content. I like that they have cross play, but that is my opinion.

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You misunderstand what he is asking for. Currently the Mac client is an overblown Wine wrapper, so it uses less than the computer's full capacity of anything. He's asking them to recode it so it is native. It would still work in groups just fine. As a person who switches back and forth, I agree with him.

edit: I don't think iPads are likely or needed however.

Its a lot of developer time to rewrite the client. As everything is a budget... what other development would you like cut to get a native OS X client?

(I play on an M1 too when I am away from home)

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Originally Posted by Shibi

Its a lot of developer time to rewrite the client. As everything is a budget... what other development would you like cut to get a native OS X client?

(I play on an M1 too when I am away from home)

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maybe they should compute how many people pay them for the middling quality of the current client and pay them with that money? No, seriously, that's a BS excuse when we know the client has been around since HW and they are currently getting a bazillion more monthly sub fees than ever before.

I can agree to this. While I use windows personally, as I prefer being able to build my computer, I have some friends who exclusively use macs and would probably enjoy this game. Not fully sure how difficult it would be to rewrite the client for Mac, but definitely something to consider. Though I think their next goal is probably an xbox version.

Square can always outsource it to another company or division, for money obviously. Again if you made a native app, an ipad version would be awesome. Imagine pairing a ps5 controller to your ipad and playing at a cafe.
Once we can you know, log in without a 3 hour queue obv. More importantly though, the current mac app has some limitation. Maybe it only allows so much % of the gpu, or cpu, or memory, who knows. But it seems you can't brute force this client to having good performance. Now that macs no longer have Bootcamp, it's time to recode the client.

Aren't the new macs on ARM? Both Windows PC and PS4/PS5 are on Intel/Amd 64.
This game isn't even compatible with ARM Windows devices.

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Originally Posted by AkaeiNox

Aren't the new macs on ARM? Both Windows PC and PS4/PS5 are on Intel/Amd 64.
This game isn't even compatible with ARM Windows devices.

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It runs through Emulation called Rosetta, which is itself emulating Windows. Making a native mac app would open a lot of doors for future uses. Such as when apple discards rosetta entirely. It's gonna happen someday.
But, imagine being able to play this game natively on your iphone. Yeah you can adjust or reduce the menus but you could. The iphone powerful enough. Add in a controller dock, perfect playing on a bus or train in short bursts.

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Originally Posted by savageink

maybe they should compute how many people pay them for the middling quality of the current client and pay them with that money? No, seriously, that's a BS excuse when we know the client has been around since HW and they are currently getting a bazillion more monthly sub fees than ever before.

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Honestly, I'd be super surprised if they didn't calculate this already and factor it into all the decisions made since 2013 and earlier. Software development is a budget and SE have a lot of metrics to help them make those decisions.

They know how many people are on the OS X client (including me)
They know how many engine developers/QA they have and how much they can produce
They know how much budget the C-Suite have given them to hire more heads for the engine
They know what other tasks need doing in the engine
They know the coding difficulties inherent in their engine

If OS X is important they will assign the resources, if their metrics show it's a relatively small number of us using the Mac Client, then it won't be as near as the top of the list as we would hope.

If the number of people playing on Intel drops and the number of people on ARM rises (which would be wonderful for many reasons!) then it moves up the list.

But at this time... it's clearly not ranking highly. The solution of the Crossover/WINE wrapper is working for now. So, until the day ARM dethrones Intel in a wider sense (again, I hope it will as it's clearly superior)... to push the ARM native version up the list the question remains: What do we cut?

Our best hope, to be frank, will be that Windows on ARM takes off more than it has, and they can then use that impetus to budget in a more native codeset.

I'd quite like to see a proper macOS native client at some point in the future. Not that I've got any intention on playing the game on macOS, despite owning a 2021 MacBook Pro with M1 Pro myself, but simply because Apple are transitioning away from x86. Looking back at the transition from PowerPC to x86 in the early 2000s, the compatibility layer Apple implemented in Mac OS X to ensure application compatibility was only supported for 2-3 years and was then dropped from the operating system entirely.

Sure, you could not update your OS on an existing M1 Mac but eventually Apple will release Macs with a new enough OS that won't include the x86 compatibility layer. The games industry has been particularly slow to support M1 Macs for some reason but you also had Blizzard that released an M1 compatible WoW client very early on into the lifecycle of the first M1 laptops.

It shouldn't cost dev time for other content either because different people are qualified/employed to do different things. An artist isn't also a programmer and vice versa.

I would definitely like a better ver. for Mac even if we don't get a native. Right now it is running in Wine, surely there's something better we can do, even if it doesn't require a full rewrite of the code.

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Originally Posted by Johners

Looking back at the transition from PowerPC to x86 in the early 2000s, the compatibility layer Apple implemented in Mac OS X to ensure application compatibility was only supported for 2-3 years and was then dropped from the operating system entirely. .

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I don't think they will drop it the same way. Currently it's straight up emulation through Rosetta, right? There's nothing lost by keeping the code there. It's nothing like the headphone jack on iPhones it's just a computer program. Dunno what happened with PowerPC to x86.

