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BAR Launcher for macOS v0.12

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@benbreen benbreen released this 24 Jul 20:03
· 453 commits to main since this release
v0.12
f67a809
  • Online play: disabled in this build (LAN / direct-connect unaffected)

What's new since v0.11

Fixes you'll notice right away

  • Fullscreen and windowing actually work now. Fullscreen, borderless, and
    windowed all come up at the right size on the monitor you're using — no more
    oversized windows, windows jumping to another display, or "Fullscreen"
    launching as a plain window (#7, #13). Under the hood: the Mac window code now
    lets the system (SDL's FULLSCREEN_DESKTOP) own sizing and display choice
    instead of hand-rolled math; engine 4e91c00ce2.
  • Screen-edge scrolling works on every edge, in every mode (#7). Pushing the
    cursor to the right or bottom edge now scrolls the camera like it should, and
    on a multi-monitor setup the pointer no longer slips onto the next screen
    before the edge triggers.
  • No more giant blue triangle or garbled graphics (#14, and the same cause
    behind #6 and #8). The map, units, and text now render cleanly on M2 Air and
    M2 Ultra. Under the hood: a driver bug read vertices at a stale stride;
    fixed in the KosmicKrisp/zink driver, testcard shows zero contamination.
  • The selection box and minimap box are outlines again (#2), not solid
    filled rectangles covering what you're trying to look at.
  • Big battles stutter less (#5). The game no longer freezes the picture for
    about a second while the simulation catches up in huge fights. (Applied to
    new installs only — if you've tuned these settings yourself, they're left
    alone.)
  • Switching audio output no longer crashes the game (#12) — e.g. plugging in
    headphones or changing the output device mid-match.

Play against the AI

  • Skirmish AI (the BARb bot) is now included and runs natively on Apple
    Silicon, so you can play skirmish/AI games (#1, #4). This is verified in
    testing — a quick confirmation in your own games is welcome.

Performance

  • A little more GPU headroom on Apple GPUs, with no change to how the game
    looks — measured +3.7% frame-rate on an M2 Air (+1.7% on an M2 Ultra;
    bigger gains where the GPU is the bottleneck). Helps the beyond-all-reason#15 GPU-bound cases.
    Under the hood: enabled zink renderpass (tile load/store) merging for
    KosmicKrisp, mesa patch 0013; byte-identical rendering, bit-exact
    simulation, A/B-measured on a real battle scene on both Macs.

Install & updates

  • Windowed by default on a fresh install, at a sensible size — no more a huge
    5K window filling a MacBook Air on first launch. Existing setups are untouched.
  • Clearer download progress and a friendlier label — it now reads
    "Downloading Beyond All Reason (latest)…" instead of the raw content tag.
  • Content updates track the correct live version now. In v0.11 the launcher
    could update the wrong content tag and leave you on stale files; v0.12 follows
    the same tag the official game does.
  • "Skip update" is only offered when there is a game to play without it.
    Upgrading from v0.11 means downloading the real game files for the first time,
    and skipping that would leave you with nothing playable — so the button stays
    hidden until a complete install is on disk.

Heads-up for this build

  • Online multiplayer is turned off in v0.12 (it was on in v0.11) while
    cross-platform sync is re-validated for the online fast-follow. LAN and
    direct-connect games are unaffected.

Still imperfect / not a Mac-port bug

  • Empty end-game awards screen vs AI (#3) is a bug in the Beyond All Reason
    game itself (BAR beyond-all-reason#516), not the Mac port — it happens on the official build
    too, so the fix has to land upstream, after which the port inherits it.
  • Late-game slowdown on fanless MacBook Airs (beyond-all-reason#15): the GPU tweak above helps
    early/GPU-bound scenes, but heavy late-game is limited by the game's simulation
    on the CPU — the same wall every platform hits, not a Mac-specific problem.
    Fanless Airs also throttle as they heat up over a long game.
  • A trackpad-scroll quirk and an occasional crosshair drop — reported but
    not yet reproduced; still investigating.

Matching the official game exactly (sync)

In plain terms: the Mac version runs the game logic identically to the
Windows/Linux versions, down to the last bit — so replays play back correctly
and (when it returns) online multiplayer stays in step with everyone else. This
is checked every build, not assumed.

Technically: the simulation is verified bit-identical via the streflop
sync-test and in cross-platform lockstep against Windows over LAN with zero
desync in both host directions. The Apple-GPU speed-ups in this release
(fast-math shader mode, renderpass merging) are rendering-only and are proven not
to change any synced simulation checksum — staying in sync is a hard requirement,
upheld whether or not a build ships with online enabled.

Install

  1. Open the .dmg and drag BAR Launcher to Applications.
  2. Launch normally (double-click) — the build is notarized, so Gatekeeper opens
    it without the right-click → Open workaround.
  3. The launcher downloads BAR's official content on first run — allow a few
    minutes on first launch.

Verify your download

6975ec95a556608b8d4d1b852ad7d198380b6c33bf9cec091553ff3cf9589210  BAR-Launcher-v0.12.dmg
d013bdd21978d56bf46c9adbd4aa17d7e0bfcb90cbf813e7160b4e581edfd4b2  BAR-Launcher-v0.12.zip
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