[Bricksmith] Bricksmith appears to be broken on Big Sur

[Ryan Hicks]

Allen Smith and some others are working on it - I am not involved, I am just watching.

From a technical perspective they first solved the layer problem with OpenGL which Big Sur introduced. 
So Bricksmith is still using OpenGL which is deprecated by Apple. The new 3D technology is called Metal which is supposed to replace OpenGL. I am just learning Metal and I can tell you, that replacing OpenGL is a major job to do.

But as long as Apple does not remove OpenGL, Bricksmith is working on Intel machines. Also the programming language "Objective-C" is still widely used - and my guess is that nearly all frameworks within Apple are written in Objective-C (apart from SwiftUI).

On M1 processors Bricksmith runs with the Rosetta2 simulator - and it is still very fast. Well, as far as I read, software under Rosetta2 is not simulated but translated into M1 instructions the first time it is run.

So bottom line:
As long as Apple does not ditch OpenGL Bricksmith is working if taken from the current sources on GitHub.
And as long as Apple does not ditch Rosetta2, Bricksmith will run on M1 as well.

And my last word. I am the one-eyed int the land of the blind. So there are experts knowing a lot more than I do.

Happy to hear Bricksmith's being worked on...

Perhaps useful context, the app ran well on my Intel MacBooks up until I updated them to the latest OS Monterey where it apparently cannot display any of the 3d layers. Previously one machine was on Catalina, the other on Big Sur and aside the command-w crashing the app problem, Bricksmith ran fine. 

I'll look into compiling from GitHub but I doubt I'll get very far