Rufous

Played 8.5 hours... On a Mac
I have been REALLY enjoying Palworld! I have a base level Mac Studio, and I decided to give it a shot. This is the lowest tier M1 Max model (beefier than the base tier M1 found in the first gen Apple Silicon Mini, for example), but still the lowest option for the Studio. I have 32GB RAMI downloaded Whisky, which is an open source tool that combines Wine64 and Apple's GPTK (Game Porting Tool Kit)... I am actually shocked at how easy it was to get this to play!All I had to do was:1: Download and install Whisky2: Download the Windows version of Steam3: Create a "Bottle" in Whisky (set it appear to apps as Windows 10)4: Run the Windows Steam installer by hitting Run in Whisky and finding the installer5: Treat it like Steam on Windows... Let the installer finish...6: Open Steam (you can pin the Steam app in Whisky)7: Sign in8: enjoy Steam for Windows on your Mac9: just browse your Steam Library and hit install when you find Palworld10: Hit play when it's done installing.11: Press no if you get a message about out of date AMD drivers (you aren't using them)12: Enjoy Palworld! That's it! Barely more complex than installing Steam!As for my experience... I had some bad stuttering at first... Then I remembered to pause Folding@Home! LOL, I had it burning 100% on 8 of my 10 cores! Credit that it worked with the CPU being pegged to 100% like that!Once I reigned in the CPU hog, Palworld was 100% playable. I did still experience occasional stutters, but nothing that I couldn't bear. There's occasional graphical glitches, like the eyes in the character creator being black. In game, this was back to normal. I ran the game at a reduced resolution, 1600 x 900. I would have tried 1080p full screen, but one limitation I found was the game refuses to fullscreen to any other monitor but your primary, and since I run a 5120x1440 ultrawide... I wanted to avoid the obvious "cinematic" experience. This IS emulation after all... The game is coded in Intel x64 instruction set using Windows APIs, and the graphics are Direct X (12? I don't even know... Whisky was so smooth of a setup, I literally didn't need to know this detail). It's being run on an ARM64 CPU and being executed using Apple's Metal graphics API. Huge props to Apple for their Rosetta translation layer and the GPTK, along with Wine64... It all comes together so well!I ended up playing 8.5 hours straight. No crashes or glitches, aside from the eye thing, and a visible seam in the skybox. If there were other glitches... I never noticed. This was a downright shockingly pleasant experience from an "Early Access" game, and doubly shocking that such a leasant experience was had under emulation, no less!From what I've read, M2 and M3 Macs handle this even better yet, and if you are okay with cranking down the settings, even something like an M1 Air can get... "cinematic" framerates... 25-30ishI really don't know if the devs will ever consider doing a proper port to Mac OS, but if this game emulates this well, I honestly won't even be heartbroken if they don't. This is just downright shocking. It was also more of an experiment than anything... I have a 10th Gen i9 with 64GB RAM and a Radeon VII w/16GB. It's just in my workshop, and I did not feel like gaming in my workshop. I just wanted to see what was possible on a Mac using only freely available tools. LOL