(2020-11-20, 13:30)Andy Zmolek Wrote: Made the mistake of upgrading not expecting that nothing that rendered in 3D would work anymore. Is anyone else having this experience?
I'm on a Macbook Pro 16" with 16GB
Hi Y'all,
I can at least tell y'all what has gone wrong with Big Sur; Andy's comments are correct that BrickSmith is unusable on Big Sur, and there isn't a good work-around.
Basically: BrickSmith is built around the idea that the 3-d view doesn't have its own layer in Apple's UI compositing system. This in turn means the 3-d code renders to the underlying pixels in "UI space" - when you zoom in, we just draw the model bigger (using 3-d transforms).
Apple has been deprecating this way of working in favor of having all 3-d UI views render to their own dedicated layers. This is actually, architecturally, the right way to do things in that it lets 3-d accelerated code render directly to a VRAM surface that the compositor can then work with. But it's also _not_ how BrickSmith works, and breaks the view system.
we embrace "render to the surface" then as you zoom in, the view just gets pixelated and blocky as the VRAM surface is _stretched_. If we set it to be big enough to look good at high res, a large model ends up being an 8k x 8k FBO, which is bad.
As of Catalina, we were in a situation where a developer had to get an old SDK to compile against to _trick_ OS X into thinking that BrickSmith was an old app despite being compiled on a new OS, to get access to that backward compatibility pass. In Big Sur, compatibility is gone.
The fix for this is the same as the fix that would have allowed for native Catalina compilation:rewrite Bricksmith's view system to somehow cope with "zoomed" layers.
I...don't know how exactly to do this - my day job is in 3-d graphics but not Mac UI tinkering, and as may be obvious by my posting here once every year, the comment "we don't have active mac developers" is probably right. Allen had to put BrickSmith down but I haven't had time to pick it up.
If anyone could write a patch that mods zooming, I can try it (I have 3 different OSes in my office) and see if we're in business, but it's not a trivial change.
Realistically we can only say BrickSmith is incompatible with Big Sur until new code is written.
cheers
Ben
PS whether or not it's good or bad dev practice for Apple to provide a limited window of compatibility on old OS features they want to drop, it's certainly very different from Windows, where software will run on Windows _forever_. So it's understandable that devs in this community who are bound by dev time would be annoyed by having old code "go bad". Bricksmith is also non-ARC, and i have no idea if some day we'll wake up and that doesn't work either.