[Official] 5.0 - Dropping OS X 10.6 support for Editor/Players; dropping OS X 10.7 for Editor

Greetings,

I'd like to announce that we will formally drop support for OS X 10.6 entirely for both editors and players for the 5.x product cycle. The numbers are showing that 10.6 use is vanishingly small.

For OS X 10.7 we will drop support for the editor, but keep runtime support for the time being.

Our current plan is to block installations of editor and the webplayer as appropriate. However, for the OS X Player, we can only look to make you all aware of the change as packaging of that player belongs to you all.

 

Yay! Does this mean we'll finally see OpenGL 4.x for OSX/Linux?

 

Drop it like a beat

 

I know it's not completely related, but how does it work the opposite way around? Is there a way to run old (2.x or even 1.x) builds on a new OSX? I've once posted this question but received no answer: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/running-old-unity-2-x-games-on-osx-10-9-mavericks.218515/

I still use my old macbook pro (where I can max. install 10.7) for testing, so I'm happy that the OSX player still works with this version.

 

That is fine if you support retina display in the editor. When do you want to fix that, i hoped for 5.0 ?

 

Nope, unless you count running an old OS X in a VM.

--Eric

 

I guess this means it is 'bye' to all the 32-bit EFI MAC computers with 32-bit and 64 bit core 2 duo's . I can plan to do minimum QA bench marks tests for my games presuming that MAC users are no less then a 64-bit CPU with 64-bit EFI system.

 

Unity doesn't support anything less than 10.6 anyway, so that's a non-issue. That is, any Macs that can run Unity games in the first place are already 64-bit.

--Eric

 

Actually yes it is 64-bit but 'some' of the systems actually have a 32-bit EFI for 32-bit kernel. I know I got a "BUNCH' of these older mac's. all run Unity editor and player fine. At least with the 4.x version.

That said, I'll probably move to a Minimum supported Spec for my games of OS X 10.8 with 64 BIT kernel mode.

 

That is really a shame that we can't take advantage of newer versions of OpenGL. I mean, some versions of OSX do support newer versions of Open GL, but Unity is stuck with OpenGL 3.x

For us it means we cannot create GPU snow particles for our game because it would not run on OSX even if the hardware AND software support it. It's either we support Windows only or have to create a prehistoric game for all platforms.

Why can't we have a DX11/OpenGL 4 build option?

 

I make snow particles and rain in my games fine. Of course I'm running on i7 3.95ghz with 32gb ran and 4gb vram. OpenGL 4 would be nice for systems that would benefit from it.

 

Ours also have snow particles, but we can only afford some in front of the camera. What would be great is to have to ability to create 3D interactive blizzards made of millions of particles. We currently cheat using stretched billboards and while they (sometimes) look good, they do come with a lot of limitations (clipping through walls, not smooth when seen from the front, etc.). The TC Particles package on the asset store only works with DX11 even if Mac hardware and software actually support it since 2011.