We’re coming to you here with some sad news. We’ve always prided ourselves with being able to supply our games on PC, Linux and Mac, but we have now encountered some serious problems with the latest versions of MacOS. Even though we’ve put in tons of effort trying to fix the issues – so that SOMA and Rebirth supports MacOS – we have finally had to give up. We simply cannot manage it.
This means that SOMA won’t fully work on the latest version of MacOS (audio will not work to be more specific) and that we won’t be releasing Amnesia: Rebirth on Mac at all. We are truly sad for those of you who have been waiting for this version to be released.
We wanted to share some more details about the problem with you here:
- OpenGL was deprecated in macOS 10.14 (Mojave). Newer macOS can still run OpenGL games but there are no tools to help development. If a graphics related bug occurs we are blind and have to guess what’s going on, which increases the workload per bug to extreme levels.
- Changes to the audio drivers in macOS 11.0 (Big Sur) has caused our sound engine to stop working. We have been in discussion with our third party partner and they have no plans on updating the sound engine to support the latest macOS. This means we would have to change to a different sound engine, meaning a complete reimplementation of all sound effects without even knowing that we could reach the same quality.
Really sad news of course but we now feel we have exhausted all our options and will simply have to fold under these problems.
Can you please move to Unreal Engine already? This is enough proof your engine is not gonna make the cut in the future.
idk if this would fix the problem. I mean, they are probably not accustomed to working with Unreal at all, it would probably take their team a whole other year to learn how to operate with it. And just because their engine doesn’t properly work on the newer MacOS versions it doesn’t mean they must give up on it.
That’s not how it works. Game engines are like engines – people who work on them don’t only work on a single one. And making a game like their HPL engine titles in Unreal Engine 4/5 would be a very smooth, natural transition. Try using both and you’ll see.
It’s probably better for them to move to Unreal or other modern engines. As someone who worked with HPL for 5 years now (creating mods, tutorials, looking at the source code etc) I’m very familiar with the pipeline and how things tick. It will be an understatement to say this engine is antiquated.
Not only it’s lagging behind every engine I know and it lacks very basic features you’d expect from a proper engine, but it’s also extremely buggy (Some of the important level editor features don’t even work, the tools crash randomly, etc) and picky.
Even the people at FG experience those bugs during development, as the former community manager once pointed out.
Unless the next iteration of the engine (HPL4) will be even remotely close to Unity and the like, I don’t see a reason to not move to other engines from a technical standpoint.
Taking a year or so to learn a much better, stable, and modern technology with better pipelines will likely be better for the whole team in the long-run.
Why switch to UE? They spent tons of money on dev their own engine. It has maybye the best physics computation than any other engine. Its build for spec. purpose. The problem is like with any other sw on mac. Apple dgasaa outside their ecosystem. And thx to the situation epic contra apple, ue might have the same issues in the future. Problem is mac. Not the engine. That runs withou problem on w and linux.
Their engine is good enough for games, they are doing. It’s admirable that devs in those days still have the guts to make their own engine as well.
Oh no, please not! I love their own engine much more than any other engine. It’s immersive how it works with physics based objects and interaction. Other engines limit these features to a minimum.
You can do the same in Unreal, Unity or even Godot lol
I don’t think the issue is HPL3. For SOMA and Amnesia, Frictional has used FMOD Designer to integrate their audio with the game. The program is 11 years old now and Firelight has created new versions since then, but I guess Frictional preferred to stick to what they knew already. I assume they are replacing it with Wwise for the very same reasons and many more for all upcoming projects. That’s for the audio.
The problem here is on Apple’s side if they decide to stop supporting certain tools. And certainly, moving to UE4 just to develop a Mac version…there was some war going on between the two, right?
thanks you frictional game i love the game keep up the good work thanks 🙂
Mac and Nintendo Switch user here 😐
Thanks for the effort anyway guys. You are great and now seriously considering getting a pc to finally play Rebirth (and replay Soma, a total masterpiece).
Cheers!
José
not a mac user myself but i think i can imagine the dissapointment of those who have this certain platform. but still thank you for being honest!
Nowadays, gamers have the opportunity to use GeForce now or shadow.tech
As a Mac user, this is disappointing, but thanks for the honesty and for trying.