Native macOS Version of ONI Needed

[SenW]

I'm a long-time ONI player with around 1500 hours of gameplay, which isn't considered a lot. Recently, I wanted to dive back into the game to explore the new DLC content. However, I discovered that even on my Mac Mini M4, despite the M1 being out for nearly five years, ONI still runs in Intel mode.

As the game progresses beyond 1000 cycles, it becomes particularly resource-intensive. I hope the developers can support a native build for macOS. I believe that an ARM64 native version could improve performance by at least 15-20%.

Thank you

[imazined]

How much RAM do you have?

[SenW]

5 hours ago, imazined said:

How much RAM do you have?

16GB

[imazined]

That might be part of the issue. Rosetta itself won't make it better. But 16GB of RAM is on the lower end for ONI

[gigamoi]

28 minutes ago, imazined said:

But 16GB of RAM is on the lower end for ONI

My 1500 cycle save plus my browser with a few tabs open causes about 14GB to be used on my rig. While it's tight, it fits under 16GB. (That being said, I don't know about any eventual roseta overhead nor did I check any of my very late game saves.) As long as it does fit, having more RAM should not impact performance.

[1265578519]

ARM64版本大约可以提高70%的性能，因为CPU指令集不在需要经过转义

[SenW]

On 11/8/2025 at 4:29 PM, imazined said:

That might be part of the issue. Rosetta itself won't make it better. But 16GB of RAM is on the lower end for ONI

No, the memory usage still shows as green in the monitor. I suspect there's a performance loss due to Rosetta translation. I also play Factorio, which is natively built for Apple Silicon. After version 1.1.72, it began supporting this, and it runs very smoothly on my Mac, even with extremely large maps in the late game. It doesn't turn into a slideshow like ONI does.

Here is the performance improvement Factorio experienced after transitioning from an Intel build to an Apple Silicon native build:
Factorio Performance Update

From this, you can see that on some models of Mac with the M1 chip, there is about a 20%-25% performance improvement.

[PAX12Bruce]

IRRC most unity-based game can be port to Arm Mac, ONI is made based on unity. Unless they did some low-level instruction set hacking, it shouldn't take a very long time to do it?

Factorio's improvement on the native build is very good from personal experience. There could be not enough business reason for porting ONI, since Factorio has an Switch Edition (its Arm-Chip).

[Tigin]

5 hours ago, PAX12Bruce said:

IRRC most unity-based game can be port to Arm Mac, ONI is made based on unity. Unless they did some low-level instruction set hacking, it shouldn't take a very long time to do it?

Factorio's improvement on the native build is very good from personal experience. There could be not enough business reason for porting ONI, since Factorio has an Switch Edition (its Arm-Chip).

I could totally imagine SimDLL having optimizations that fall under that category. Speculation aside, I would love to see the speed of a Mac Studio running on a native build.

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

On 11/11/2025 at 2:36 AM, Tigin said:

I could totally imagine SimDLL having optimizations that fall under that category. Speculation aside, I would love to see the speed of a Mac Studio running on a native build.

SimDLL have 3 different versions for windows/linux/mac, so it has already been customed.