Dear players of Dawnmaker,
First, thanks a lot to all of you who reported the performance problems you encountered with Dawnmaker on Mac since the last update. Second, my apologies for taking so long to fix the issue! But here it is: Dawnmaker should now be running as smoothly on Mac as on all other platforms. If you want to know more about what happened, read on, otherwise, go play Dawnmaker! :D
So, here's the long-form story of what happened and why it took so long to fix.
I do not own any Apple software and am not familiar with development on that platform. I initially released Dawnmaker on Mac because it was possible to do so from my hardware (Linux user here :) ) and it seemed to be running fine. However, for a reason unknown to me, after the March update it started running… not fine, not fine at all, on recent Mac hardware. It was reported to me, but having no Mac available at the time, I could not investigate.
Luckily, as part of my work on the mobile port of Dawnmaker, my publisher Acram Digital provided me a Mac. I was able to reproduce the issue, and I could feel the pain of Mac players. The game was lagging everywhere. Even the title menu, which is a very simple view of an image with text on top of it, and nothing more, was slow as hell. However, I had no clue what was going wrong, as it happened exclusively with the Steam version. If I launched the game through any other means, everything was fine.
It took me a while, reading documentations and trying different things, to understand that the root cause was (probably) that the build was using the x86 processor architectures, and recent Mac computers use the arm instructions set. My assumption is that, for some reason, x86 builds of Electron (the tool I use to distribute Dawnmaker as a native app) stopped working well on arm hardware.
From then, I had to figure out a way to build for both x86 and arm platforms. That took another while, figuring out the correct way to use my tools, setting up a build platform (to make sure I could continue building updates after I've sent back the Mac to Acram) and going back and forth with the Steam tools to test. And I'm happy to report that I've finally succeeded, and from now on I will be able to make universal builds for Mac. This performance issue should not come back for Dawnmaker on Mac! 🤞
Again, I apologize for the time it took to resolve this problem, and I wish you great fun with Dawnmaker, whatever platform you're running it on!
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