[OSX] Unofficial Path of Exile port - 30/12/2018 status update

Hello fellow Mac gamers:

Unfortunately, I have to say at this moment, it is not possible to make working port of PoE on OSX, due to several reasons:

However the main reason is OSX system itself
This game relies heavily on streaming data from big file. While this is not problem on Windows or Linux, OSX does not like it, especially when mmap() method is used to accessing this data. OSX implementation of mmap is extremely slow on large files, and over the time, the game file (content.ggpk) has bloated from <5GB during alpha to 18GB+ nowadays. This is also the reason why the game loading times gets slower and lags during gameplay higher with every patch.

For technical people, lets consider this C code

This code tests 1000 mmaps allocation in 4kB, 64kB and 1024kB blocks on file io_benchmark.dat. On Linux, this code runs <1s (actually for 4kb its <100ms). While on OSX it runs for at least 10+seconds regardless of amount of data read. This is reason behind slow loading times and lags ingame. If the data resides on HDD/SDD or directly in memory, it does not matter, the speed remains about same.

To make this game works trough wine on OSX in playable fashion, one of the following has to happen

1) Apple will rewrite mmap implementation in their OSX kernel (unlikely, I opened bug report for this years ago, and it got closed as duplicate, no progress)

2) Wine would need to rewrite their memory management to avoid using mmap. This is also unlikely, because alternate approaches would slower the allocation on Linux, while it would speed it up on OSX, but OSX is not Wine main target

3) GGG would change their data system to instead using content.ggpk to large amount of smaller files (max 100MB, ideally one file per each effect). I guess this is the most likely scenario, if GGG is willing to support PoE on Mac at least passively.

Also, as most of you noticed, newer OSX has implemented checks on created application, and will complain about corrupted app even if it is ok. This can be workaround by giving specific instructions how to install the game from scratch, however until one of the above happens, there is no point in writing such guide.

So how can I play the game on Mac
Not trough wine, that's for sure. However there are alternatives but each one require installation of Windows

Best performing:
Bootcamp - you will end up in dual boot between OSX and Windows. This gives native and full performance, but you need to reboot each time to change OS.

Virtualization - This does not give you full performance, and comes with additional cost as none of the major provider does not give the app for free.
The best performing one are Parallels Desktop and VmWare Fusion. These have full DX9 implementation and nowadays possibly even DX11, there is minor performance loss (~10-20%) compared to bootcamp.
You can also try Oracle VirtualBox which is for free and should have good DX9 support, but it would definitely be the slowest solution (not as slow as trough wine though).

V9
- Based on wine-staging-vulkan-4.0-rc1 64bit provided by Gcenx from portingteam
- preliminary support for dx11, it will still crash, but if by some miracle the game starts in DX11 and works, let me know
- updated wineskin so there should be less issues on newer macs/osx

V8
- Based on wine-staging-2.21 64bit
- wrapper rebased around new installer
- disabled some winetricks, the wine can handle a few more things natively
- lot of errors should be gone
- still fps dropping like hell when new effect is introduced for first time :(

V7
- Based on Wine-1.7.52 with Staging updates and Crossover Wine 1.4.10 (CX version) with following fixes:
Fixed: Unable to launch on OSX El Capitan
+ Various bugfixes from wine (it may crash less or more often :)


V6
- Based on Wine-1.7.41 with Staging updates with following fixes:
Fixed: Game Fails to launch with Segmentation fault "$(dirname "$0")/Path Of Exile861127983Wine" "$@"" on older OSX prior to 10.8/10.9
Fixed: Game cannot be resized in windows mode
Fixed: Game fails to launch with Failed resetting Direct3D device objects
Fixed: V-Sync should be working now (maybe it worked before, but never noticed it)
+ Various bugfixes from wine (it may crash less or more often :)

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krifFinn wrote:

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ThaMas wrote:

Very easy to install, works like a charm!

Great effort and thank you very much Julus!


Just for the record: even on my Mid 2009 13" MBP with a 256MB Nvidia gfx card works fine.



.

OT

Perhaps we could have a competition who has the oldest/crummiest Mac that runs Path of Exile.

My entry is a mid 2007 iMac with Intel C2D 2,4GHz, 4GB Ram, ATI Radeon HD 2600 HD, WD Caviar Black 1TB 7200rpm and OS X Mountain Lion. Perfectly playable in native resolution 1680x1050. I don't mind turning off graphical settings, the game looks very good for me.


More to the point, I think it's great that GGG decided to make PoE playable in a whole load of different machines. Official Mac support would be awesome and also make that unmentionable D-game by company A/B rather pointless...

Well, it seems they have official Wine support (at least the forum topic says so), which should be enough to make the game playable via wine port... It is much easier and cheaper for them to do so, and even bigger companies are beginning to use wineskin port engine (for example, CD Projekt Red and The Witcher RPG)

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Sparten890 wrote:

I just downloaded your wrapper and the game loaded just fine but when i try to fast travel to the prison, the game freezes and gives me an error message telling me it has encountered a serious error and needs to close. i tried this several times and it keeps repeating every time i try. this does not happen on V2 of the wrapper. Any solutions?

If the v2 wrapper works fine for you, then use it. It is almost impossible to make a wrapper which works for all configurations (but I am trying to do so :).

If you still want to use v3 wrapper, then I suggest to add "-gc 1" option to EXE flags, the crash may disappear but for cost of longer loading times:
1) Right click the wrapper->show contents
2) Run wineskin->Click Advanced
3) enter "-gc 1" without quotes into EXE flags field.

Also the crash should be gone with the 0.9.12 (hopefully)

If anyone interested, this look like fix:
Fixed a client crash that could occur whenever entities are deleted if they still had effects in the world.
As I already posted in old topic, the all reported crashes (according to the failing function address) are caused by D3DXDisassembleEffect function which seems to be highly related to be the the issue.

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Jow wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/hEcC5.png
error

Download, unpack, double click, play

You missed the unpack thing :) just move the game outside of dmg file (to applications or Desktop)