Eldman

Now I understand what you meant.

We just copied "City of Heroes.app" and "NCLauncher.app" from "/Application".
Everything related to the game was deleted from "~/Library" on his side before running from the copy.

We have not tried to do anything on the Windows side at all.

I am running Snow Leopard (10.6) and he is using Lion (10.7).

It is very common on macs to be able to just copy an application bundle from one machine to the next and it will just work.

I have been helping him with this problem.

He has contacted support, but they have not answered for over a month now.

We uninstalled the old client and launcher and removed everything we could find that had to do with the game from ~/Library. Then we downloaded the installer from the account page and started that. Every time it failed with the hash error. Really weird. We have also run memory and hard drive checker programs without finding any errors.

Luckily we did find a workaround. We copied my own game and launcher apps to his computer (took 10 hours over the net, eek). That seems to work for now. We have to see what happens when the next patch arrives.

Nice build Kinrad.

Just in case you missed it, your defense is not soft capped. The Power Boost power effectively only boosts Farsight, not the toggles.
If you want to aim for softcap, do not activate Power Boost in Mid, but instead add 7.37% to all defenses (power boosted difference of Farsight). Another way of looking at it is to aim for 37.6% defense.
Of course, for Defenders the values will be a little bit different.

This is a wonderful thread
It has given me a lot of ideas for my own Fire/Fire Dominator, even though he is only level 37 so far.

I just cannot decide on /Fire or /Ice. Fireball/Rain of Fire vs Sleet/Ice Storm (or whatever it is called). The -Res in Sleet is helpful for the whole team, but Fireball is ... Fireball. What more needs to be said? Hehe.

I am looking forward to more of the discussions about this wonderful power combo

When talking about X inf/min, how much do you take into account?
* Inf drops
* Common invention IO:s (sold at merchant)
* If in AE, how do you monetize the tickets?
* Anything sold to market?

Do you take sell time into account?

At least sometimes it has to do with the server.
Last night me and a couple of friends played through Posi 1 & 2 and we got assertion failures several times and always at the exact same time. This is also the first time it ever happened to me.

My guess is that the server sent invalid messages to the client, probably because the server were heavily loaded (Defiant server).

Nope, FSAA turned off. This game has a history of bad FSAA, especially on ATI cards.

The strangest thing is that it is not always like this. Seems to be random between sessions.

The weid thing is that it is connected with the input field. Feels strange that it needs to spam the server more when waiting for me to finish entering a sell value than it does when showing a search result.

I have a strange problem: When I have an active "enter price" input widget in the market gui, my FPS went from 30-40 down to 5-8.

The strange thing is that sometimes I don't have this problem at all (seldom), and sometimes it is much worse (almost all the time). I even get it when alone in power suppressed Praetorian market.

I have an iMac with some sort of ATI card in it (don't remember right now).
All graphics settings to LOW, advanced settings disabled (lose about 50% of my FPS if it is just enabled, but that is another issue)

Anyone had this problem or is it just and issue with my gfx driver (would not be the first)?

Could be.
The test server works fine though.

I am having the same problem as well. Stuck at "Connecting.. #x" where x increases once in a while.

Wonderful job with those guides, Silas. They are a real joy to read.

Do you have a Mid build for the Sonic/Rad?

For all you readers out there, try CuppaManga's solution first. If it works for you then all is good. My script should only be used as a last resort.

Tried these steps (on test client):
* Installed vidiotmaps.
* Deleted all test server preferences.
* Started game in safe mode (works).
* Logged in a character (just to be sure).
* Exited game.
* Started game in normal mode (works).
* Exited game.
* Started game in normal mode again (hangs with black screen).

No errors in Console (except complaining about missing F:, but it always does that).

---
PS: I found a nice program called Platypus that creates a fake '.app' around a script. Lets be get rid of using the Terminal to start the game at least.

Thanks for the information, but I actually managed to get the test client to hang just like the normal client, just by adding the vidiotmaps. That means that the test client has the same bug.

