In this tutorial you will learn how to run At Dead Of Night on macos without emulators or wine. Basically run natively (if you can call browsers rendering a native thing).



So how does this work? Read technical details below. Or just download .app to play now.

Since I don't want to redistribute the game for free and fall under piracy laws, you have to authorize with Steam account having at dead of night in Steam library. There are also links to other mods on this website.

https://adonmods.utidteam.com ↢ download macos port from here

Caveats

1. "This app is corrupted" error — Remove quarantine attribute by running this in terminal: (replace path to nwjs.app by actual path on your computer)
2. It asks for permissions like downloads folder etc. — Refuse them. I have no idea why it asks for such permissions, but looks like it's optional to give them.

So first of all I spent several days figuring out how ADON works with nwjs. We'll start with explanation of terms so you don't get confused very quickly:

- at dead of night is a browser game that runs inside of chromium (like Contradiction, Omori etc)
- as any other web thing, it uses javascript and javascript uses v8 engine to compile itself to machine code and run on your computer
- nwjs is a thing that allows you to run browser games in native windows. but actually if you press F12 (with dev mode unlocked) you'll get the same chromium devtools, inspect element, javascript console in At Dead Of Night as in your google chrome browser. you may be familiar with discord which is the same thing, but running on electron and not nwjs (because electron is slightly less ♥♥♥♥♥♥ than nwjs)

Now you ask me, so it's possible to make a website and play at dead of night instead of installing the game? What's the problem with porting adon on basically any existing platform that supports google chrome then? you see, Tim Follin, At Dead Of Night developer, obfuscated the game's code and the result of that is js/app.bin you can see in your game's folder when you download it. These bin files generated by nwjs are actually v8 snapshots, basically images of operation system memory, something between abstract v8 bytecode and machine code (assembler). AFAIK he wanted to make mac version but it seems there was some problem with tools or shell.

Luckily, after 2 days reverse engineering these v8 snapshots, it turns out they ARE crossplatform. How is this possible? I have no idea. But I do know that this only works with adon2024 beta version. So that's the first thing you're going to do if you want that game to port to macos.


1. Go to your steam library
2. Click RMB on ADON -> Options
3. Beta versions
4. Select adon2024. Some day it might end up being the main version of the game (i.e. default public branch) so if you don't see it there — it's either got deleted and you may now close this page and give up, or skip this step entirely
5. Wait for adon2024 version to download

The important thing here is that nwjs bins (app.bin) are not compatible between nwjs versions (because the underlying v8 versions are not compatible), so the main adon version on public branch uses v0.47.2 version of nwjs, but the adon2024 uses v0.82.0. For future researchers: you can find current nwjs version used by your version of adon by running `window.process.versions` and looking for `node-webkit` version there.


Anyway, go ahead and download engine's version from here:

https://dl.nwjs.io/v0.82.0/nwjs-sdk-v0.82.0-osx-x64.zip

Make sure to not download arm version as it likely won't work. Even if you're on m1 like me, always download x64 because we have to stay as compatible with windows as possible, otherwise it will likely break during game startup and bin loading.


You end up with zip archive containing nwjs.app file. Make sure to remove apple's quarantine attribute, otherwise you will get fake "app is corrupted" errors (apple wants to make you scary of files downloaded from the internet).

Just run: `xattr -d com.apple.quarantine [path/to/nwjs.app]` in your macos terminal.


You must use nwjs.app's internal executable to run adon, not the .app itself. As second argument, provide package.nw directory of At Dead Of Night local copy.

Example command (make sure to change to actual paths):


Now this will either work or not for you. Somehow it worked for me and I have still no idea why. Nwjs explicitly states that their bins are not crossplatform. But somehow it works anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

JavaScript is weird. Good luck.