[Strangepan][2.0.60] Black screen on old mac using metal

[Ze_Rubenator]

What did you do?
I switched to the Metal backend and restarted the game.

What happens?
The screen goes completely black on startup except for the system cursor. Steam FPS counter also doesn't show. The startup jingle plays, and after nominal loading time (or possibly a bit quicker than usual?) the menu music starts playing and I can hear the sounds from the background simulations. I can click menu buttons and see the cursor occasionally change into a hand as I move it around the screen. My fans also don't ramp up nearly as much.

From this and looking at the log it seems the game loads successfully and is unaware that anything is amiss. It technically works it just doesn't render/display anything.

What did you expect to happen instead?
Be able to see the lovely Factorio textures on my screen.

Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?
Always when Metal backend is enabled, never when OpenGL backend is enabled. I fiddled around with some other settings which seemed to have no effect.

The main suspect
The way I see it there are two possible reasons why this happens:
1. There is a bug
2. Factorio may require Metal 3 support, but my older computer only supports Metal 2

If it's the second case, again there are two solutions:
1. Make Factorio Metal 2 compatible
2. Disable the option to select Metal backend on Macs that don't support Metal 3

[StrangePan]

Hey, can you send me a screenshot of your System Information > Graphics/Displays panel? I would like to see a breakdown of all your system's GPUs and the versions of Metal they do support.

 > About This Mac > System Report... > Graphics/Displays

Factorio should be compatible with all versions of Metal on all supported versions of macOS, so if this issue is consistently happening to you, it may be something specific about your GPU that we need to look at.

[Ze_Rubenator]

Here you go.

I was wrong, though. It's actually Metal 1. I must have been hallucinating last time I checked cause I could have sworn it said Metal 2. Sorry about that. Either way, if it should work on any version that shouldn't matter.

But it probably does.

The reality is that this computer is over a decade old now, and even though it runs just as well as the day I bought it, support for everything is dropping left, right and centre. Stuff that used to work suddenly doesn't. Even Steam will stop working in a few days time. Apple stopped OS support years ago, I cannot update past 11.7.10 (without the use of something like OpenCore Legacy Patcher which brings its own host of problems). It feels like I'm being forced to buy a new computer even though I shouldn't really need to.

All this to say, if you can't get it to work (or don't want to because it's ostensibly a legacy system), please don't remove the ability to force OpenGL in a future update. Even if it's literally just for me. I would say it being a hidden option like in the latest update [2.0.69] is fine. Though it is a bit tricky cause right now setting macos-preferred-graphics-backend=open-gl in config.ini doesn't seem to actually do anything, you have to set force-opengl=true.

Bonus nitpick: OpenGL spelling is inconsistent. Sometimes it's opengl and sometimes open-gl. It caused me some grief when trying to find these options after the latest update.

[StrangePan]

Excellent, this helps a lot, thank you. It's supposed to fall back onto OpenGL in this case automatically, so this is a genuine bug. Thank you for reporting it!

We will never remove the force-opengl hidden config option, so no worries about that! The macos-preferred-graphics-backend setting was removed, so better to rely on the force-opengl setting in your case. When a bug fix is released, you might be able to try removing it from your config again, but I don't have a means to verify any fixes I make.

Oh no, that in spelling inconsistency is gonna haunt me.

[Ze_Rubenator]

If I see a potential fix in a future changelog I'll report back.