Believe that’s proprietary.
There’s plenty of decent open source libraries for game development, but to be brutally honest, they come with their ups and downs. Namely how split the community can be. Probably better for a larger company to use Unity or Unreal, or write their own.
This is the license that it’s under
General: 3-clause BSD
Wine: LGPLv2.1+
Basically, they’re paying code weavers.
To make proton it’s basically a fork of wine
ARM64 support is in place for the WoW client, but ironically that was only due to Blizzard having an internal ARM64 Windows cilent under development testing. Had Blizzard not started looking into ARM64 for Windows it would likely have never supported the M-Series Macs.
Nah, Apple’s design is “throw away machines”. It’s called planned obsolescence. None, and I do mean none of their current machines can be upgraded in any way. They have a finite lifespan from the moment they’re created. One of the big fears is Apple will simply do away with the Mac Pro as we have known it for the last 17 years and its next “Mac Pro” will be non-expandable, non-upgradeable and like the rest of their machines, no eGPU support for better performance than their IGPs.
This sadly has actually become an issue in-house for Blizzard. They’ve having to work around a lot of deficiencies in modern macOS and even hardware deficiencies. It’s the reason I keep saying that their CPUs are beast mode (and they are), but their GPUs/IGPs are weaksauce. Hell, users still have to knock down render scale at 4k even on the most powerful M-Series Macs available because the IGPs just can’t hack it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the tile based rendering system is also causing performance issues with WoW, to say nothing of Blizzard having to tiptoe on egg shells with regard to Metal when trying to get WoW’s renderer to work properly with the IGPs Apple uses. Of course there’s also the lovely Metal 2 memory leak that will never be fixed by Apple, effectively cutting off Intel Mac users from updating to Ventura forever even though their machines can run that OS.
The “professional” GPUs have ECC built in. I’m talking full ECC, not the pitiful barely functional error correction in GDDR6 (or even regular DDR5). Honestly, even though it would cost a few frames per second (at the most), I’m an advocate for putting ECC back into computers as a baseline. ECC DRAM and ECC VRAM. A whole slew of “bugs” could be avoided with proper error correction. That’s what the professionals pay for - avoiding bugs while maintaining relatively good render times.
Their MacBook Air is a joke. It throttles even with the most mundane tasks because its heat dissipation system is so pathetic it’s almost worthless. It has no fan to move air at all so the whole thing heats up to the point that it’s usefulness only goes about as far as email, moderate web browsing, and things like word processors. Gaming on that machine is pointless since it throttles so badly and with no fan to manually adjust to counter the heat buildup, there’s nothing the user can do about it.
Do we really have to point out E-Mu here? 
WoW in the iOS universe won’t happen. Because the addons are considered external they can’t be installed in iOS. Apple deems that “sideloading” and blocks it. It’s why non-jailbroken devices can’t run emulators with a user’s own selection of ROMs (and sadly why M1 Arcade Music Player for Android never got ported to iOS). Since a lot of people need addons for accessibility (like myself), an iOS WoW would be nonfunctional for them.
It’s a mach-O kernel base with a BSD foundation. It’s just different enough that vanilla linux apps don’t necessarily run properly (or at all) in macOS, except under the Terminal. Brew is a clusterfudge and won’t work properly or at all for OSes prior to Big Sur. It’s the unfortunate effect of Apple abandoning their OSes on a yearly basis.
That’s also why it’s getting harder and harder to support WoW on macOS. There’s a real possibility that if Apple continues to refuse to fix bugs and not even backport bugfixes, that WoW 11.0 won’t have macOS support at all. You see, with Apple abandoning OSes yearly and only fully supporting newly released hardware, that forces Blizzard to use the latest XCode to build WoW for macOS and thus more uses get cut off every time they have to move up to the latest and greatest to support Apple’s newest hardware lineup. Ironically this is the exact same problem Linux had for a very long time with regard to kernel updates and the requirements for those updates. In fact, this very problem is why Linux grew so slowly for so long. Maintaining support for Linux was absurdly taxing. It’s better now, but still fragmented enough to make most game developers shy away from it despite its capabilities.
Commissioning outside development on a project like WoW isn’t really feasible. This is despite the fact the named companies are good at what they do. CodeWeavers BTW is also a big reason DXVK is continuing to improve as much as it has recently.
Sadly it is a lot of work for macOS ports. There is literally one “full time” macOS developer with Blizzard currently, and that person is also tasked with the Windows clients for all games as well. The macOS stuff literally gets done only when he has time to actually do the work, and the patches only get pushed out during Windows patch cycles unless it’s a completely gamebreaking issue, and even then sometimes the issues stick around for longer than they would on Windows (see: the client crash that took weeks to patch out).
Apple continues to piss off virtually every game developer out there with its shenanigans and refusal to backport bugfixes that result in fractured OS support scenarios like what Blizzard is dealing with.
Why you guys whining about using windows so hard omg I’m going to quit lol. Linux is garbage compared to windows.
Not really, honestly you don’t even have to touch the command line/terminal anymore if you really don’t want to… but if people like windows or apple or Linux more power to them, it’s just a tool at the end of the day… and honestly, Linux has come Leaps and bounds in the gaming front…
But also in the end the world runs on Linux…
While I would also like a Linux native app for when I am in that, the plain and simple is it is not a supported OS, and until it is on their supported OS list, they really don’tcare if an unsupported OS has issues running things.
That sentiment would also go for most software companies, you use unsupported things, it isn’t their job to support your unsupported software. That said of course some are more sympathetic then others and might listen to users and add more support, but as others have said here that won’t likely ever be the case for WoW.
Informative post, thanks for it.
Why I love their advertising. look how fast it is! they have throttled for years. don’t show me 10 seconds calculations. show me…2 hours of massive video export or running mathematical analysis that takes hours.
they are worse than intel. Intel you can assume will use their math libraries for the compiling. they at least put that in the notes too. waaaaay at the bottom, in fine print, but its there. sample code was this calculation coded in house with math libraries used.
so yeah…its gonna do some freaky complex math calculation faster. To show off why that processor you got last year is now garbage lol. and to sell those math libraries. I using student means pulled this down for free once. those math libraries can be useful. not paying for it for my needs but yeah…for science/technical pro’s it might be worth it.
Apple you need review sites. They slam it with a task that takes an hour+. Shows real power curve as apple drops as the throttle kicks in.
This is exactly what I did to play WoW. I’ve not had any issues since I returned to playing at the launch of Dragonflight.
the reason why they can’t is because microsoft has a death grip on DirectX api… linux runs wow just fine with AMD gear and NVIDIA if you have patience and a will to succeed. When the linux community can fork out the dough to borrow some native api’s from m$ like macintosh it would be damn near a direct port to linux… take a look at all the open source thats already in the battle.net app… [https://github.com/Blizzard] plenty of open code there.