Some thoughts about a mac release.

[Rahorah]

Using "a mac" can mean very different things. A ten years old MacBook or a MacBook Air is not comparable to an up to date iMac or Mac Pro.
But not only on the hardware side a mac can vary much. The OS itself changed too during its life.

Mac OS X was released in 2001 as the successor of Mac OS 9. The latest release was in 2012 called Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. - GolfIt! will never run on Mac OS X!

Then there was a name change and OS X was released in 2012 as OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. The latest release was in 2015 called OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Support by Apple will be dropped soon. - GolfIt! may run on OS X, but I don't think it ever will.

Then the name changed again and macOS was released in 2016 as macOS 10.12 Sierra. It may be advisable to have a Mac with a 1 or 2 GB dedicated graphics card running on macOS to enjoy the game one day.

But why not on older Macs? GolfIt! uses UE4 as the game engine in version 4.15.2 at the moment. The latest release of UE4 is v4.18. Changing the major version of a game engine can be non trivial and cause a lot of changes in the code. So the actual game engine is always some months behind. As long as the development continues, the game will run with engine version 4.18 someday (maybe in half a year or more as a wild guess). And this will bring a problem.

When you read through the release notes of 4.18[docs.unrealengine.com] (bottom of page at Platforms), the minimum requirements changed to MacOS 10.12.6 Sierra for editor and games. At this point, the game will not be playable on older Macs.

Besides that, on a mac there is no DirectX. To use OpenGL in future versions (UE 4.19), you will require an OpenGL4 capable graphics card.

If the devs don't want to earn a bad reputation, it will be comprehensible to not sell a game they know will not work anymore in half a year. So they should stick to these minimum requirements defined by already known future updates.

That doesn't change anything on a release date of a mac version. But one can estimate, if waiting is worth it.


I'm not a dev of this game.

[copied this from a different thread, it is better placed here.]

[Honeybeelinjo]

If be golf it for imac pro

[EvShrug]

Egads man, are you a computer yourself?
Just say: “a MacOS port on newer systems is possible, but it faces the same challenges as any game port to the platform.”

I can’t believe you wrote a 400 word history lesson on every Mac operating system since the return of Steve Jobs.