Rendering Problems in Wine

josef615

I'm trying to run the game on my early 2011 MacBook Pro using Wine 3.5
The game mechanics seem to work, but only about half the game is rendering; certain parts of characters and environments, and ships aren't rendering at all. Does anyone know how to fix this?

bloodyriz

Your chances of getting help on anything to do with Mac is dwindling. Mac support for STO ended quite some time ago.​​

nimbull

I'd love for STO to run under Wine again or natively in Linux myself. Up until they stopped supporting older DirectX's in STO it ran fine. Now Wine is playing catch up again. Your best bet is to report it to the Wine people and hope they come out with a fix or if you have the skills. Start working on an update for Wine and do a submission to support STO under Wine again. On the up side it sounds like Wine has made good progress since I last tried.

trekpuppy

I'm a Linux user myself and do not own a Mac but I do have a personal interest in STO working on Wine so I naturally keep myself up to date with its progress.

On Linux, STO with Direct3D 10/11 has been working fine since Wine version 2.1.

On MacOS the problem is Apple's graphics API, called Metal. According to CodeWeavers, who are huge contributors to the Wine source code because of their Crossover product, Metal doesn't expose all functionality of your graphics card necessary for Wine to properly render some games. The general understanding at CodeWeavers is that Apple isn't particularly interested in updating Metal but I can't personally verify this.

However, there's a new graphics API called Vulkan that's becoming increasingly popular because it's platform independent. There's work in progress to implement Microsoft's Direct3D 12 and earlier over Vulkan in Wine and they're making rapid progress. Apple has not displayed any interest in implementing Vulkan on Mac but just a couple of months ago an open-source implementation of the Vulkan API on Mac, named MoltenVK, was released.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/vulkan-is-coming-to-macos-ios-but-no-thanks-to-apple/

As the Vulkan support in Wine matures, I hope that this can be a solution for those of you playing STO on Mac but expect several more months of developing before Vulkan finds its way into the main Wine code.