Hello everyone, macOS Ventura beta is released and it has a new version of metal, Metal3.
Does anyone have any news or info about Diablo 4 macOS and whether or not it’s a thing?
Does anyone think that Metal3 will make Diablo 4 (and future blizzard games) more likely to release on macOS?
I can not afford another computer or really anything for the foreseeable future so please don’t tell me to just “buy another PC to play D4” because that’s not an option. I simply won’t be playing Diablo 4 if it’s not on either macOS or Switch.
2 Likes
limitations in metal was not what made them decide to stop supporting macOS in other games. It was purely executive
In fact they had overwatch running on macOS at one point purely as a side project and the 3 devs that did it brought it to their manager and said “this works” and the PM was like “macOS? no”
that pretty much summarizes the issue at blizz right now when it comes to mac. They conitnue supporting it in products that already have it but with MINIMAL (and I cannot emphasize that enough MINIMAL) effort. No new products will support mac, period.
MacOS support at blizzard truly is EOL and no api improvements will change that, only market share really. Blizzard used to be a company that valued mac users because they valued inclusion of ALL gamers big or small but modern blizzard is a company about making the most money while spending the least and corporate overlords look at things like macOS and go “that requires developers, QA, and support staff and for what, 5% more sales? pass”
The only thing that will change that is if apple silicon truly sets a new performance and efficiency bar that actually grows mac share once again. it actually has helped, but only in piercing the laptop market mostly. Apple really needs a consumer machine that is a strong desktop that isn’t a 10k mac pro. M2 pro, max, ultra and extreme need to be hits (and solve the thermal throttling current ones have because they decidedd a fanless no heat spreader design was a good idea).
2 Likes
If they didn’t charge so bloody much for the Mac Studio it’d be the perfect WoW gaming machine for me since I’m still currently tied to macOS for the lone “feature” Rommax put in so people like me can play without losing mouse/controller input randomly. There is no such feature on the Windows side of things. But I can’t justify $4k+ just for a WoW machine. 
3 Likes
hey what is this feature Rommax you mentioned? I am curious to learn more
It’s a hack that he had apparently put in when Metal first appeared in order to mimic the behaviour of exclusive fullscreen mode but removed when Battle for Azeroth came out, which seems to not exist in Metal just as it doesn’t currently exist in DirectX 12. In this case the feature disables CMD-TAB and CMD-H and effectively prevents anything from stealing focus, such as the dock doing its thing where it randomly invades your screen, putting the game into the background instead of it remaining in the foreground.
The reason for this feature is because those of us that need specific input curves that require third party software have a problem where if the game app loses focus (i.e. is moved out of the foreground even for a mere moment) the input/sensitivity curves are lost because the software controlling the input devices loses its hook into the game app (or I should say the game app causes the software to “forget” the game is active and as a result gives up at least partial control of the input device).
Since I have a deformed arm with less fine motor control than my good arm and it happens to be my mouse arm, I need that software to keep that curve properly so I can click objects in the game (UI buttons in my case since I can’t use the KB/mouse combo but instead use controller + mouse). If the game loses focus, I lose my mouse curve. I’m then forced to quit the game and relaunch, something you can’t really do in a raid or dungeon, especially LFR which can auto-kick if you DC.
The command to enable this hack is as follows:
In the config.wtf file you add this line if not already present:
SET ExclusiveWindowMode "1"
If the line exists but the value is 0, change it to 1 and save the changes.
You can also do this in-game for an on the fly change, though if you are using third party software for mouse input curves it may require you restarting the game afterward due to how this works on the fly:
/console ExclusiveWindowMode 1
Changing the value to 0 or deleting the line from the config.wtf file reverts the behaviour to defaults and disables the hack.
wouldn’t this also improve the performance of the game?
can you give me the directory to the proper config.wtf file location for macOS so I can paste it. Thank you!
It has no actual improvement on game performance. It’s a hack designed to lock focus, but does not actually allocate resources like exclusive fullscreen does. It only mimics the portion of EFS that prevents anything else from interrupting the game’s foreground focus.
The file is located in the following directory (for retail):
/World of Warcraft/_retail_/WTF/
I’m not sure if this is available in the Classic version of WoW, but would hope so. You can try it out there by substituting _retail_ with _classic_ for the directory.
Just remember, this disables CMD-TAB and CMD-H while active. CMD-M is still available to switch between this mode and true windowed mode, something I do occasionally use if I need to redo my UI based on past screenshots, such as when I make a new character and want the same setup as my other characters of that class.