On your iMac, do a:
/macro GFX reloadgfx
Put the macro button somewhere on your toolbars. Hit the macro immediately after you zone, as well as every time you are in a place with a lot of people (like Ms Liberty on a high-population server). You may also want to hit the macro immediately before zoning.
Do this faithfully and it's generally pretty stable. Forget and you'll pay the price in crashes.
I do that religiously on the iMac and it does not prevent the crashes, unfortunately.
EDIT: Could it be the video card (is there anyway to check drivers?), or maybe the difference in anti-virus software?
I am having the same problem with my Imac. my system is the same config except for I got 4 gig ram. I spent part of lastnight on the phone with apple care and they seem to think it is a problem with the video card. I have an appointment sunday morning with the techs to find out. I will post on what they find.
Thank you. That would really suck if it was the video card and not something else that would be much easier to deal with.
Well I spent some time at the Apple store lastnight with the techs. I was in the area and stopped in. I told them the problem I was having and we got COH on one the Imacs in store for them to try out. We just copied COH from my macbook pro laptop and went at it from there. The Imac we used is the same as I have with the dual core 3.06 with 4 gig ram and nividea 512 card. They had the same problem after half an hour playing on the Imac. My macbook had no problem with locking up. I did try the /reloadgfx after I would zone 2 times and it seemed to help the issue with not locking up. I will know more sunday when I get the big machine in. I also made converts out of 3 outta 5 techs. Now I might be able to enslave...er...get on line mac/coh tech support more readally for problems we may have. The Lead tech for the apple store has bookmarked this forum for mac users to see if this problem is hardware or software. More to come in a few days.
Ok , after taking my Imac in and having them run tests on it , they found it was not the video card. One of them bumped the problem up to apple to see if they could do anything more to find a work thru, but they said from what they have seen running it my memory for the machine gets over loaded and locks up. The lead tech does not know what the gurus in the land of soy lattes can do, but maybe that info can help the COH devs get a patch going to show the Mac users some love for a more stable platform.
Excellent. Lets hope they figure something out soon. The iMac is a pretty common mac platform, so we hopefully won't be waiting that log for a fix.
Do we know if there is some way to dump the RAM that the program is using occasionally to attempt to stop the memory overload? Or is that a function that is already achieved using /reloadgfx? I get back home today (finally) and I'll be able to try stuff with the iMac again to see if I can make it crash less. I mean, 15+ a day is just dumb.
Try the new Mac build on the Training Room and see if that improves things for you.
Manga @ Triumph
"Meanwhile In The Halls Of Titan"...Titan Network Working To Save City Of Heroes
Save Paragon City! Efforts Coordination
Guess it's not news but I was just here to state that I get about one crash every 1-2 hours on a brand new iMac (top of the line 24", default spec). Infrequently it will also freeze. I can still move the mouse, music may still be playing, I just can't get back to any of the other apps running on the Mac. Just now it froze and I had to hard boot, corrupting my hard drive and I could only get back in after running safe mode.
Not exactly the quality I was expecting! I resubbed just to play on my new Mac. :-( At least I only subbed for a month.
I will try to give the new Mac build a try tomorrow. Is it possible to use that to connect to the live servers or will that only work for the test server?
Test server only until I15 goes live.
Manga @ Triumph
"Meanwhile In The Halls Of Titan"...Titan Network Working To Save City Of Heroes
Save Paragon City! Efforts Coordination
For what it's worth, the error is caused by a malloc command in the WineX subsystem. Wine (the Windows code emulator) is making a bad function call to memory and it causes the whole magilla to hang. It's all in the console logs.
BTW, I get the same results on a Mac Pro (Jan 2008 edition) with 8 cores and 12GB of RAM + NV8800GT video card.
Yay, well lets hope they can fix it. Although it does seem better. I'm only crashing 1-2 times a day now.
I've yet to hear any dev's chime in any concern for this persistant problem. It's a ray of hope that Auryl got Apple peeps to look at this seriously. Perhaps this will get something going. Starting to feel like we Mac players are second hand citizens to the devs.
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Well, it's not like we make up a very large part of the playerbase. Macs just aren't seen as gaming platforms, and thats justified.
Yeah, but you don't hear about Blizzard blowing off their Mac player base. Plus they went and ported the game properly instead of using a Windows emulator. Here's hoping for a Cocoa-based Universal Binary version in the near future.
[ QUOTE ]
Yeah, but you don't hear about Blizzard blowing off their Mac player base. Plus they went and ported the game properly instead of using a Windows emulator. Here's hoping for a Cocoa-based Universal Binary version in the near future.
