CuppaManga

I won't guarantee this will work, but it might be worth a try:

1. Right-click the NC Launcher application and select Show Package Contents, then double-click Contents.

2. Open up Info.plist by dragging it to a text editor like TextEdit (it's in your Applications folder), BBEdit, or even Xcode if you have it.

3. Change the value below LSMinimumSystemVersion to 10.5.7 instead of 10.6.

This may cause the NC Launcher to crash if they didn't just forget to change the value back before compiling it.

Do you have any third-party mouse software installed?

I updated the original post with new instructions covering today's new NCSoft Launcher and Cider client releases.

No insults from me, Zwillinger. I already made a new post planning for the worst, but I'll be happier of course if it's not needed.

I am curious to find out if the new Launcher will be able to patch the Mac client itself (if not I posted info on how to do that as well).

The market may be better behaved on Live date but I would bet only on "readable", not entirely fixed.

I don't have any information directly from Paragon or NCSoft; but I do know with only 3 days to go, code is most definitely frozen to prevent causing additional problems with the release. Anything else to be fixed will have to wait for the weeks following. What we've got now is pretty much what we're going to get on Tuesday.

Here are some important things to know about the Issue 21 release on Tuesday, September 13th:

The Mac client version on live (4462) is NOT compatible with Issue 21. If you patch up to the new version, you will not be able to use the Paragon Store without crashing.

If the NCSoft Launcher fails to patch the actual Mac client (Cider itself) you will most likely be instructed by our community support reps to remove your existing Live client and install the new one from scratch. While in its spirit this is correct, it is also WRONG, and will cause you to lose all your character slot settings, saved costumes, architect missions, architect characters, screenshots, and demorecords.

Instead, follow these steps:

1. Right-click your City of Heroes application and select Show Package Contents.

2. Double-click Contents, then Resources, then transgaming, and then c_drive.

3. Hold Option and drag the "coh" folder to the desktop (holding Option makes a copy). This part will take about 10 minutes or so.

4. Rename "City of Heroes" to "City of Heroes Old"*

5. Close all Finder windows to avoid confusion later on.

6. Download the new Mac client from here (note - don't try this until Tuesday, it won't be available until then**):

http://download.cityofheroes.com/cli..._Installer.dmg

7. Double-click the DMG. Verify that this is the correct version of the client by using the Get Info command on the application (it should be 1.0.6909). Then drag "City of Heroes" to the same place as your old client. Eject the disk image after you're done to avoid confusion later on.

8. Right click the new "City of Heroes" and again select Show Package Contents, and then double-click Contents, Resources, Transgaming, c_drive.

9. Drag the "coh" you placed on the desktop into the "c_drive" folder, overwriting the contents that are there now.

10. Run the NCSoft Launcher and patch up to date.

* - Keep the "City of Heroes Old" as long as you can. I tested this procedure already, but accidents do happen. If something goes wrong, you can trash "City of Heroes", rename "City of Heroes Old" to "City of Heroes", and start over.

** - If you're very brave, you can download the Beta Mac client immediately here: http://download.cityofheroes.com/cli....0_Install.dmg and modify the Info.plist so it works for Live. Hint: Change the CiderGameOptions and PrefFolderName.



Also as a separate step, I highly recommend making a backup of your game preferences before launching CoH:

1. Select "Go To Folder..." in the Finder's Go menu.

2. Type "~/Library/Preferences" and click Go.

3. Select the "City of Heroes Preferences" folder and use the Finder's Duplicate command.

After each launch of City of Heroes, repeat Step 1 and 2, and then drag "City of Heroes Preferences" to the trash. Then use the Duplicate command on the "City of Heroes Preferences Copy", and rename it to "City of Heroes Preferences". This effectively resets the preferences after every game session, so any changes you make to display settings etc will not stick.



Even if you are using the correct version of the Mac client, there are a few major issues you should be aware of:

- You may have difficulty patching Live client's Cider after the NCSoft Launcher has just updated. If this happens, quit the NCSoft Launcher and then run it again before patching the Live client. If that doesn't work, check the Properties of the client and make sure it's pointing to the correct location.

- If you are using MacOS X below 10.6, the newly updated NC Launcher will give you great difficulty. Follow my instructions further down the thread and see if it helps.

