Yeah it's very sad for me as well, I was a big fan of supreme commander and I really wanted to play BAR. They have a special Notice for Mac users, which explain that they don't support Mac because:
1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple.
2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures.
The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate it all to Metal automatically at runtime. Surely performance will suffer a bit, but it should be playable.
The second one is quite absurd though, ARM processors is not something exclusive to Mac, Windows-on-ARM laptops are becoming increasingly common, ARM market share in the broader PC space is forecast to approach 20-30% in the coming years as Windows-on-ARM software compatibility matures. This prevents a huge number of people from playing the game due to the ancient streflop library, and really this notice should be "Notice for ARM users" not "Notice from Mac users"
UPD:
Actually there is a guy who is trying to invent a direct OpenGL-to-Metal translation layer just to play B.A.R. it seems, and the progress is pretty huge at the moment:
alt Hacker News
Yeah it's very sad for me as well, I was a big fan of supreme commander and I really wanted to play BAR. They have a special Notice for Mac users, which explain that they don't support Mac because:
1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple.
2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures.
The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate it all to Metal automatically at runtime. Surely performance will suffer a bit, but it should be playable.
The second one is quite absurd though, ARM processors is not something exclusive to Mac, Windows-on-ARM laptops are becoming increasingly common, ARM market share in the broader PC space is forecast to approach 20-30% in the coming years as Windows-on-ARM software compatibility matures. This prevents a huge number of people from playing the game due to the ancient streflop library, and really this notice should be "Notice for ARM users" not "Notice from Mac users"
UPD:
Actually there is a guy who is trying to invent a direct OpenGL-to-Metal translation layer just to play B.A.R. it seems, and the progress is pretty huge at the moment:
https://appgl.pages.dev/