[/ QUOTE ]
Blizzard was able to deliver a native Mac version of the game because
1. They're Blizzard - they have more money and manpower than NCSoft does. Lots more. And...
2. Blizzard developed native Windows and Mac versions of WoW concurrently, from the very beginning. While it's nice for performance, it also means you have double the codebase to support (again, Blizzard has the money and manpower to do that). When CoH launched in 2004, people asked about a Mac version but Jack was quite stubborn and said it would never happen.
Apple's Intel transition is a mixed bag for gamers. On the one hand, it's much easier for companies to release Mac versions of games, which helps promote the Mac's ability as a gaming platform. On the other hand, those Mac versions aren't normally written natively, since developers don't have to do that anymore thanks to translation/emulation software. Of course the translation means a Mac version won't run exactly as smoothly as a native Windows version, but the amount of hardware overhead in modern systems means you won't notice the performance hit much, if at all.
@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."
The Good, Bad, and Ugly:
- Good: CoH is an OpenGL game. This makes translation via Cider easier so it runs on Mac much more smoothly than most translated games, because it does not have to go through a DirectX translation layer.
- Bad: Because CoH is an OpenGL game, it has problems in Windows. That means the developers had to rely on creative hacks to make it work right in Windows. But that, in turn, makes it harder for CoH to translate to Mac via Cider.
- Ugly: At least one of those hacks is to get around Windows awful memory management. The hack does not play well with Cider, which is why we have occasional crashes until it's fixed.
All of the above also applies to any possible native Mac build as well. OpenGL would make it easier, but the CoH devs would have to figure out how to re-code all the hacks and everything involving memory management, because those wouldn't work. Cider at least creates a buffer for that so it mostly works.
The devs currently have their hands full just working on the next few issues worth of content. Transgaming is almost like outsourcing, because otherwise they wouldn't have the staff to be able to handle it.
Manga @ Triumph
"Meanwhile In The Halls Of Titan"...Titan Network Working To Save City Of Heroes
Save Paragon City! Efforts Coordination
I got an E-mail from the folks at apple. looks like whoever got this problem routed to them is also a COH player. He said that he is going to contact the devs and match notes on this crashing problem to see if there is anything else going on Mac side of the house. I can forward the E-mail on to any of you that want to read it once he gets a reply.
I'm back up to crashing 3-5 times an hour now. I've sent my specs to the devs and hopefully they can use that for bug fixes. The only other thing I can think of is to up my ram. iMac 2008 version, 24". Anyone else have any suggestions? Ever since I went to Redside the problem has gotten so much worse. It seems Redside hates Macs more than Blue, at least mine anyway.
the wife's Imac has 8 gig ram and she crashes less. we both use the unloadgfx macro and as long as we use that we have little problem. I have heard nothing back from my apple guy, but he is suppose to come over for LAN night next week. Wish I has something more for you all.
I'll try boosting the ram from 2 to 4. When I get it all installed and try it out I'll post an update on the thread. Thanks. 
My (totally subjective) experience: Redside does seem to be worse. unloadgfx does seem to help, though it's hard to tell if that's real or a placebo effect. Turning texture settings to minimum (for both environment and characters) helps a lot - that one change alone makes me go from crashing every three zones or so to more like five to ten. Annoying. I like high quality textures, and my computer can handle them fine - but I'll take low res textures if that's the price for being able to actually play.
And the Rikti War Zone indoor area at the start is absolutely horrible. Lag everywhere as it tries to load everything on the fly.
I've upgraded the ram from 2gb to 4gb and it has lessened the crashing to about once an hour with liberal use of the reloadgfx macro. I can deal with that for now.
Hello everyone. I have a quandary and I am requesting the assistance of this forum. My job keeps me on the road a lot, so I have 2 computers. An iMac 24" at home (purchased in Dec 2008), and a 15" Macbook Pro (purchased April 2009) for the road. When I play on the iMac, I have an average of 5 crashes per hour of playtime. This makes the game very frustrating to play, especially if I am in a group (which I like to do as much as possible). However, on the MBP I have never crashed, even while on dodgy hotel internet. Here is some information to assist my query:
Both computers run in native resolution with World Detail @ 80%, and Particle Count @ 35,000 to reduce video stutter (may or may not work, not sure).
IMac Vitals:
3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM
24-inch (viewable) glossy widescreen TFT active-matrix LCD, 1920 by 1200 pixels
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS w/ 512MB GDDR3 Memory
Intego Antivirus Software
Macbook Pro Vitals:
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB 1067 Mhz DDR3 SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT w/ 256 MB GDDR3
15.4-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen display 1440 by 900 resolution.
Norton Antivirus Software
If any other information is needed please ask and I will do my best to provide it. I am on the road, so I don't have direct access to my iMac, but I have the documentation with me.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! I am a new player and I really would like to stay on, preferably with a client that doesn't crash every 15 or so minutes!
Thank you all in advance for your help!