Now (with a bunch of tweaks and modifications) we have all the tools we need to run some DirectX 11 Windows games on macOS. Fortunately, the Khronos Group (who manage Vulkan development) wrote moltenVK, a library that translates Vulkan functions to Metal, Apple's proprietary video library. Don't get too excited though, because Apple video drivers don't support Vulkan natively. So they wrote a different, improved backend, one that translates DirectX calls made by Wine applications to Vulkan (the successor to OpenGL), called DXVK or DirectX to Vulkan. Obviously I got the game to work, or I wouldn't be writing this guide, but how? Over on the Linux side, people quickly realized that the OpenGL based wined3d backend was aging, inefficient and quite simply, bad. That backend has no chance of functioning for Highfleet (which runs on DirectX 11). Standard Wine builds for macOS use an ancient OpenGL backend (OpenGL has been deprecated by Apple for years) that only supports up to DirectX 9 (which was released in 2002!). Games running on Wine make calls to the Windows DirectX rendering library, and those calls must be translated into something macOS can understand. However, Wine on macOS is extremely bad at graphics.

It also translates calls to Windows libraries for various functions (ie sound output) to native (macOS) library calls.

Wine on its own essentially translates Windows CPU calls to Mac or Linux ones. We will be using Wine and DXVK to accomplish this (Warning: these sites are provided for informational purposes only. Overview/Background (Scroll down for the actual guide) Any and all questions are welcome in the post comments below and I'm also on Discord at The-Minecraft-Scientist#1050. So you have a mac? Cool! Let's run Highfleet on it (hopefully).

Download highfleet steam