PvZ Portable for macOS

Packages wszqkzqk/PvZ-Portable as a .app you can double-click, with a launcher that supplies what double-clicking can't: -resdir for assets kept outside the bundle, the engine's runtime flags as checkboxes, and an importer for your own game assets. It also rebuilds the engine with PVZ_DEBUG and DO_FIX_BUGS on, which the official releases ship disabled.

Like upstream, this repo contains no PopCap / EA game assets. You supply main.pak and properties/ from your own copy of Plants vs. Zombies: GOTY Edition; the launcher imports a folder or a zip on first run. UI is English and Simplified Chinese.

Install

Grab a DMG from Releases, drag it to Applications, then run this once — the build is not signed or notarized, so Gatekeeper blocks it otherwise:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/PvZ Portable.app"

Build

Every tool is in devenv.nix; the engine is compiled with the clang and Apple SDK that come with it. Xcode is needed on top of that for the launcher, which xcodebuild builds with Xcode's own Swift toolchain.

direnv allow                # or prefix each command with `devenv shell --`

build-engine                # cmake + ninja, collect dylibs  → out/engine/
build-app                   # xcodegen + xcodebuild          → out/PvZ Portable.app
build-dmg                   # package                        → out/*.dmg

devenv test runs scripts/verify-app.sh, which statically checks the assembled bundle. lint runs swift-format and swiftlint over launcher/. make-appicon regenerates the (checked-in) icon catalog.

build-engine takes --ref <tag|branch>, --src <checkout>, --no-cheat, --no-fix-bugs, --clean, and --variants both. The last one builds two binaries the launcher can switch between, because DO_FIX_BUGS has no runtime switch and plenty of players consider the original bugs to be features.

Notes

• The engine and libs/ live in Contents/MacOS/ because upstream's rpath is already @executable_path/libs/. The launcher execvs the engine over itself, so the PID is unchanged, the Dock icon doesn't bounce twice, and it can drop the argv LaunchServices handed it — the engine exits on any argument it doesn't recognise.
• Assets go to ~/Library/Application Support/io.github.wszqkzqk/PvZPortable/, not into the bundle, so the .app stays replaceable and its signature intact.
• arm64 only, not sandboxed, macOS 13.3 or newer. That floor is set by std::to_chars, which the engine reaches through std::format and Apple's libc++ marks unavailable before 13.3; verify-app.sh prints the engine's actual minos.

Licence

LGPL-3.0-or-later