- The Paragon Store has an issue with incorrect text encodings, and will probably display squares instead of text in some areas. This will eventually be corrected from the server end, most likely.

- The Paragon Store also seems to crash a lot. This is because of very limited testing time for the current (6998) Cider client for Mac. It may be fixed at some point; but due to the wide array of problems the launch date is likely to experience, don't expect one quickly. It may be several months, or even the next issue/half issue release before this is fixed.

- After using the Paragon Store, the NCSoft Launcher will not be able to run CoH on subsequent launch attempts. The temporary solution is above, making a backup of the CoH preferences. Hopefully the NCSoft devs will publish a permanent repair at some point. But as with above, don't expect one quickly - the major changes CoH Freedom brings to the entire system has everyone busy, so it may be several weeks.

- Do NOT spend a lot of time in the Paragon Store. Make multiple trips there, close it when you can, and when you wish to make a purchase, do so quickly and then get out of there. There is currently NO guarantee that the Paragon Store crashing will not cause a loss of Paragon Points! You may be able to get them back, but Support will be overwhelmed and it's not something that will happen quickly. Protect yourself first.

I'm hoping this transition to Freedom goes a lot more smoothly than I anticipate, but it always pays to be prepared one way or the other. Always hope for the best, but also be prepared to have problems, and to be on your own to solve them for a long time. This is a very large transition, and every large transition has problems.

Don't use the absolutely minimum settings, you lose a lot of the hardware graphics acceleration, and it actually uses *more* memory that way.

While I'm on a roll annoying all the devs with detailed comments about CoH and the NCLauncher (more code talk ahead, beware!):

It seems the current client versions are being stored in Cider's config files. I don't know if the CoH client itself sets those, but it's also possible the NC Launcher does, which is a Bad Idea (actually that even breaks with Windows programming standards, one app changing another's registry information). I do NOT know if this is because the CoH client requires that to be set properly for it to start and log in, but if that's true, there's a better and safer way to do it (like a file in the client install similar to the checksum).

If, though, NC Launcher is accessing Cider's config files to find the install location, it's really better off guessing based on what kind of places the install usually is (in "coh", or "Program Files/City of Heroes" or "CoHBeta"). It would actually detect the install far faster than parsing its way through .reg files anyhow.

Now does anyone have a guess at what font is used in the Paragon Market so I can take a shot at why it doesn't display?

EDIT: Oddly enough I discovered there *is* a separate file the game client stores its version number in.

I am now completely exhausted, out of ideas, and pissed off. After trying to get the CoH Beta to work reliably for several hours now, my reward is for the NC Launcher to become irrecoverably damaged, even for launching the Live or Test clients!

*** If you are using Lion and care about being able to launch City of Heroes reliably to the Live servers, DO NOT attempt to use the new CoH Beta client at this time ***

I'm in the middle of attempting in futility to repair it, but I have a feeling this is going to involve a lengthy process of tossing out ALL of my CoH clients and the Launcher and all its prefs and starting over from scratch. I'm angry enough now that I'm going to say the NCSoft Launcher is a complete piece of garbage without even the simplest level of error recovery, so that it can end up in such an irrecoverable state.

EDIT: Now I feel a little bad about being so harsh. I'm tired and frustrated after a really difficult and stressful day capped off by hardware failure on my PC on a holiday weekend. But I'm still going to add that I am willing to help make the NC Launcher much more robust and less error prone *if* the devs are willing to work with me. If that sounds slightly arrogant it's because I pretty much know exactly what went wrong and how it went wrong.

(warning, code talk here) From the crash log it seems there is a function called parseINIFile in a custom NSObject called INIFile. In there, assumptions are made about what strings are going to be in one of the .reg files and where they are located (I believe the file is user.reg). By "assumptions", I mean the code is looking to find certain pieces of text in certain exact locations of the file. No thought was made to what happens if Cider writes the file differently in a new version, *which is what it does now*. This was a grievous oversight on the part of the Launcher developers and something that will not work well except in early testing just to "get it to work". Also, the at least one of the storage objects used in INIFile are not "nil"-ed after use. That means if you leave NCLauncher running after it corrupts the beta client, subsequent launch or patch attempts of the Live client or the Test client *will corrupt those too*. And that's how I got into the situation I'm in right now.

