With OBS Studio 0.15.0 came a better location for plugins to install to, which solves many of the current issues. While this location still requires Administrator rights to write to, it is a much safer location than writing directly into the OBS Studio installation directory.
With OBS Studio 28.0 comes another restriction: Per-User Plugins. This is currently only enforced on ARM64, but may soon be enforced on all architectures. Adjusting the Packages installer to generate the correct files is relatively easy.
Unfortunately the MacOS Package Installer has some problems figuring out if it should show the user the correct step or not, and may even ignore our settings entirely. This bug has been first reported in 2010, and has since then been re-reported in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 where it was finally turned into a community wiki on StackOverflow.
With OBS Studio 28.0.0 a new requirement was added to MacOS plugin: Loadable Bundles. These bundles are similar to Application Bundles, and have many of the same features, but are designed to be loaded by Applications instead of being the Application. This allows for almost all of the advantages to persist, with some minimal drawbacks.
To ensure better stability of future releases, we need to adopt multiple stages in the release cycle. As we already label Alpha, Beta, Candidate and Stable differently, simply adopting this classification system already does everything for us. This also allows us to maintain compatibility with the existing system, while offering something new entirely.
Adds back the removed portable installation method, but in a different way that shouldn't be possible to mess up. The original method had to be removed due to an excessive amount of poor video guides on how to install StreamFX, many of which went out of their way to ignore the Installation Guide.
Fixes#542
Enables users of the Mac Operating System to use an automated installer instead of the manual installation method which is prone to user errors. This is done via the use of "Packages", which generates a .pkg file according to the requirements we present it.
A complete redesign of the component and dependency system is necessary in order to support additional platforms, such as MacOS and other Linux platforms. Additionally it results in a much cleaner code base, which is less confusing overall.
Eventually it might be necessary to push components of StreamFX into their own CMake projects, as it is getting kind of complex now. Especially with the push for a proper plugin manager, things get dicey for big plugins like StreamFX.