Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game - News - Automation and MacOS - The Future.

[p]As many of our Mac players noticed, the long-discussed MacOS version of Automation did not make its return with Al-Rilma Update Patch 7. Why is that? Unfortunately, a number of reasons led us to make the difficult decision to end development of the native MacOS version of Automation. This was not a decision made lightly, nor was it a decision that was entirely ours to make either. In the following we want to share with you in some detail the factors and circumstances that led to this point, as well as an alternative path forward.[/p][p][/p]

Why are we choosing to stop development of the MacOS version?

[p][/p][p]Well, there are five main reasons why:[/p][olist][*][p]Ending Support - Apple recently announced that when MacOS 28 arrives in 2027, Rosetta support will be ending. For those that don't know, Rosetta is the technology that runs behind the scenes that translates the x86 code that PC applications need to run (and is used on virtually all PCs since time immemorial, practically) on Apple's ARM-based processors. This causes a serious issue for Automation - and indeed nearly all games developed on Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) specifically - in that UE4 relies on Rosetta to run quickly and efficiently on MacOS. Without Rosetta, Automation will become unplayable as a native MacOS application.[/p][/*][*][p]Rendering Pipeline - In the current version of the MacOS build that we've worked on for patch 7, we have encountered several rendering pipeline issues for Automation that are nested deep in the game engine. These are causing screen flickers and frames rendered with inverted vertices ("spazzing out") for a brief moment whenever you edit your car. Further investigation has shown that we likely wouldn't be able to fix this ourselves and that the only supported cure currently would be switching the game over to Unreal Engine 5. Releasing the MacOS version with these issues would be unacceptable.[/p][/*][*][p]UE5 Unviable - Transitioning Automation to Unreal Engine 5, at this point in its development, is not a viable option. We've done several game engine changes with Automation throughout it's 14+ years in development, from switching from our own, homemade game engine to UE4 in the first place, as well as several UE4 version updates following. We can tell you that this is a time consuming and often frustrating process. There are a lot of wildcards involved that can absolutely foul up any timelines you may have for the transition, and as anyone who has been in the community for long enough will tell you: things break in the transition, mods stop functioning, and players are likely to lose most, if not all, of their existing saves in the process of an engine switch. We've already promised to the Automation community that the switch to UE4.27 that we made in 2022 would be the last engine switch, and we have found no compelling reason to break that promise.[/p][/*][*][p]Mod Logistics - Even in case we were able to somehow solve the rendering bugs in UE4, there would be one issue we could not solve effectively for the MacOS version - that being, UE4's need to have Workshop mods "cooked" for each operating system. We would need to build out our Software Development Kit (SDK - the tool our modding community uses to take their raw 3D models, convert them to a usable format for UE4, and then upload them to the Steam Workshop automatically) to allow modders to create mods for MacOS Automation in addition to PC Automation. That doesn't magically happen for the 600+ mods that already exist on the Steam Workshop for Automation; they would need to be re-cooked and re-uploaded to the Workshop to work with MacOS, and that re-cooking process might very well end up breaking those same mods on the PC side. Not an ideal situation at all because this would effectively create a two-tiered mod system, and introduces the possibility that popular mods might never make it to MacOS at all, if their creator is no longer actively modding for Automation.[/p][/*][*][p]Maintenance Costs - Maintaining the physical infrastructure on our end to build and test on MacOS is a not-inconsiderable ongoing expense, especially in terms of developer time that could be spent on improving the game instead. We are a very small team for the size of the project as is, and it goes without saying that we would rather focus our efforts on what gives us the most benefit in delivering Automation to you, the player, as best as we can![/p][/*][/olist][p]None of these issues, except for #1, are unsolvable admittedly, but to put it simply, it's just not a good use of our time to finish development of the native MacOS version, only for it to just stop working (probably for good) in less than two years.[/p][p][/p]

So, what now for Automation on Mac?

[p]Well, something we have found over the last little while is that Automation runs more or less perfectly on Parallels! We found it was just as stable as the PC version and that it ran largely the same when comparing performance on comparable PC and Mac hardware. Additionally, you get the added benefit of running the PC version of Automation, which allows full, unfettered access to the Steam Workshop and all of the mods on it, and also not having to worry about any of the issues we've just discussed with Rosetta support ending.[/p][p][/p][p]We understand this is very disappointing news for some of you, and we hope that you can understand the difficulty of making this decision. We look forward to welcoming our Mac players on Parallels now, and far into the future![/p]

News Liste Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game

Why are we choosing to stop development of the MacOS version?

So, what now for Automation on Mac?

Aktuelle Steam News
Neue Steam News in der ePrison Datenbank

News Liste Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game

Why are we choosing to stop development of the MacOS version?

So, what now for Automation on Mac?

Aktuelle Steam NewsNeue Steam News in der ePrison Datenbank

Aktuelle Steam News
Neue Steam News in der ePrison Datenbank