EDIT 2: On further thought, similar lack of object "nil"-ing may be what causes the NC Launcher not to save its own preferences correctly, making changes to the application locations not "stick" between launches.

Zwill or whoever else in engineering can use this info:

NOTE: Testing this in Lion on a Macbook Pro

- The new Mac Beta client (or more specifically, Cider) is modifying the .reg preference files in City of Heroes Beta Preferences in a way that the NCSoft Launcher does not understand. That means whenever the client is launched (Cider launched, more accurately) those files are overwritten, and subsequent launches break until the City of Heroes Beta Preferences are tossed out.

- For those who have seen a string parsing error in your Console log instead of the Mac Beta client launching, the above is what's causing it. Toss out your City of Heroes Beta Preferences.

- I believe the font problem in the Paragon Market is related to the .reg file corruption. Those .reg files have a lot of stuff in them, and I can't spot the corruption immediately, but I do know they contain graphics information and font information.

- I'm a little confused at how testing of the Mac Beta client took place without using the NC Launcher (obviously the two weren't tested together), at least on Lion.

For me the patcher downloads the 0.0.0.0 to latest patch about halfway, and then indicates an error downloading, and then has to be started over again. This happens repeatedly so it's impossible to complete the download.

I'm currently trying to download the patch directly via a web browser (I got the URL from the Console log) to see if I can manually pull down the patch and extract it, as it's my only chance at getting it working right now.

EDIT, pasted from the log:

Sep 2 08:10:09 Silver-Hawk NCLauncher[8774]: Download failed! Error - The request timed out. http://cohbeta.patcher.ncsoft.com/Ci...10.1.0.ncpatch

Update again: Even after I got the up-to-date patch the Mac client itself was NOT included in the download. I'm going to have to go fishing on the patch servers to get it.

Update 3: This is not for the faint of heart. So far I got the patch files, and the new Mac beta client, but the NC Launcher is not accepting the files I downloaded as a valid patch, and insists on downloading everything again. Otherwise, it seems to be working.

Update 4: SUCCESS! Mac Beta client now working, version 1.0.6909 (I think that's what it was). Running on Lion, so if someone can tell me which font the Paragon Market uses I'll see what I can do about the squares appearing instead of text. This is the first time I manually patched a game! I wonder if this is how it's done before a game officially publishes?

UPDATE 5: Spoke too soon. It launched ONCE. Now some INI file is corrupted, causing the NC Launcher to be unable to launch Live, Beta, or Test. This is going to take me a long time to figure out and fix.

Start by only turning on Shadows halfway, and turning off all the other Ultra Mode options (water effects, reflections, ambient occlusion), and turn off FSAA as well.

After that you can experiment with Water Effects and Reflections. Do not turn on FSAA or Ambient Occlusion.

This has been on the known issues list for ages. Cider apparently has its own colorsync profile.

The memory leak/crash issues are something that's deep within the way WINE allocates certain kinds of memory. It's going to take a lot more than a simple patch to fix it.

Actually those memory leaks, if you see how they behave it's probably an indication that the roots of Cider were never really intended to be used for long periods of time with something as intensive as games. It's been adapted way beyond its original purpose (running MS Office or IE in non-Microsoft operating systems for short periods of time), and this is the result.

I zoned into a BAF tonight with no trouble.

What type of internet connection do you have? You might be getting dropped back to the log-in prompt because of that.

1. Put all the game applications (City of Heroes, City of Heroes Test, etc) in a folder with the NC Launcher application - I call my folder NCSoft.

2. Run the NC Launcher and make sure it's correctly pointing to all its game applications using the Properties link below each game.

3. Make a duplicate of the newly created NCSoft folder, called for instance NCSoft 2.

4. Run the NC Launcher in the NCSoft 2 folder, and change the Properties for each game so it points to the game applications in the NCSoft 2 folder.

I haven't tested this, but it should work.

I don't have a Mac with an nvidia 9600 but I'll give it a try anyhow.

Next time you crash, open Console (Applications > Utilities > Console) and copy the last few lines and paste them here so we can see if there's an error.

I'd like to test that.

Live server or Beta? And ATI or Nvidia Mac?