RPG Maker MV/MZ on Apple Silicon (Apple M1 chips)

[SoundsByDane]

There isn't any posts anywhere (that I know of) that talks about this so thought I'd do my part for the community and point this out. If you are interested in getting the new MacBooks that were released last month and you use RPG Maker MV or MZ then I'd recommend you avoid these Macs.

I currently own an M1 Mac and it's very difficult to use RPG Maker on it. My specs are MacBook Pro M1, CPU and GPU chip: Apple M1, 8gb RAM. RPG Maker itself runs fine through Rosetta 2 but once you playtest/battletest that's when you run into issues. For me it constantly crashes and the screen will go blank (would turn black for MV and white for MZ). I have been able to playtest the game sometimes; I'd say the longest I've been able to test my game for was about 15 maybe 20 minutes before it crashed.

I've contacted support about this issue and they tried their best to help. RPG Maker playtest/battletest runs on OpenGL that's where the issue lies. On the Apple website they mention that "OpenGL is deprecated, but is available on Apple silicon" (quoted from here: Porting Your macOS Apps to Apple Silicon) which may not be that big of a deal but I think it has something to do with why the playtest/battletest always crashes. I've sent this link to support and explained my situation but in the end they said "it really does seem like the new CPU is just not compatible with RPG Maker software".

So, there you go. Avoid the M1 Macs if RPG maker is your main game engine. I wouldn't look forward to any updates for it either. I doubt the creators (or who ever) would plan on ever fixing this. And since OpenGL is deprecated on Apple Silicon I don't think there will be an update for the M1 Macs that will make it more compatible. It feels like RPG Maker is more optimized for Windows anyway lol. If anything, for now, just stick with the Intel based Macs which runs RPG Maker just fine.

Now I gotta consider if I gotta return this or not :/

 

[chaucer]

I'm not a mod or an employee of degica or anything, but that's really odd, cause if it's an opengl issue, MV has a canvas fallback, have you tried forcing canvas mode with the use of the community basic plugin?( I think that's the name of it forgive me if I'm wrong ), that should help if it is an opengl/webgl.

I'm unfamiliar with the specs of the new apple hardware, do you know how much vram the gpu has? That might also be an issue if it's a too low. :x

 

[SoundsByDane]

I'm not a mod or an employee of degica or anything, but that's really odd, cause if it's an opengl issue, MV has a canvas fallback, have you tried forcing canvas mode with the use of the community basic plugin?( I think that's the name of it forgive me if I'm wrong ), that should help if it is an opengl/webgl.

I'm unfamiliar with the specs of the new apple hardware, do you know how much vram the gpu has? That might also be an issue if it's a too low. :x

Just tried the canvas mode after you mentioned it and the playtest still crashes. As far as the vram, I am not to knowledgeable on that and have a hard time finding out how much vram the M1 chips have but I can say that the M1 chip has an 8-core gpu. Not sure if that means anything.

 

[chaucer]

I'm by no means an expert in terms of hardware, but I did a quick search on the Apple M1, it seems it's an arm based processor? my experience with arm based processors( speaking from using a rpi4 & linux ) has been pretty hit or miss in terms of what x32 and x64 apps will run in it, so it could be an issue with nwjs and arm? but I could be wrong. Or possibly video ram limitation, those are my two best guesses, however I'll leave it for someone who's more knowledgeable on the topic. :x Sorry T__T

 

[SoundsByDane]

Almost definitely an issue with nwjs and arm and even vram limitations. The person from support who was helping me mentioned it probably could be VRAM issue. And yeah, the M1 is an ARM based processor. But if that's the case, would that mean the developers for RPG Maker would have to make a compatible version for M1 or is that strictly an nwjs thing?

EDIT: You did you best to help btw, thanks .

 

[Andar]

@SoundsByDane
have you tested the games directly, without battletest or playtest?

RMMV and RMMZ basically create HTML5-games, which can be launched in any browser by index.html.
Both playtest and battletest use an internal, chromium based browser.

But nothing above mentioned (or I have overlooked it) what happens when you use Safari (or any other native M1 browser from Apple) to launche the index.html directly
EDIT: do that with forced canvas mode of course

 

[SoundsByDane]

@SoundsByDane
have you tested the games directly, without battletest or playtest?

RMMV and RMMZ basically create HTML5-games, which can be launched in any browser by index.html.
Both playtest and battletest use an internal, chromium based browser.

But nothing above mentioned (or I have overlooked it) what happens when you use Safari (or any other native M1 browser from Apple) to launche the index.html directly
EDIT: do that with forced canvas mode of course

Yep, just tried that. I deployed a game and tested it (with canvas mode) and things get a little weird. So weird that It's hard to explain but I'll try. Well firstly, it still crashes. The window will open then just shutdown randomly. Second, there's like a weird glitch that happens. Like the screen will go black then it will re appear but the tiles are all black. then the screen will go black again, re appear and now the sprites are gone. When I go to the menu, I can see the menu but the background is all black. Very glitchy, I never seen RPG Maker act this way. I'm trying to get footage of what happens but when I try to record, it doesn't seem to act up as much (it knows I'm on to it )

 

[Andar]

That behaviour is not regular, and it should have nothing to do with RPG-Makers.
If you use a native browser to directly launch the game, neither Rosetta nor OpenGL should be involved anymore, so it can't be anything from RPG-Maker.

