Apple Silicon support will be required in 2 years.

[BergQuester]

Apple released a tech note noting that macOS 28 will no longer support Rosetta 2, necessitating native ARM Mac support: https://developer.apple.com/document...on-environment

I hope that Fantasy Ground's native Apple Silicon support gets prioritized so that it doesn't drag out as it's 64 bit support did.

[Zacchaeus]

I imagine that will depend more on whether Unity supports it or not.

[BergQuester]

I imagine that will depend more on whether Unity supports it or not.

I don't think that's an issue, Unity has supported it for years and Smiteworks had an early ARM build with Unity a few years ago. https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...y-Mac-M1-users

There were stability issues and it wasn't a priority at the time.

[Moon Wizard]

Unity definitely supports it; but the challenge is getting native versions of all the libraries we use to work correctly, especially the older libraries.

We were already talking about this internally as something to work on long term before that announcement.

Regards,
JPG

[jaharmi]

Unity definitely supports it; but the challenge is getting native versions of all the libraries we use to work correctly, especially the older libraries.

We were already talking about this internally as something to work on long term before that announcement.

Regards,
JPG

It may or may not help, but Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit has also been updated to version 3.

[caution]

Just as a data point, in my current weekly game, 5 of the 7 people in the game run on Apple silicon and we're seriously considering switching to another VTT due to the lack of native support. I run it on an M4 Pro Mac mini with 64GB of RAM and the machine has been completely stable, except when running Fantasy Grounds. We have had to cancel multiple sessions over connection issues, out of memory crashes and full machine freezes. This hasn't happened to me with any other piece of software, only FGU. I would hate to switch, but it's getting to the point where we'll be forced to try another solution. I feel badly for our poor GM who puts in HUGE amounts of time to make the experience as fun as possible.

[jaharmi]

It’s been about a year or two since I ran a game where others connected, but I didn’t see that kind of instability or connection flakiness then. I and my players were all on macOS; I started with an Intel Mac and moved to an M1 Max. Others also moved from Intel to Apple Silicon Macs.

@caution, it seems like you’ve had problems and others in your group may also have, as well. To clarify, did others have problems on Macs?

Also, out of curiosity, have these problems been present, different, or even worse during the macOS 15.x timeframe (i.e. since September)?

[caution]

When the Mac mini M4 was announced, I pre-ordered two of them, one for my wife and I. We migrated to them on day of release and since that day, Fantasy Grounds has been very problematic. The client clearly has a significant memory leak, it crashes, we often have issues connecting that requires us to completely wipe out our installation (including our cache, and all settings). Other people in the group use Intel-based Apple products and one has an M1 Apple silicon machine without seeing these issues. My machine is an M4 Pro with 64GB of RAM, networked via 10GBps ethernet. My wife's machine is similar but with 32GB RAM. This has been very frustrating to say the least. It has been nearly 5 years since Apple switched to their own silicon and it is overdue for FG to create & compile a native client.

[jaharmi]

When the Mac mini M4 was announced, I pre-ordered two of them, one for my wife and I. We migrated to them on day of release and since that day, Fantasy Grounds has been very problematic. The client clearly has a significant memory leak, it crashes, we often have issues connecting that requires us to completely wipe out our installation (including our cache, and all settings). Other people in the group use Intel-based Apple products and one has an M1 Apple silicon machine without seeing these issues. My machine is an M4 Pro with 64GB of RAM, networked via 10GBps ethernet. My wife's machine is similar but with 32GB RAM. This has been very frustrating to say the least. It has been nearly 5 years since Apple switched to their own silicon and it is overdue for FG to create & compile a native client.

I think my players at the time all had an M2 at best. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to either be a player or GM with FGU on M3 or M4.

I wonder if any of the other Apple chips / chip generations has presented crashing problems. If so, perhaps there’s a short-term fix.

I am certainly in solidarity in wanting a fully native Apple Silicon version of FGU in the near-term, if not sooner.

I ran a tabletop game with my M1 Max yesterday. I ran two instances of FGU (GM and player) in order to display the map to the players at the table using a second portable USB-C monitor. My laptop was warm and the fans — which are normally silent — were audible (but not loud) by the end of the session. The Mac’s power usage ranged from 22-75 W during the session, and probably averaged over 50 W. Meanwhile, the same computer can drive 2-3 4K-5K2K displays simultaneously with many other standard Mac applications running — and does it silently, quickly, and generally falling under 14 W of power (see SAP Power Monitor for one way to measure this).

The power usage when running FGU is definitely the same kind I see when running a full game like Baldur’s Gate 3. This is not unsurprising, but when most of what I’m doing in FG is displaying text and simpler graphics — and I get much higher quality text rendering natively from the OS — it’s kind-of frustrating.

My game yesterday was with younger players. This group started playing as teens/tweens in 2020-2021, and many have continued on. The primary devices they have all had access to are iPhones (with one Android), Chromebooks (primarily from school), and now iPads. As some of them start to go to college, they may be getting their first “real” computers.

Even with other adult players remotely or in person, it is not always easy to have a computer that meets or exceeds the FG system requirements.

In terms of catching up to the last 5 years, I really wish there was:

• support for connecting other kinds of devices in at least some limited / player-only sense (phones, iPads, Chromebooks)
• presenting content at the table (if live) without needing a full second FG instance (which is a pain to control, since you may not be able to see it), and
• a better solution for multi-display support (probably useful more for GMs, especially with remote games)

Within my circles of potential players, a number of these touch upon Apple platforms in a significant way. With the windowing and other changes coming in iPadOS 26, an iPad version of Fantasy Grounds would be great for opening up FG to more players. (A number of organizations I’ve heard from are considering whether an iPad on iPadOS 26 might be suitable for some employees’ devices instead of a laptop.)

If there is a change to FGU to support Apple Silicon, I would personally suggest that SmiteWorks also use this as an opportunity or stepping-stone towards supporting iPads along the way — and maybe other kinds of devices, if possible. Should this be limited to player support, it still opens up options for more people to connect and widens who can join a GM’s game.

If there are libraries or other components that are needed, can these be on the GM side only? Could they be run in a separate process or even a container (repo, video)? (Yes, I realize that the container support is ARM / Apple Silicon.) As a GM, I’d gladly trade off a bit of my CPU / network if that opened up wider client device compatibility and/or got me to an Apple Silicon native app sooner.

[Griogre]

@jaharmi The reason Balder's Gate and FG are similar is that FG is not usually just running text and simple graphics. With FG most of the GPU power is being used to calculate LOS and what should be visibility clipped or not clipped for every creature and player on the combat tracker. The most predictive of how much calculation the GPU power needs is the pixel size, number of colors of the map and number and complexity of the LOS oculars.

Then, if you are running two instances of FG you are basically doubling the load on the GPU to run both the GM copy and Player copy at the same time.

You might see some improvements if you Disable Line-of-sight or Disable Lighting. Disabling lighting can be really viable with outdoor maps in daylight.