Can we get some sort of update to whats going on with tlopo and apple?
Apple is a little vague about all this online.
Thanks.
Ahoy there!
Thanks for the question, Squintz!
As of right now, Apple appears to be continuing forward with their decision of deprecating OpenGL - which is not shocking at all to us. Now, while we are still very frustrated with Apple and macOS, we have been exploring other options of supporting macOS + Metal because we do not want to lose macOS as a supported platform. We value
all of our players, including our small macOS community. Thankfully, we've made a significant amount of progress toward this goal.
The TLOPO administration and other internal development teams have been working very closely with the developers of the Panda3D Game Engine in an effort to update TLOPO to the latest version of Panda3D. The Panda3D development team has already been hard at work finding ways to support macOS going forward - and has made significant progress. Further, with TLOPO migrating to the latest Panda3D game engine version, we will be able to benefit from all of Panda3D's work on this. Thereby, we will no longer need to worry about macOS support from here on out.
These changes will be deployed to TLOPO in our upcoming major update ("Pypperoni"), please see check out this
post for more detailed information regarding this update. We expect these changes to go live relatively soon, hopefully before summer is over at the very latest. But then again, we don't have any concrete deadline for this. The TLOPO team is most active during the winter and summer, so
This is a general breakdown of the most significant/important plans are in the Pypperoni update:
- Migrate from Python 2.7 to Python 3.7.
- Migrate from a custom and internal build of Disney Online's Panda3D to the public version, Panda3D 1.11.
- This new Panda3D will be modified version of the public Panda3D, incorporating TLOPO-specific changes previously developed in-house by the Disney Interactive Media Group that directly benefit POTCO.
- Fully remove all 32-bit support and begin shipping only 64-bit downloads.
- This will massively improve performance and speed of the game - as well as allow players to take advantage of more RAM.
- Completely overhaul the entire TLOPO deployment/release process.
- Significantly improve loading times and general in-game performance.
There are literally hundreds of different features that are incorporated with this new update. We are also working with the Panda3D team to identify any potential performance bottlenecks located inside the game engine. Since we've started working with them, we've helped their team identify and fix dozens of bugs - which also benefits the open source Panda3D community.
We will continue to update our blog and social media as we get closer to releasing this update. It's definitely something to look forward to.
If you have any other questions about this, feel free to send us an email at
support@tlopo.com or drop another reply here. We'd be more than happy to chat about it.