From what I know of, that means either an incompatibility with pixi.js (which is unlikely) or a local problem of your Mac with javascript/browser/safari.
I'm not current with MacOS on M1 - is there already a native firefox or other browser than safari? Can you test that? and call Apple Support if they have any problems listed with javascript and display functions?

 

[SoundsByDane]

Was I supposed to web browser deployment instead of a Mac OS X? How do I test a web browser deployment?

EDIT: Also, yeah I think there is a native version of Firefox for Apple M1. I've downloaded it already.

EDIT #2: I did a web browser deployment and tried opening the index.html on the Firefox and Safari. I get this message "Error failed to load:data/Actors.json".

 

[Andar]

Was I supposed to web browser deployment instead of a Mac OS X?

no need
The games ALWAYS run in a web browser.

the difference between web deployment and OS deployment (and that means any OS, not just MacOS) is that with an OS deployment the engine provides a browser-app to run the program, while in web deployment that part is skipped.

It might be that the MacOS deployment hides the index.html inside the browser-app due to the way apple handles their apps, but even then the index.html is always openly available in the project directory, before you even deploy.
And that is the one I wanted you to use for testing, no need for deployment at all.

EDIT #2: I did a web browser deployment and tried opening the index.html on the Firefox and Safari. I get this message "Error failed to load:data/Actors.json".

At a guess, it's the folderpath to the project.
Any HTML5-based game requires the entire filepath for all files to follow networking rules. And that makes the place where you store the project important if you open it directly.
Sorry, forgot to mention that.

In playtest (and probably in MacOS deployment) the game is encapsuled and can use relative paths, that is why the folder where it is stored is no longer important.
directly opening the program means that all folders to the top needs to follow networking rules in their naming, which means no spaces, only latin letters and a few other rules.

 

[ydoolb]

Well, sorry for necropsying, but I can confirm that I have same problem with my M1 Mac. And I think buying some windows laptop just for RMMV/MZ will be little overkill.

 

[EmeraldSpecter]

Well, I'm glad someone posting on this thread to pop it back to the top... this explains why the RPG Maker works less than optimal on my laptop (M1 Apple Silicon) and much better on my Mac Mini (Intel chip). I will keep this in mind when I'm doing testing and maybe I should create a shared folder between the two and just use my link to open the app over the network.

 

[chaucer]

The problem, is the new apple processors are armv8, which means, that in order for rpg maker MV/MZ to run on it, it'd need to be recompiled for armv8( or v7 should also work ) specifically.

However even IF the editor were re-compiled for armv8, you still have one major flaw, nwjs( the window used to playtest the game, and when deploying to desktop, mac OR linux ), does NOT have support for an nwjs version.

However with that said, there IS a way to use nwjs on arm processors but it's not official and may have some problems.
https://github.com/LeonardLaszlo/nw.js-armv7-binaries

It MIGHT be possible to run the software via wine( if the new apple M1's are capable of using it that is, I'm unfamiliar with this chipset still ) with dxvk installed. If anyone does give this a try, make sure you're using wine version 5.18 or higher, or else you will just get a black screen when playtesting the game. There is a way around this in older versions of wine, I believe you need to setup virtual desktop in order to achieve this though, iirc.

 

[HalcyanStudio]

I have found this short guide to circumvent the issue, I think mainly for deployment to the market so you can ensure the end user will be able to play it on their Apple with M1 chips: https://hackmd.io/@Mirai/RPGMakerMVMZ-macOSM1_eng

Basically, the method of deploying the project through Electron allows the game to be played on Apple products with an M1 chip it seems.

 

[Angelus197]

Is there any news about running RPG Maker MV and its corresponding game on the new Apple chips? I am developing a video game with this graphics engine and I am considering buying a new MAC. Thank you.

 

[Tea++]

@Angelus197
Please translate and edit your post, all posts must be in English on the server. (Deepl or Google translate will work)

There has been an official announcement. (link below)

Regarding future MacOS support for MV

 

[Angelus197]

I hope you have made progress on this topic since the last comment.

 

[Mouradif]

Is there any news about running RPG Maker MV and its corresponding game on the new Apple chips? I am developing a video game with this graphics engine and I am considering buying a new MAC. Thank you.

I am on Mac M1 too, RPG Maker MV crashes without warning while editing events (I haven't found a consistent way to reproduce or trace what's happening for now) and RPG Maker MZ works perfectly. Or at least I haven't had any problem with it editing for extended time

 

[Angelus197]

I am on Mac M1 too, RPG Maker MV crashes without warning while editing events (I haven't found a consistent way to reproduce or trace what's happening for now) and RPG Maker MZ works perfectly. Or at least I haven't had any problem with it editing for extended time

Well, I'm already very advanced in MV, with many plugins, and it would be unfeasible for me to move it to MV. Then the game runs correctly in M1? Although the RPG Maker does not. Maybe it can be run well through Wine or a Windows app emulator.

 

[Mouradif]

Then the game runs correctly in M1?

The game will run well in any system that has web browser (and the ability to serve the files over http).

Like @Andar said earlier in this thread :

RMMV and RMMZ basically create HTML5-games, which can be launched in any browser by index.html.
Both playtest and battletest use an internal, chromium based browser.