Dynamic lights not working on MacOS Apple Silicon

[Andrew67100]

Regardless of what hardware renderer or software renderer I use, I can't seem to get dynamic lights to work on MacOS. At this point, I'm sure this has to be a bug because dynamic lights work just fine on my PC with the exact same settings enabled. Imp fireballs glow on my PC and do not glow on my Mac. If I'm missing an obvious setting outside of the dynamic lights setting, please let me know. Thank you!

[Rachael]

Try setting the value "autoloadlights" to true in the console.



Background: This is a shortcoming of the 4 distinct GUI platform paths GZDoom has. It has one for Win32, one for X11/GTK, one for X11/KDE, and one for Cocoa (Mac).

Only the Win32 one gets the bells and whistles. And yes, we're trying to change this, but it's not easy to find suitable GUI frameworks that don't bloat the executable (and compile time) by ridiculous amounts that are still easy to use.

"autoloadlights" corresponds to the "Load Lights" tickbox on Win32.

(On the bright side, at least we didn't use electron for the startup dialog)

[Andrew67100]

Try setting the value "autoloadlights" to true in the console.

Thank you so much! That worked beautifully once I restarted the game. Is there any other tricks for MacOS I should know to get the most out of the engine similar to this console command? I appreciate the thorough response and explanation since GZDoom is honestly one of my favorite things to play.

[Rachael]

You can use autoload<tab> in the console to see the command completion for all the autoload commands. You can use cmd+I on the GZDoom icon from within the Apps folder to enable Rosetta mode (but you probably already know that) - it's very useful to see if a certain crash still happens with the Intel version. Any entry-level Mac with a retina display will run the game a lot smoother if you set "vid_scalefactor 0.5" without drastically harming the image quality. Macs with more powerful processors probably can (and should) run the game at native resolution. I expect the high-end M2 GPU's will even be able to handle "vid_scalefactor 2" on a full Retina display.

Beyond that I don't know a whole lot that is special for Macs, specifically.

[Andrew67100]

You can use autoload<tab> in the console to see the command completion for all the autoload commands. You can use cmd+I on the GZDoom icon from within the Apps folder to enable Rosetta mode (but you probably already know that) - it's very useful to see if a certain crash still happens with the Intel version. Any entry-level Mac with a retina display will run the game a lot smoother if you set "vid_scalefactor 0.5" without drastically harming the image quality. Macs with more powerful processors probably can (and should) run the game at native resolution. I expect the high-end M2 GPU's will even be able to handle "vid_scalefactor 2" on a full Retina display.

Beyond that I don't know a whole lot that is special for Macs, specifically.

I actually did not know that tip to enable the Intel version. That’s fantastic. I assumed both the x86 and ARM versions were in the same installer, but had no idea both were accessible from an Apple Silicon Mac.

On the subject of pushing the latest Macs using GZDoom, I’m lucky in the fact I have access to nearly every Apple Silicon chip to run various gaming tests on, and can say they the M1 Max and M1 Ultra are beasts.

To push these new Apple GPUs to their limit, I booted up the classic DOOM WAD and manually set the resolution to a native 16K image. Yes, not 4K, not, 8K, but 15360 x 8640 resolution in the video settings. I did this on an 8 core M1 Mac Mini, 32 core M1 Max Mac Studio, and a 64 core M1 Ultra Mac Studio. Just standing at the beginning of the game (DOOM 1993) and not moving the mouse or walking at all, here was the performance I recorded:

Mac Mini: 8 FPS
M1 Max Mac Studio: 51 FPS
M1 Ultra Mac Studio: 91 FPS

For reference, my RTX 3060 laptop got 31 FPS with this test.