Is there a wiki resource listing all the limitations in the current mac OS X versione of unreal engine? I’ve spent a lot of time trying to implement features that I later realised not working because currently not supported, and such a listing would be very valuable. Also, where can I find all the known issues for the current release?
Right now I’m not aware of any canonical list of the small differences between Mac and Windows versions of the engine/editor.
Presently the sole main differentiator is the Mac’s OpenGL renderer is limited to D3D Shader Model 4 equivalence due to OS X Mavericks only supplying OpenGL 4.1. That means we don’t currently use shaders on the Mac and there’s no support for compute shaders, so SM5+ level rendering features like automatic eye-adaptation don’t work (yet) on the Mac. This will change as and when the OpenGL version provided by OS X is updated.
Almost all other features of UE4 should be working on the Mac with two known issues:
- Generate Unique UVs not yet implemented for Mac.
- Fracture Mesh doesn’t work.
These are both on the list of things to fix, but there’s no ETA for them.
What features were you struggling with in-particular?
So far, I’ve noticed:
- Tesselletion
- World displacement (due to missing tesselletion support)
- Reflections on translucent materials
- eye-adaptation
The demos looked a bit different, probably due to the SM5+ level rendering features missing, but it is not always obvious to understand what is working and what not (e.g. what are the features enabled by DX11 shader model in UE?)
Plus, there are a few bugs (e.g. UE4Editor crashing when hitting any key in full screen, keyboard focus issues…), is there a way to track the existing issues beside questions in answerhub?
A list would be really helpful. It looks like Distance Field Ambient Occlusion is also unsupported on OS X (according to the limitations section of the documentation). However it looks like the editor can at least generate the signed distance fields.
Just an update for anyone who finds this:
- Fracture Mesh should work on Mac
- The Mac is still limited to SM4 with OpenGL, so features like the DistanceField render passes aren’t available (yet). We’ll let everyone know if & when that changes.
Thanks . If I may add to the list, planar reflections on translucent materials aren’t working either, and currently the new DOF method introduced with 4.8 crashes the editor and the old one seems to work only partially.
SSS (subsurface scattering, used for realistic skin) doesn’t seem to work on mac too, but I may be wrong.
Anything else?
Is the situation going to improve with El Captain metal support?
Also, not SM4 related, Oculus Audio SDK and Leap Motion at the moment are not supported on mac.
Thanks for listing them all devel.bmad:
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SSS was disabled on all OpenGL platforms, as I discovered only recently - this has been added as JIRA UE-17816 to fix.
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Planar reflections on translucent surfaces will require further investigation - it’d be useful to have more detail about your expectations/use-case. Again it has been added as JIRA UE-17817 to resolve.
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Oculus support on Mac hasn’t been looked at in ages, there are JIRA’s for that already & I’ve added another (UE-17818) for the audio SDK. Unless/until Oculus actually restore official Mac support there will be a limit to what we can do.
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No idea about Leap Motion support - I’ve added JIRA UE-17819 but I think the chances of getting this are low.
Metal support for El Capitan is an on going effort; some extra graphics features will be possible and others will not. Until El Capitan & official, released support is in UE4 it’d be wrong of me to say anything either way as there are too many moving parts!
Thanks for your feedback marksatt!
As concerns SSR on planar translucent surfaces on MAC:
Planar reflections on translucent surfaces will require further investigation - it’d be useful to have more detail about your expectations/use-case. Again it has been added as JIRA UE-17817 to resolve.
See attached screenshot of the error I get when enabling it:
Do you have any idea if the new DOF method is expected to work with SM4?
Also, any update about support?
Thanks - that looks like the translucent lighting bug looks like a shader-compile error so it should be fixable.
No idea about the DOF pass - this is the first I’ve heard about it, so I’ll have to get back to you.
I haven’t ruled out adding experimental support for GL 4.1’s tessellation, but even that will only work on El Capitan and might have to be done outside the supported UE4 branch.
You can take a look at what shader stages Metal supports at the Apple developer site (account registration is free) - that will dictate what we can support on Mac going forward.
In other words - I wouldn’t get your hopes up anytime soon.
The SSR on Translucency should be fixed in 4.9.
Great 
Is the patch already in the master branch?
Hi , is there any specific dependency to this commit? I’ve tried to cherry-pick it in my 4.8.1 branch but I always get a systematic crash when launching the editor (see crash log attached)