CuppaManga

I'm going to release a newer version of the CoH for Mac guide eventually that'll have info on playing back demorecords (as soon as I test a reliable method for it), the use of /reloadgfx, download locations, and other information that wasn't included in the initial version because it was written during open beta and certain things hadn't been discovered yet.

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well make that 1 dozen and 1. I'd just like to be able to see the stupid game. After trying to get onto it since Beta I finally am able to do so and voila the external monitor that I require because of my eyesight is unusable because I can only mirror rather than arrange with CoH.

way to make EVERYONE feel welcome. You're a minority, you don't matter, nice tone.

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THIS problem is easy to fix.

If you're using a Mac Pro, hook up the external monitor and set it in the Displays pane of System Preferences to be the default monitor. Your smaller single monitor should go dark, and CoH should work fine.

On a Macbook or Macbook Pro, boot it first, then hook up the external monitor, and also an external keyboard and mouse (both required to make this work). Close the lid. You might then have to wake it up again using the keyboard. After that, you'll be using your external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

The specific situations CoH does *not* support is playing the game spreading the UI across two monitors at once, or using the desktop on one monitor and the game on another.

A couple issues ago someone posted a short guide on how to do that, but sadly it's disappeared. Hopefully that person will step up so I don't have to re-test how to do it myself (I don't play back demos very often).

Follow these same instructions:

1. Right-click the City of Heroes application and select "Show Package Contents".
2. Open the Contents, then Resources, then transgaming, then c_drive, then either "coh" or "Program Files" and then "coh".

Then look for the folder named "costumes".

Let me see if I can recap some of the history of this chat bug:

Sometime during Issue 14 beta, it was discovered that the Mission Architect was eating typed characters. The reason was determined to be that one of the other key captures were stealing typed characters from the architect and then clearing the buffer. The fix was apparently to have it stop clearing the buffer, which introduced the infamous chat bind bug.

After I14 published, me and a few others observed that the chat bind bug seemed to be the key used in the bind not being cleared from the buffer after the bind is executed.

What we apparently didn't realize is there are multiple buffers for different functions, as Castle pointed out this week: I would guess, one for chat, one for movement, one for the Architect, and one for the Consignment House.

While you're typing in one of those buffers, the keys were also being passed to the other buffers. So movements end up in chat, CH ends up in chat or login, etc.

So the problem isn't knowing *why* it's happening, but finding all the different instances where keys are being captured by buffers that aren't supposed to be capturing them.

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If you click on a non-editable segment of the UI, any keyboard entries you made at that point would be stored in the buffer. Then, when you attempted to chat, that buffer would be placed in front of whatever test you were attempting to enter as soon as you hit enter to send the message.

The key bit that allowed us to fix it was the "non-editable" part of the statement.

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There's one bit left Castle - the Consignment Market UI. Keystrokes there are also left in the buffer, and spill into chat and the game login/password.

I got hit bad with patching problems, but ironically, only on the PC side. The red names have been notified.

Use Cmd-Enter to switch to Windowed Mode, and then Hide the application.

More info on this for those who really want it:

CoH likely can't support Tiger (OS X 10.4) any longer because it may now be using features of Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6) that are not available in Tiger, such as:

- OpenGL - Leopard and Snow Leopard have much newer versions with features that aren't available in Tiger. They could use an older feature set, but to make the CoH client better and more usable, new OpenGL features are usually better. Since Apple rarely releases OpenGL separately from the OS like Microsoft does with DirectX, making the older OS unsupported is the obvious option.

- Tar/Gzip - the Updater uses Tar and Gzip that are part of Leopard and Snow Leopard. The older version in Tiger may have been the source of some of the updater issues present in the last Training Room build.

- Webkit - The Updater may use Webkit features only available as a part of the latest Safari, which may not be supported by Tiger.

- XCode - The Updater and Cider portions of CoH for Mac may be compiled by XCode versions that are not guaranteed compatible with Tiger, and installing compatibility modules may be causing the compile to fail. The solution most programmers opt for at this point is to limit to newer versions of OS X.

Sounds more like a connectivity issue.

First, make sure you installed the Boot Camp drivers that came with the iMac (they're on one of the two restore CD's - the one with a Windows partition).

If that doesn't help, you qualify as Windows support for CoH. Send a support request and they'll help you.

I remember reading articles about the processor wars.

Turns out that the PowerPC variant Apple was using was being retired by IBM. To replace it, Apple had 3 choices: Switch to IBM's "pro line" PowerPC's at a much higher unit cost, which would have saved the effort of converting software over; Switch to IBM's new low-cost Cell processor, which would also require software rewrites, and no promises of a standard instruction set; Or switch to Intel, which would also require software rewrites, but only once, as it's been standardized for years.

If Apple went with the pro PowerPC, the unit cost of each Mac would have gone up significantly, thought the software would have stayed the same.

The Cell would have *reduced* the price of each Mac, but the software transition may have killed the platform. Especially if it had to be done again a few years later.

