Crashing Issues and a Question for the Forum

Is your iMac overheating perhaps? I've been running smcFanControl since my WoW days. I don't have the crashing frequency others have (but they do eventually happen).

simple fix, really

build yourself a pc.

seriously, I never understood the love affair with Mac, unless you are doing serious audio/video rendering of course.

Back in the day there was the argument that all the hardware was produced in house and you didnt get the potential conflicts you get with PCs, but I mean hell, now its the same parts as a pc, just an inflated pricetag so you can use the OS. Yeah, windows used to be extremely painful, but, it is a lot better than it used to be, and the whole, "I dont get viruses" thing has gone out the window, as hackers are starting to target Macs now that they are trendy.

But, anyway, sorry, had to get that out of my system. This game has always seemed to be more friendly to those with lots of RAM, and lots of RAM on their vid card. I am currently running 6gigs and I still use the unloadgfx command pretty regular. With that type of crash, which seems to be similar to my crashes on my old system, unloadgfx helped out a ton, used to keep it macro'd on all my toons.

I have a one year old Mac Book Pro laptop running OS X 10.5.7. I have been playing CoH for about a month now, and i get about 4-5 CoH crashes or freezes per hour, with the majority being software crashes, maybe 1 freeze per hour, and then maybe every other hour i need to completely reboot the computer in order to be able to reload CoH once it has crashed.

Most of the time, crash or freeze, i need to perform a Force Quit in order to get out of the program to reload it. I have not noticed that there is any specific action i take in-game to prompt a failure. Zoning has been suggested as a suspect, but but I crash in teams while waiting for someone to travel to our zone, and all i was doing was sitting pretty in a group doing nothing. I have played with the advanced graphics options, but other than dramatically reducing visual quality, these changes appear to have no effect.

Any suggestions would be most heartily appreciated.

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro4,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.5 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP41.00C1.B00
SMC Version (system): 1.27f2

The first thing I would do is upgrade to 4GB of RAM. For some reason, on this game on the Mac, 2GB just doesn't seem to cut it. I tried running the game with 2GB and it was pretty slow and I had issues. After I upgraded to 4GB of RAM in my MBP, the game ran faster and was more stable. CoH itself needs a good 1.3-1.4 GB just to run. And the Windows compatibility stuff sucks even more RAM. That gets you up to 2GB real fast.

Let me try and clear up some misinformation spread by this thread:

- The memory leak/crash problem *is* being worked on. It just hasn't been solved yet.

- You *can* run CoH in as little as 1 gig of RAM, but 4 gig is strongly recommended. This is for pretty much the same reason as with the Windows client - the less RAM you have, the more likely leaks will cause crashes.

- More RAM is especially important if you play red size, as there are more textures in a smaller amount of space than hero side. The buildings and structures red side are more densely packed, while they're more spread out hero side.

- The /reloadgfx and /unloadgfx are functionally identical, and are named differently for the same reason there are /e lotus and /e yoga emotes.

- The /reloadgfx and /unloadgfx commands dump textures out of video RAM and memory, and reload them from disk (as advertised). The reason it works so well reducing crashes is because it seems to simply release all the memory and then reallocate it, which accidentally fixes any leaks that are already in progress.

- Apple designs its own logic boards, heat sinks, cases, and power supplies. It has to, so it can patent them. Otherwise, all the other parts including processor, chipset, video, memory, hard drives, dvd drives, and even displays are OEM parts. OEM means you might not be able to buy them in a store, but you can mail order them as well as Apple can. The exception is Apple laptops, which also have custom order speaker systems, fans, and keyboards/trackpads.

- City of Heroes is *not* ready for Windows 7. I tested it for nearly a month, and had problems ranging from patches failing to high lag, low framerate, and general instability that can't be blamed on the beta nVidia driver alone. I've since switched back to Vista until the problems can be solved (I'll make a post to the Tech forums later on this). CoH is, however, reportedly ready for Snow Leopard.

I hope that clears everything up.

Nice roundup Manga. I did a /e facepalm when I realized I left out the optical drive in my earlier post. In talking to my Apple friend he said that what's custom is often different from one model to another. There's the already mentioned stuff that is definitely off the shelf but some other parts are off the shelf in some machines and custom in others.