Compatibility with M1/M2 Macs

[Salmon]

I bought the game and unfortunately I didn't realise that the game wasn't supported on M1 Macs. It would be cool for this feature to be added as soon as can be as im excited to play the game. I also can't seem to find a workaround. Please devs, I really want to play your game, I know im not the only one with this problem.

[Faalagorn]

There are emulators that allow you to play x86 apps on ARM, though the performance my sadly suffers

[EnigmaGrey]

Unfortunately, the future on M1 is not especially bright for Project Zomboid. Initially, we were quite excited to see that the game played well despite being virtualized (Rosetta), but subsequent updates on Apple’s side introduced a stutter when moving that we never could figure out.* Worse, Apple could pull OpenGL support at any time, as it was deprecated in 2016, and we don’t realistically have enough Mac users nor devs with Mac experience to do a complete rewrite in Metal, Apple’s replacement for OpenGL.

 

I’m not saying that support for m1 can’t happen in the future, but we can’t make any promises. If the uncertainty is a concern and you’re past the cutoff for Steam’s automated refund system, you can still manually submit a support ticket to Steam. Just explain why and link this thread in the ticket.

 

if you would rather not refund the game,  a workaround might be using Mesa drivers on Mac (but you might have to compile it yourself). Another option is to dual boot linux, assuming the distro includes Mesa’s m1 driver, Ashai. Parallels (vm software on Mac, as Faalagoon mentioned above) might also work, but last time I tested it, I had quite a few errors related to openGL and it performed poorly. If parallels gets hardware acceleration, it might perform better.
 

* for the stuttering, you could try turning off or lowering advanced settings like  reflections/dynamic skybox in the game’s Options menu. They’re near the bottom.

[Salmon]

I managed to run the game on Mac today but it was not the greatest. I thought it would be in the works as many devs have made there games work on M1. I’ll keep the game in my library and hope and prey. 

[EnigmaGrey]

Think of it like this: Mac was always a very small portion of the player base (maybe half a percentage?). Apple then split that small fraction into an even smaller number, between arm and intel. For many companies, Mac support wasn’t profitable enough to support dedicated devs, but releasing a x86 build didn’t require much additional work to pull off (depending on  how the game was built, anyway), so why not do it. But the changes requited to get a native ARM build are fairly involved and require all third party libs we use to also support arm. Same thing for Metal vs OpenGL, albeit on top of the switch to ARM.

 

That’s partially why Rosetta “just working” was such a boon to game developers, otherwise there’d be only a few hundred m1 native titles right now (ignoring Apple Arcade). 

 

For example, this list has 1440 games that will work to some extent on m1, but only 288 are native. The rest rely on emulation.

 

It’ll likely be a very long time before everyone else catches up, assuming arm is the future. But, for now, Mac has been surpassed by Linux for gaming, and seems to continue to decline. Basically it’s the 90s in reverse: apple moved on from Power PC to x86, allowing for a huge number of games to be ported over “easily” but by extension wiped out the native powerpc games. (Emulation was very primitive back then, however.)

 

https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/M1_perfect_games_list

 

[Salmon]

I get it. I’m just sad that I can’t play. I’m a massive “apple fanboy” and I buy everything apple when I can. Do t get me wrong Mac’s are great, especially my MacBook Pro M1 but I’ve always been let down by their compatibility with games. 

[getstoopid]

@SalmonAs a workaround would GeForce NOW (or any other games streaming service) be an option, provided it's available in your region?

If you have a decent internet connection...