ammaarreshi/generals-mac-ios-ipad

This project makes Command and Conquer Generals: Zero Hour, EA's 2003 real time strategy game, run natively on Apple Silicon Macs, iPhones, and iPads. It is not an emulator. The original engine, released by EA under the GPL v3 license, has been recompiled to run directly on ARM64 chips. Since the game was built for Windows and speaks DirectX 8, the project routes its graphics calls through DXVK to translate them into Vulkan, then through MoltenVK to translate Vulkan into Apple's Metal, so the original rendering code runs unmodified on top of Apple hardware. The campaign, skirmish mode, and Generals Challenge all work, and touch controls have been built from scratch for tapping to select units, dragging a selection box, long pressing to deselect, and pinching to zoom. This work builds on a chain of earlier community projects that ported the game to modern Unix systems and to macOS and Linux. What this repository adds is the iPhone and iPad version, plus a set of engine fixes. Porting a 2003 Windows game to iOS turned out to involve real obstacles: iOS apps run inside a read only, signed bundle, so every place the game tried to write a save file or config had to be redirected. Switching away from the app can also cause the operating system to grab control of the screen mid frame, so the game's render loop had to be made to pause safely. Touch input needed new logic layered on top so that things like a menu button highlighting on hover, or a drag turning into either a selection box or a camera pan, would behave correctly, since the game was never designed for fingers instead of a mouse. Running it requires owning a legitimate copy of the game on Steam, since no game assets are included. Setup on macOS needs Xcode's command line tools, several build tools installed through Homebrew, a full copy of vcpkg, and the Vulkan SDK, followed by scripts that build, deploy, and fetch the game's assets. Getting it onto an iPhone or iPad additionally needs a full Xcode install signed into an Apple Developer account, plus extra steps to fetch a pinned build of MoltenVK and prepare fonts, before building and installing the app through Xcode's command line tools. The README notes some known issues, including iOS occasionally closing the app during very long sessions due to memory limits.