I’m primarily a Mac user, and do all of my creative work on a Mac, including making my avatars. There are some limitations but it’s mostly worked pretty okay.
Unfortunately, a future version of macOS will no longer include the Intel emulation, and the ancient Unity version that the VRChat SDK is stuck with will allegedly stop working in the not-too-distant future.
Does VRChat have any plans to update to a newer version of the Unity editor, or any mitigations to allow Mac users to continue to use Unity from macOS?
Unfortunately my physical setup in my home doesn’t lend itself to the idea of adding a Windows computer to the mix for this (my Windows-running VR PC lives in a different space and I have specific accessibility needs I’d rather not get into, but which prevent me from running the Unity editor there).
How is macos for remote desktop software? Like I’ve used parsec to access my windows PC from a Linux desktop, but also moonlight or maybe you could steam remote play access to it
It works just as well as it does on Windows (and Microsoft even provides an RDP app which integrates perfectly), but Unity isn’t super friendly especially when there’s any added latency with mouse operations and so on.
Remote desktop is how I’ve had to do some things (like setting up shaders which don’t work on Metal) but it’s not a great experience overall. Specifically because of Unity-on-remote-desktop issues, and not with the idea of remote desktopping itself.
Ooof, RDP. last time I used RDP it was painful. The last time I tried RDP was back in 2021 when one of my PCs died, and Parsec wouldn’t really run on a Raspberry Pi 3.
Instead of RDP I’d suggest either Parsec, Steam, or maybe a Moonlight+Sunshine combo. Parsec is okay with UAC prompts, with moonlight+sunshine I did learn that the prompts in Windows 11 can time out.
I haven’t tried it yet on my Mac (as I do all my avatar stuff on an x86_64 linux machine), but I was recently looking at a project called “Whisky” (frankea/Whisky on github) which is a wrapper around Wine 11 for MacOS with support for various game launchers.
Looks to be reasonably active (latest commits were only a few hours ago last time I checked), and they didn’t seem to have any concerns regarding the pending removal of Rosetta in MacOS 28. Though I can’t tell if that lack of concern is because they’re unaware of that impending removal or not, so who knows?
Regardless, the point is that they’re using various D3D/DXVK to Metal projects to improve gaming performance, which should also translate to halfway-decent Unity performance. It’d be nice if that also meant it could run the Win version of Substance Painter on a Mac but that’s a whole other can of beans.
Whether or not a Wine environment would play nice with Unity Hub is another matter as well, though. It could be worth a shot if you have the time to mess around with it.
That’s interesting, and I wonder if it would at least solve the problems I currently have with the non-Metal-compatible shaders (notably Warren’s Fast Fur). But given that it’s based on Wine I’d expect it to rely on Rosetta to work, unfortunately, but it seems that Rosetta’s gotten a stay of execution for another year so that gives them another year to figure out a different emulation solution.
Yeah, I just gave it a shot and Rosetta being installed was considered a pre-requisite. Also the whole thing just plain didn’t quite work right; winetricks wasn’t installed and so I couldn’t get the VCRedist and dx11 installed and such ugh what a mess. Maybe I was somehow doing something wrong, but there was a certain lack of error checking that doesn’t give me high hopes about the whole thing working (trying to open a terminal in the bottle environment attempted to source a shell script that didn’t exist, for example).
If nothing else the github page has links to the D3D/DXVK-to-Metal projects so you could theoretically set it all up by hand but…eeeeesh. Maybe a barebones Windows install running under qemu-x86_64? Any theoretical solutions I can think of seem like a bit too much of a pain in the butt, honestly. Unless there’s some way you could do all the Unity work on your Mac then save and push the project files over to your PC to have it do the build-and-upload steps? Wouldn’t have to worry about the input lag that way, but, again, it seems like it would be a big pain in the butt unless there were an easy way to script it.
Maybe we’ll see more progress on moving to Unity 6 in the near future (and hopefully that would make the whole issue moot), especially since UnityHub considers the current version a security risk. Fingers crossed.
The issue is more that any project using the VRC SDK has to use a version of Unity that’s compatible with it, and currently the only version of Unity that’s compatible is Intel-only. Unity isn’t super happy with changing the editor version on a project, especially not downgrading.
Hopefully what @naqtn said about VRChat working on a Unity 6 update comes to fruition before macOS 28, which is currently when Rosetta is scheduled for removal. Given that they have a bit over a year I’m not too worried right now.
Worst case I guess I could just do the remote desktop thing.