Warframe for mac

[(XBOX)ToothyWhisper93]

Hello. 

I really enjoy playing this game and want to continue playing it on my mac as I will be able to play on the go. 

What do other users think about this?

[Mazifet]

I don't really see too much reason for DE to do this. To my knowledge porting games to Mac is a massive annoyance compared to Windows or Linux, and they would be spending all this time just for a comparatively small group of people. Warframe mobile is coming out eventually anyways, so why not just play it on that?

[Letter13]

Your best bet is to set up Bootcamp or whatever system Apple provides for installing/launching a Windows instance on a Mac, and then just playing Warframe that way.

Porting Windows applications to MacOS is an absolute nightmare. MacOS is not a very developer friendly environment.

[DrivaMain]

You can load Warframe Mobile with apple silicon macs. You can play on your mac on February 24th 2024 when that releases.

Edited December 20, 2023 by DrivaMain

[(XBOX)ToothyWhisper93]

10 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

You can load Warframe Mobile with apple silicon macs. You can play on your mac on February 24th 2024 when that releases.

I've seen warframe mobile. If its available on mac ill play it on that but sometimes mobile games aren't optimisted for mac

15 hours ago, Letter13 said:

Your best bet is to set up Bootcamp or whatever system Apple provides for installing/launching a Windows instance on a Mac, and then just playing Warframe that way.

Porting Windows applications to MacOS is an absolute nightmare. MacOS is not a very developer friendly environment.

Yeah i know a few games that have had trouble trying to get there game for macOS

[(PSN)Lollybomb]

FYI, if it's a silicon Mac, mobile will pretty much be your only option I believe.  Bootcamp isn't supported anymore there, and Parallels will only let you run Win11 due to the lack of a translation layer that can handle virtual machines.  Therefore Parallels is limited to running the ARM version of Windows 11.  Windows itself also (last I knew) lacks a 64bit translation layer to run Intel x64 applications on an ARM processor.  They have a 32bit version, but not 64.

So, unfortunately, the mobile version will likely be your only option.  This is a longstanding issue with Apple, and given that they've moved away from the x86 architecture, is unlikely to improve.  At least anytime in the near future.  But who knows?  The fact that Microsoft does have a publicly available build of Windows on ARM, and they do have their own translation layer means that they are at least looking at it.  If more Windows computers start running ARM chips, developers may start targeting that more, at least as an option.

[Anonymouse7611]

Just FYI, I've been happily playing Warframe on my M2Pro Macbook for the last couple of days.  The process isn't for everyone as it does require a fair bit effort, but Warframe has been running nearly perfectly for me, and since I was able to do the account merge this week, I was able to bring over my Xbox progress and now I'm stylin with all my prime warframes and gear.

The process for me was:

1. Have Mac OS 10.14 Sonoma and Xcode installed on my Mac.
2. Download the latest version of Apple Game Porting Toolkit
3. Install Apple Game Porting Toolkit using the instructions here. I stopped just before installing Steam.
4. Download the standalone Warframe installer. This means clicking the little "here" link on the page and downloading all 20 files.  The network installer gets part way through the download and croaks.  The standalone installer worked perfectly.
5. Install Warframe into a fresh wineprefix by running the .exe file of the standalone installer.
6. Create a PC account if you don't already have one
7. Merge/link your Xbox/PS4/Nintendo Switch account to your PC account
8. Fire up Warframe and log into the PC account.

I've been doing the Gargoyle's Cry farm this weekend, but I've run various other missions solo and in teams, visited Duviri, re-modded some weapons and warframes, built and collected stuff from my foundry, ranked up in the Cavia syndicate.  All of that has worked fine.  There are a few visual glitches on some of my warframes that have fancy ephemera and effects, but I've minimized the visual glitches by turning down some of the graphics options.  Audio has been perfect both on my Macbook speakers and over my AirPods.  The game crashed on me exactly once while I was standing around in my Orbiter for no apparent reason but so far never during game play.  I haven't tried trading with any other players yet, so I can't say whether that's working or not yet.  I'm using an old Steel Series MFI Bluetooth controller, which doesn't quite have enough buttons but I theoretically could unpair my Xbox controller from my Xbox and pair it with my Mac, but I didn't want to have to do that.  The Steel Series controller is working just fine.  I just had to remap a couple of lesser used functions that I had on my Xbox controller (such as marking waypoints) to functions I absolutely need (like sprint and opening the level map).

I could not be more satisfied.