It generates some cache or similar in what I call EVIL_DIR (in my script). The problems seems like the cache does not work well with the maps.

I have tried this guide: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showpost.php?p=2870666
Sadly it did not work for me, but I did find out why.

The problem is that I have installed the Vidiotmaps maps (they are *really* good). This is a bug with the game, not the maps.

When I uninstalled the maps I got the game to work again, but that is not a good solution. So instead I wrote me a little script that "fixes" the problem caused by having the maps installed, and then starts the game. The problem is that the fix must be done before *every* gaming session. As an extra bonus the script also fixes the blank updater problem that some people have.

NOTE: I run on the EU servers. Some modifications to the script is needed for the US servers, but they should be evident.

/usr/local/bin/start_cox.sh

I have tried running Mids using the Wineskin application (just a wrapper around Wine).
It is almost a success.

In the hope that someone can give me some ideas on how to proceed I am showing how I did it.

NOTE: Requires a Windows Mids Hero Designer installation. Needed for the files. It might be possible to run the installer, but I have not tried that.

Wineskin home: http://wineskin.sourceforge.net

Steps:
* Install Wineskin (see home page for info).
* Install Wineskin engine (see home page for info).
* Start Wineskin.
* Click 'Wrappers' tab.
* Enter "HeroDesigner" into the 'Create Wrapper' box and click 'Create'.
* Click 'Basic Usage' tab.
* Make sure 'HeroDesigner' is selected in 'Installed Wrappers'.
* Click 'View Wrappers C drive' button.
* Copy the Mids Hero Designer directory from your Windows installation to this location.
* Close the Finder window (we don't need it anymore).
* Click 'Run WineskinSettings.app' button.
* Click 'Advanced' button.
* Click 'Wineskin Configuration' button.
* Click 'Choose' button belonging to 'Windows EXE' field.
* Select 'MHDLoader.exe' from the Mids Hero Designer directory.
* Click 'Save and Exit' button.
* Click 'Wineskin Tools' button.
* Click 'Run Winetricks' button.

In this tool we need to install some packages. Select a package from the drop-down button and click 'Run' to install it. Close and restart the tool between each installation if you want to see the packet list. When installing, choose default for everything.
Packages to install:
- dotnet20 (I could not get it to work with mono for some reason)
- fontfix
- gdiplus


When everything is done, go back to the main Wineskin window.
* Click 'Run wrapper'.

You can also run the wrapper in debug mode from the 'Advanced' settings panel.


============================================
Before I installed 'gdiplus' I could start the program, but I got an exception the first thing that happened. It complained that something was missing. It also looked like a lot of the user interface was missing.

After 'gdiplus' was installed, the program hangs during the "Loading Enhancement Database..." phase. This is where I am now.

I have found that this does the trick (must be done before EVERY game session):

rm -rf ~"/Library/Preferences/City of Heroes EU Preferences/p_drive/User/Local Settings/Application Data/NCSoft"

This way you will not lose your graphics settings.

NOTE: I assume that US players does not need the "EU" part of the path. Should be easy enough to change for you.

I did turn off those things and I *still* get a black screen on startup

When opening your defensive build in Mid's I noticed that you have taken most of the IO:s at level 35. Is that to make them work when doing some TF:s?

It's the Option key (mac keyboard).
The Command key works as expected, at least for Copy/Paste.

Well, I guess that is one way to solve it. Thanks for the idea.

The real problem is that Cider does not seem to recognize the Alt-key.
I must accept that Cider has a lot of funny "features" like not supporting Alt or more than three buttons on a mouse

I cannot create special characters like '$', '[', and similar. This makes macro creation and manual power description in chat ("[Brawl]" for example) a hurdle.

The work-around is to Cmd-Enter and open a text editor to enter the character and copy/paste it back to the game.

Has anyone who has this problem found a way to solve it?

Thanks for the link. I didn't know about it