Zero-K on MacOS

I've gotten Zero-K to work on MacOS/ARM to an extent.

Using an Ubuntu ARM64 Virtual Machine and running the semi-portable itch.io release with Box64 seems to work pretty well. Though, a dual boot setup of MacOS and ARM Ubuntu would likely have near-native performance.

I've been looking at doing things natively on MacOS but given that MacOS doesn't support OpenGL, Spring will refuse to run. As a result, this seems to be the best solution.

I'll continue to look into this, but as an FYI for anyone that tries something like this in the future, rosetta is no-op. In all of my tests it'll just segfault. Also, it might be possible to get Zero-K working natively on MacOS by using an OpenGL-Metal compatibility layer like MGL or MetalANGLE. I haven't looked into this myself so there's still a chance it'll work.

Here's the project: https://github.com/smallketchup82/Zero-K-MacOS

Thanks for reading! I'm happy to have gotten this working and reproducible enough to be able to share with others.

Have anyone tried running on actual native arm64 ISA? Would one need to build the engine from source for that?

I have an update to this thread, in that I've managed to get Zero-K to run natively on MacOS using software rendering a couple months ago. The entire game works, however it runs at an average of 15fps, requires shaders to be disabled, and is borderline unplayable as a result.

Because it requires a lot of steps, I'll make another post detailing what method I used to get it to run natively for anyone curious. Unfortunately, however, there is no way to run it natively on MacOS without software rendering due to the game's usage of OpenGL. Zink does not work. Any OpenGL to Metal translation layers have failed to work.

The current best method is still using my VM packages. But it is worth it to track these pull requests on Recoil engine's github as they seem somewhat promising:
- https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/pull/2820
- https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/pull/2991