[Anonymouse7611]

On 2023-12-19 at 1:41 PM, Mazifet said:

I don't really see too much reason for DE to do this. To my knowledge porting games to Mac is a massive annoyance compared to Windows or Linux, and they would be spending all this time just for a comparatively small group of people. Warframe mobile is coming out eventually anyways, so why not just play it on that?

Just to be clear, porting to Mac really is no more or less difficult than porting to any platform.  The real difficulty is the small size of both the Mac developer as well as the gamer community.  The economics is the main driver here.  It becomes a fairly large investment to find one of the few Mac developers that are on the market and pay them more than the going rate for other game developers to port your game to a smaller market.

The integrated developer environment on Mac (Xcode) is really no different than on Windows (Visual Studio) or Linux (many to choose from).  To say it's an "absolute nightmare" probably comes from lack familiarity with Xcode.  I admit that the Apple "closed ecosystem" does create a couple of extra hassles such as the need to digitally sign applications otherwise MacOS will refuse to allow your application to run, but again, not insurmountable and you don't even need to buy a developer subscription.  A free Apple Developer account will work, but it is an extra hoop.

(More on Warframe Mobile below)

On 2023-12-19 at 2:24 PM, Letter13 said:

Your best bet is to set up Bootcamp or whatever system Apple provides for installing/launching a Windows instance on a Mac, and then just playing Warframe that way.

Porting Windows applications to MacOS is an absolute nightmare. MacOS is not a very developer friendly environment.

Bootcamp doesn't work on Apple Silicon Macs, but for older Intel Macs, this would work, but rebooting your computer to switch operating systems is a pain and an undesirable option.  The overhead of virtual machine solutions (Parallels and VMWare Fusion) don't provide sufficient performance for games.

(As for porting to MacOS being an "absolute nightmare", commented above.)

On 2023-12-19 at 6:53 PM, DrivaMain said:

You can load Warframe Mobile with apple silicon macs. You can play on your mac on February 24th 2024 when that releases.

This is a promising option.  I was not part of the mobile beta but someone showed me Warframe on their iPad, and that was pretty cool, except for the messed up aspect ratio and clunkiness of the client, but I assume these issues will eventually get fixed.  The problem here is two-fold. 

First, if a game is developed for a mobile platform in mind, the user interface will be geared toward the touch-screen of mobile device and that interface will conflict with how keyboard/mouse or controller would interface with the game (i.e. there usually isn't a cursor on the mobile touch-screen interfaces).  So running a mobile game on a computer may have user interface annoyances unless the mobile client has all the extra keyboard/mouse/controller support built into it in addition to the touch-screen support.  This will bloat a mobile game on a platform where storage is a premium.

But worse than user interface, one of the extra hoops of the closed Apple ecosystem is that iPhone/iPad apps don't "just run" on Apple Silicon Macs.  The developer needs to specifically allow their app to be run on a Mac.  Take Genshin Impact for instance.  It's a huge iPad app that has a PC client, and it would seem like a no-brainer to allow the iPad app to run on a Mac, but if you check the Apple App Store, you'll discover that you can't install Genshin on Mac.  Similarly, another option is that I've seen Warframe being played streamed from a real Xbox over the the Xbox mobile app, but that app isn't available tor download on Mac.

[Packetdancer]

On 2023-12-20 at 6:25 AM, (PSN)Lollybomb said:

FYI, if it's a silicon Mac, mobile will pretty much be your only option I believe.  Bootcamp isn't supported anymore there, and Parallels will only let you run Win11 due to the lack of a translation layer that can handle virtual machines.  Therefore Parallels is limited to running the ARM version of Windows 11.  Windows itself also (last I knew) lacks a 64bit translation layer to run Intel x64 applications on an ARM processor.  They have a 32bit version, but not 64.

While Windows lacks a x86_64-to-ARM layer, Wine has one. Actually, Wine has two -- one originated in Codeweavers Crossover (at least, I think it did), the other is Apple's own optimized setup (the Game Porting Toolkit, or GPT). Of the two, Apple's performs far better. There's about 47 different open-source wrappers around the GPT which make it easier to install a game -- including Warframe -- inside of a GPT-enabled Wine bottle, though I've generally had the best experience performance-wise in experiments with Isaac Marovitz's Whiskey wrapper (even if its UI is a little clunkier).

Disclaimer: I do not play Warframe on macOS, and my experience setting it up under GPT has been limited to doing it on my MacBook Pro so that I could tell a friend who plays it on Mac how to do so.

 

1 hour ago, Anonymouse7611 said:

But worse than user interface, one of the extra hoops of the closed Apple ecosystem is that iPhone/iPad apps don't "just run" on Apple Silicon Macs.

This is technically inaccurate, but also entirely true for all practical purposes.

