Apple Silicon and why I am excited

[Phate Shepherd]

On 11/11/2020 at 1:11 PM, Lyssa Greymoon said:

How hard is it to compile the viewer on a Mac? I'm more interested in seeing an M1 native viewer than seeing it ported to the iPad.

I can barely code in C, never-mind C++ or any objective languages and managed to compile the MacOS SL viewer a couple years back to add in the mirror diff. Compiled the PC version as  well (in-world mirrors refused to work on the Mac, but the viewer ran fine.) Took about an afternoon of setting up the dev environment according to the wiki. I doubt that just adding a command line switch to build an M1 version or a fat binary with both X86 and M1 code will be that easy due to numerous tools needing fiddling with to make them behave under Big Sur. Its going to take a Mac die-hard at LL to convince them to pony up at least $700 for a Mac Mini to try it out....  or one of us!

[Ona Waffle]

On 11/11/2020 at 1:43 PM, Ansariel Hiller said:

Imagine LL having to submit the viewer to Apple for approval for their app store and Apple rejecting it because of being a Fortnite 2.0 case with bypassing in-app payments... 😂

You know LL dont have to submit their viewer, just like Firestorm doesn't get submitted. Unlike IOS anyone can make a Mac program and distribute it as they wish. Sure Gatekeeper will warn the user that the app hasn't been tested, (once only), but it can still be run when the user permits it..

More of concern, to me, is that OpenGL has been depreciated and as far as I am aware, LL used a lot of OpenGL in the viewer. I can not imagine LL will rewrite the viewer using metal, so probably for us Mac users, it's game over.

I for one will not buy a windows computer just for SL.

Edited December 12, 2020 by Ona Waffle

[Ansariel Hiller]

3 hours ago, Ona Waffle said:

You know LL dont have to submit their viewer, just like Firestorm doesn't get submitted. Unlike IOS anyone can make a Mac program and distribute it as they wish. Sure Gatekeeper will warn the user that the app hasn't been tested, (once only), but it can still be run when the user permits it..

Maybe you should have read the whole context, but I'll repeat it for you again: If Apple is going to lock down the Mac the same was as iOS - which wouldn't surprise me the slightest if they are going to do that now they can easily run iOS apps on the Mac and vice versa - and you have to install whatever application through the app store, then of course you will have to submit your application to Apple for approval.