Intel was an obvious answer, because it would only take one software transition (albeit a difficult one) and thought it cost more than Cell, it was far less than the pro PowerPC. The timing was right, too, with Transitive technology's on-the-fly PowerPC-to-Intel translation software coming available.

So that's why we have Intel today. It was purely a business decision which happened to be in our favor.

I added a note to that effect to my Mac Edition Guide.

As of Issue 15, Tiger (OS X 10.4) is no longer supported to run CoH. It may work, but at your own risk. If you have problems, Support will ask you to upgrade to 10.5 or later.

You won't be disappointed with the Macbook Pro.

For gaming, make sure you set the Graphics setting in Energy Saver to "Higher Performance" so the MBP uses the built-in 9600 instead of the 9400. It'll give you less battery life, but more power.

Yes that's the home folder.

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after I navigated to /Applications/City of Heroes Test.app/Contents
# /Resources/transgaming/c_drive/coh/cider/ folder I double clicked cider-COHD-Updater-002591 and it went on to patch. 3 hours of patching (clean install) I'll post my results in the morning or soon as I can. [/color]

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Can you do me a favor? Right-click that COHD file, select Get Info, and tell me what it's set to "open with"?

If anyone running 10.5 is still having the problem noted above, please post the portion of your Console Log where the problem seems to occur.

You can catch that by running Console first (Applications > Utilities > Console) and using the Clear button. Then launch CoH and watch the events posted to the log. Note that "f_drive" errors are normal and no cause for panic.

In particular I'm looking for permissions based errors, file create/delete/extract errors, bad patch servers, etc.

There's an issue with MacOS X 10.4 that may cause this. If you're using 10.4 you might want to consider upgrading, as 10.4 support may be dropped after Snow Leopard is released in a couple months.

Mac I15 Notes:

- Vertical Sync now does work correctly.

- FSAA/Depth of Field/Bloom/Desaturation are still disabled.

- Water Effects can now be set to High Quality.

- In Mission Architect, tiny animated avatars don't animate or rotate (but they're no longer corrupted).

- In Mission Architect, local arcs now seem to appear in the list correctly after being created or edited.

- Plugging in or unplugging headphones now correctly re-routes audio appropriately.

- 3D Sound still causes "event sounds" like glowies or doors to be very loud.

- Certain zones such as Pocket D, RWZ Base, SG bases, Arachnos maps, and Vaults load textures a little slowly.

- In certain zones such as Pocket D, RWZ Base, SG bases, and Arachnos maps, players may experience lag or chop until the texture load stabilizes (see slow texture loading above). Lag/chop increases dramatically if you set the World Detail beyond 100%.

- Dragging an item from your inventory while standing in an SG base (even before you drop it anywhere) causes the base to flicker, and the "grid" to appear for a moment.

- Dropping the first item in a transaction into SG base storage causes a long pause, up to a minute, while the client appears to be frozen. It also causes the textures in the base to reload, which makes it choppy again until the textures stabilize.

- Zoning to multiple high-texture zones may still cause the client to crash. The chances of that dramatically increase if World Detail is turned higher than 100% (crash report 1 available).

- Using the /reloadgfx command approximately after 3 zonings can reduce crashes dramatically.

- Wandering around any zone for a long period of time can cause the client to hard freeze occasionally but not crash to desktop (crash report 2 available). I had to force-quit the client to shut it down.

- (not really Mac only) New event sounds are great, except the concrete running sound overlaps a bit, and walking on glass makes the floor running sound. Also walking on some vehicles makes a floor sound, and some make a metallic sound.

Nine times out of ten it's the router.

For a short while, try connecting by plugging the Mac directly into the cable or DSL modem. If you have no mapserver disconnects, your router is cheap and/or faulty.

In my experience it provides very little benefit for the extra trouble and heat generation.

I've never really tried anything like that...

You did know you can push the windowed CoH off the main screen (with the menu bar) and onto the secondary one didn't you?

Also I haven't tried it, but supposedly you can assign different "spaces" to different displays, and also different applications to different "spaces". So theoretically that way you can trick the Mac into always launching CoH on one particular display.

Doh...good one GadgetDon. I posted too early in the morning, and thought the OP was talking about the game freezing the computer.

Do you have 3rd party RAM installed or is it all from Apple? Are you using 10.4 or 10.5? Does anything besides CoH freeze occasionally? Which video does your Mac have (ATI, Nvidia?)

Try disconnecting all USB and Firewire devices (except the mouse and keyboard obviously) before launching.

If that doesn't work run Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities) and Repair Permissions and Verify Disk, and if there are errors boot from the original disk that came with the computer and run Repair Disk from the installer (it's in a menu called Utilities at the top I believe).

That should cover the basics. After that it comes down to troubleshooting if you have anything installed/running that might be interfering, if MacOS X has been altered or damaged, or if your internet connection has problems.

Try deleting your cookies first.

If that doesn't work, sync your iPhone via iTunes and then do a Restore.