Pillars 1 on Apple M1

[somnolentsurfer]

I've been trying to run Pillars 1 on my new M1 MacBook Pro. Has anyone had any luck with that?

The Apple Gaming Wiki site says Pillars of Eternity has been tested and runs perfectly, but whenever I try I just get a black screen with the game's mouse pointer and the title screen music playing in the background. I can load the Steam overlay, which looks like it's running in the correct resolution, but otherwise all I can do is cmd-Q to quit.

I've tried disabling the Steam overlay and verifying the game cache, and I've experimented with finding the actual game file and turning on or off the 'Scale to fit below built-in camera' option. None have made a difference

[Boeroer]

I guess it's not a widespread issue because I haven't read about this before.

I fear you might not get an answer here because the Pillars I forums aren't frequented a lot nowadays-  and it's unlikely that somebody with the same problem (and a solution how to fix it) will show up here. 

For what it's worth: I played PoE on several different Linux versions and it always worked. I suspect it's just a minor detail that prevents your game graphics from properly loading up. 

You could try to search the technical subforum here - see if somebody else had the same problem.

Sorry that I can't offer more useful advice.  

[Bosmer]

I hope that your issues were already solved, but just to leave my impression here for people who search for it: I'm playing Deadfire on M1 Pro and it works perfectly fine (modding as well). Loading times are super fast, so it's definitely a viable platform. I will try out Pillars of Eternity 1 as well, eventually!

[somnolentsurfer]

Ah, sorry, yes. I posted that in a few places, and I must have forgotten to update here when I got it working. The solution was to press cmd+f to switch to windowed mode and change the resolution.

It's not perfect though - for some reason the Mac version of the game will only support up to half of native resolution, and set at the 1080p resolution that should fit exactly below the notch the black screen issue returns. Setting the resolution to 1728x1117 does work, but it has to be scaled down by the OS to fit under the notch, so you get narrow black bars down each side.

With that combined with the capes bug, that doesn't look like it was ever fixed, I decided it was better to play in Parallels and have perfect full native 2160p.

I'll get to Deadfire once I'm through Pillars 1!