To elaborate: you can actually just take an .ipa file and run it on an ARM Mac without issue -- at least in terms of, y'know, "will this binary run" --last I checked. The issue is that there's no way to get the .ipa off of your iPhone or iPad that I wouldn't politely describe as being at least "obnoxious", and probably could find more vehement terms for if I wanted to take the time. Plus -- as you note -- anything that's heavily tied to a touch input system (like Genshin Impact, which last I saw only supported touch controls on iOS, no game controllers) is going to be... clunky at best on a Mac.

So for all practical purposes, it's not worth the effort unless the dev has marked it as usable on macOS as well, at which point you can just get it from the App Store on your Mac directly. Because the "can this run on a Mac" is basically just 98% the developer saying "yes, I've checked that this can be used in a rational manner on something that isn't a touchscreen tablet, go ahead and let 'em download it from the App Store."

(Which is good, because there are kind of a lot of iOS apps out there which would not pass that criteria...)

[MutoManiac]

As a Mac user and Mac support specialist for many years, I got a Windows gaming laptop with a decent graphics card to play games. People saying you could run WF type games on a Mac and it being ok are just being very generous to the platform. WF runs great last time I checked on iOS and IPadOS.

Mac OS is better for almost anything other than games that were made for Windows.

[Anonymouse7611]

I don't think I'm being overly generous.  Warframe really has been "fine".  I'm not saying it's been amazing, but compared to my old Xbox One, it's actually been better. (Not saying too much, I know).

Traded with another player today, which worked.  Farmed the Gargoyle Cry all day with only minor issues.  At one point, for some reason all my weapons stopped doing damage and only my on-call crew and melee heavy attack ground slams would do damage, but I don't know if that was specific to running in Game Porting Toolkit or some other Warframe bug.  Exiting the mission and starting a new mission resolved the problem and it didn't happen again today.  I did manage to crash twice but both times was because I tabbed out of Warframe to open Firefox to try to look stuff up on the Wiki.  (Guess I won't be doing that anymore.) I don't know how taxing the new assassination mission is compared to more taxing content. I haven't done any railjack or an Eidolon hunt yet.  Both of those activities have been pretty hard on my Xbox in the past.

Again, I'm not saying that Macs are good for gaming.  I'm just replying to the OP that Warframe can be played on a Mac right now, and by "play" I don't mean bumping around at 10 FPS.  I mean, actually getting stuff done.  I'm only MR18.  Maybe real veterans doing harder end-game content (Profit Taker, Expoiter Orb, Orphix, Eidolons, etc...) would find the performance lacking but for me it's been more than tolerable. In the past when I travel for work, I've had to leave Warframe and my dailies behind, but now I can take it with me. Tack on cross-save merge and some new content for the holidays, I'm a happy camper.

[Packetdancer]

16 hours ago, Anonymouse7611 said:

I don't think I'm being overly generous.  Warframe really has been "fine".  I'm not saying it's been amazing, but compared to my old Xbox One, it's actually been better. (Not saying too much, I know).

I will actually back you up on this. While I only played enough Warframe on my ARM MacBook Pro to test that "yes, it works, so I can send these instructions to my friend" and then uninstalled to reclaim the space, it did seem pretty solid. And I have played FFXIV on the road on the laptop; I get performance on the ARM laptop just on its own which is only slightly less than I did on my Intel MacBook Pro when it was connected to an external GPU. (Look. I had to work out of the UK office for a few weeks on a project, and I could not bring my gaming PC, but I could pack the Thunderbolt Radeon eGPU I use for TensorFlow work...)

The performance you can get with Apple's GPT is honestly really impressive. It's not going to blow the doors off in terms of graphics settings or anything, nor is it going to come close to a Razer or ROG high-end gaming-focused laptop. (But on the other hand, the battery life is way better than most gaming laptops.) But GPT works better than anything has a right to that's translating system API calls to an entire different API, translating a graphics layer twice (DirectX --[DXVK]--> Vulkan --[MoltenVK]--> Metal), and then analyzing and decompiling the entire result to recompile it as an ARM binary. (Rosetta 2 is fascinating.)

And as someone who does also play Warframe on a Steam Deck, I can say that the performance was actually better on the MacBook Pro. Not dramatically so, but enough that it was noticeable.

But I also understand skepticism from folks who've tried it in the past, because this is a significant difference from the state of things only like... 4 years ago, as regards trying to run Windows games on a Mac. (Which is a little bit impressive, since about 4 years ago almost all the Windows-games-on-Mac were being done on the same chipset as Windows, yet had worse performance.)