Extending the documentation for building on macOS platform up to becoming a fully supported platform

[JT-SCB-GameDesign]

The community work on bringing the macOS build process up to the level of fully supported platforms and out of the experimental stage is gaining momentum.

So this discussion is to bring together all the of the Discord posts' information and expertise from the devs into one place that's easier to track, can help all interested in building and then can be more easily be condensed and turned in to documentation.

[JT-SCB-GameDesign]

Here's the link for the "Support for Mac" thread in #sig-platform:
https://discord.com/channels/805939474655346758/1349060320383074434

There's other information scattered across Discord that we can toss in here so things start taking shape and are more discoverable in one place.

From what I understand here are some of the main points as also mentioned by Nick:

Ideally we'd support the common production platforms for tools and runtime, and then the common runtime platforms for just runtime, so like

PC/Windows - arm64, x64 tools and runtime
PC/Linux - arm64, x64 tools and runtime
Mac - Mx and x64 tools and runtime
IOS - arm64 runtime only
Android - arm64 runtime only
the 3p libraries are essentially the stumbling block.

Mentioned by Steve there's also some framework considerations that can use the existing ARM framework for Linux as an example to build on.

Then I think special tuning for macOS for its specifics to clean things up. There may be some new considerations also with the new UI announcements from this week's Apple WWDC.

[JT-SCB-GameDesign]

Here's some of the existing Docs pages for reference of what we want to eventually extend and build out:
https://docs.o3de.org/docs/welcome-guide/supported-platforms/
https://docs.o3de.org/docs/user-guide/platforms/

[ShaunaGordon]

What's the rationale for supporting Mac x64?

[JT-SCB-GameDesign]

Discussion is continued on Discord here in the "Support for Mac" thread.
There is some really good info there.

[JT-SCB-GameDesign]

Choice statement from Sid picked out:
"I doubt anyone is using O3DE on Intel Macs, partly because the dxc (a tool used to build shaders for mac) which is currently packaged (as a 3p package) for O3DE is built from M1+ machines and will not work on Intel by default. In order to build O3DE shaders on Intel Mac you will need to re-build dxc locally, feed this built package as the 3p package to Asset Processor and then it should be able to compile all the shaders."

[JT-SCB-GameDesign]

This Linux fix in #19045 changing from sh to bash will have to be evaluated later in the macOS support process due to questions on bash support.

[ShaunaGordon]

As long as the script is still POSIX compliant, it shouldn't be an issue. Mac still ships with Bash, it's just an older version and uses zsh as the default user shell these days (license stuff).

[JT-SCB-GameDesign]

o3de/3p-package-scripts#9
Support for Mac Arm64 (Apple Silicon) #9
Steve Pham
This is the very starting point for adding Mac Silicon support

[JT-SCB-GameDesign]

July 30th up to date information and summarized notes from our Discord thread: "Support for Mac"
https://discord.com/channels/805939474655346758/1349060320383074434/1400113759934091485

Key terminology --
Host Platforms are platforms that run the Editor, Asset Processor, etc. Target platforms are the host platforms and other targets (that do NOT run the editor) such as iOS, Android.
In layman terms: Make games on Host Platforms, Play games on Target Platforms.

Host Platforms are platforms that run the Editor, Asset Processor, etc. Target platforms are the host platforms and other targets (that do NOT run the editor) such as iOS, Android.
In layman terms: Make games on Host Platforms, Play games on Target Platforms

macOS is a target platform, not just a host platform, so it's possible to create Mac games. It's just not known what state that is in now due to lack of AR for Mac and anyone testing it.

Keep in mind, the prebuilt binaries for the 3rd party packages were built on Mac Intel chips
They should all work with M1+ via Rosetta. In fact Intel Macs are not the recommended hardware anymore.

There is already experimental Mac support, but it requires pulling and building from source through github. There is no installer for it.

The reason Mac is not officially supported is because there is no CI/CD for that platform, so there is no automatic validation that it builds or if the unit tests pass for that platform.

[JT-SCB-GameDesign]

I just found this Xcode reference in the wiki, I don't know how up to date it is, but I wanted to put it in the mix. This type of documentation in the wiki is to allow it to be updated more easily.

So for reference:
https://github.com/o3de/o3de/wiki/Xcode