Also OP turn down water reflections and SSAO off. I play on 1080p and it is 60fps a lot of the time, only there are a lot of players running around now in cities at the moment dropping it to 40-50.

They sell new copies of the game continuously for Mac, and just released an expansion for it. So they are making money. If they did go make it a native app, they could even put it in the app store furthering distribution. (Mac App Store charges same fees as Steam). Yes development costs time and money, but Square already partners with apple, they already have lots of Mac and iOS developers if you haven't seen their GACHA department. It could easily be one of the top apple purchases and a solid money maker, if they didn't treat it like something they regret announcing. At the moment the Mac client feels like well, the ps3 client.

You can easily install windows 10 on your apple computer and get better framerate. The thing is, you won't because you decided at some point in your life that you don't like Microsoft products which is a fine position to take and I understand that. Unfortunately for you, games are difficult to build and terribly hard to port over to another OS especially if that OS does not support the majority of the things you need to be done. For instance, Mac doesn't support Direct X and that's a critical component for FF to run. That's why FF14 is running on an emulator and you get less FPS. It would take an enormous amount of funds for a very small amount of people. They would essentially lose money.

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Originally Posted by Eriane_Elis

You can easily install windows 10 on your apple computer and get better framerate. The thing is, you won't because you decided at some point in your life that you don't like Microsoft products which is a fine position to take and I understand that. Unfortunately for you, games are difficult to build and terribly hard to port over to another OS especially if that OS does not support the majority of the things you need to be done. For instance, Mac doesn't support Direct X and that's a critical component for FF to run. That's why FF14 is running on an emulator and you get less FPS. It would take an enormous amount of funds for a very small amount of people. They would essentially lose money.

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almost everything you said is incorrect, and made up of assumptions about mac users. congratulations.

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Originally Posted by Eriane_Elis

You can easily install windows 10 on your apple computer and get better framerate. The thing is, you won't because you decided at some point in your life that you don't like Microsoft products which is a fine position to take and I understand that. Unfortunately for you, games are difficult to build and terribly hard to port over to another OS especially if that OS does not support the majority of the things you need to be done. For instance, Mac doesn't support Direct X and that's a critical component for FF to run. That's why FF14 is running on an emulator and you get less FPS. It would take an enormous amount of funds for a very small amount of people. They would essentially lose money.

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You can no longer install windows on macs as of the upgrade to the m1. M1 is ARM based and Windows ARM does not install on it yet. Maybe someday, not today. M1 is also the same processor in the ipad, which as stated, would make porting the game over to mobile incredible easy for them should they make a native mac client.

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Originally Posted by Defmetal

Square can always outsource it to another company or division, for money obviously.

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They already do; the existing Mac version is handled by Codeweavers, not internally at Square-Enix.

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Originally Posted by Defmetal

It runs through Emulation called Rosetta, which is itself emulating Windows. Making a native mac app would open a lot of doors for future uses. Such as when apple discards rosetta entirely. It's gonna happen someday.

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This is a really minor point in terminology, but extremely important in implementation: WINE does not emulate Windows. (In fact, if I recall correctly "WINE" originally stood for "Wine is Not an Emulator".) It is a translation layer.

Emulating a thing means you create a virtual system within which the thing runs; you would, functionally, install Windows into a container. A translation layer runs the thing natively, but provides stubbed libraries that translate the calls; the Windows client runs, but where it might expect "library A" on Windows, it can load the same 'library' in WINE... and that library just has code that's like, "Okay, and this is how we do it on this system." Hence why WINE does not actually require a copy of Windows to function.

Rosetta 2 (the thing that lets you run Intel code on the ARM M1) is also not an emulator, as an interesting point. It actually analyzes the entire program and compiles an ARM equivalent ahead of time, then caches that; when you run an Intel program on an M1 Mac, it takes a lot longer to start the first time (because it's analyzing the program and creating an ARM equivalent) and then is much faster on successive launches (until the application changes and it must make a new ARM binary).

However, this makes for a truly bonkers number of translation layers involved in the Mac client on M1.

You're running Windows code via dummy libraries that translate the calls into MacOS equivalents, which itself is being done from an ARM binary generated automatically by effectively decompiling an Intel program and recompiling it for ARM. In addition, that program is making calls to DirectX which (via DXVK) are being translated into Vulkan equivalents, which (via MoltenVK) are being translated into the equivalent graphics calls in Apple's "Metal" graphics API.

It's honestly sort of dizzying... and impressive that it works as well as it does.

A native application would work considerably better, though, you're not wrong.

Square should evaluate the demand for it, though not using existing sales. Using existing sales is well, "The mac client doesn't work very well so people don't buy it or play on macs. People don't play on macs so we shouldn't build a native app".

Does anyone know how hard it would be to do a native client? Cause WoW did it.
This game was pumped out fast after 1.0s failure and seems to be designed to be ported to many systems, I feel like it wouldn't be too hard but I don't have any programming knowledge.