We need to push for an update.

Title says it all.

The mac client's Cider wrapper needs an update badly. We're crashing constantly, CuppaManga is constantly recording new bugs (which is a great dedication), and there's guides on how to get your mac client working to where it crashes less than 9 times an hour, or to get it to work period.

We as a community really, really need to get Paragon Studios to better communicate with Transgaming and push an update to the mac client. The mac client has been overdue for an update. The memory leaks, improper caching, and endless "Assertion Failure" dialog boxes prove it.

That's partly why I'm pushing to find a pattern - the faster *someone* finds one, the easier it is for them to publish a fix. Otherwise it's unfortunately going to take a lot of trial and error testing on the part of the devs to figure it out.

part of the problem is delays on Transgaming's part. All of Transgaming's Cider engines are based off of their Cedega engine tech. The code-named Maudite test engine went into it's 15th beta release only a few weeks ago and the expected Cedega 8 release has been horribly delayed. That beta engine still has some regressions with CoH with a massive memory leak inflating CoH's temporary files.

The rumors circling around is that the release timing of Valve's Native Client Steam for OSX took Transgaming off-guard, and that some of the larger publishers (*cough EA cough*) have been leaning on Transgaming to fix their products first. Valve also seems to be intent on pushing their Native Client for Linux out this year as well, which likely has also caused an overload on Transgaming's part.

I wouldn't expect an official update for the Cider engine until after the changes to Maudite Stabilize and Cedega 8 gets kicked out the door. That being said, it's possible that NCSoft / Paragon Studios may get a little fed up waiting for Transgaming to find time to address the Cider issues with CoH, or for those issues to be dealt with in Maudite, and develop a native client.

One of the larger problems with a native client is that the Transgaming deal was NCSoft's underhanded method of delivering semi-official Linux support without actually having to go through the trouble of advertising Linux support, or having to train their own support on Linux systems. Dropping Transgaming and running Native client would mean that NCSoft would be looking at having to field native clients for Windows, Linux, and OSX to maintain their current client-base. That might not be something NCSoft is willing to fund yet.

Interesting. Are crashes that commonplace? I'll ususally play anywhere from 1 to (on rare occasions) 4 hours straight, and I can't remember the last time I had a total crash. I get brief periods where it looks like I'm being Mapserved, and once in a while I'll get bumped back to the log in screen, but it usually snaps out of it and resumes play as usual. I'm currently on Leopard (rather than Snow Leopard). Perhaps that is part of the elusive pattern in question?

There are 4 possible major obstacles to a native client: Staffing and initial schedule time; Code portability; and Update scheduling; and Legal.

Out of those three, believe it or not, Legal is the most difficult to overcome. If Paragon Studios has an active contract with Transgaming to provide the Mac client, there won't be a native one, period.

Second most difficult, you can probably guess, is Staffing and initial schedule time. If they don't have the people, with the right training, to work on a native Mac client, or if allocating the staff would create massive delay in regular game releases, it won't be possible.

Then there's code portability issues.

Only the programmers know how much code is specialized to the development tools they use, which would make it difficult to move the code to tools needed to develop for Mac. Things like compiler instructions are easy to work around; but sometimes there are issues like memory management varying from one development environment to the next that would be very difficult to track down and fix.

And there's probably some code in there which are basically hacks to overcome problems with the game in Windows (every programmers does that sometimes) that won't even compile for Mac because it's not intended for that platform. That's not even a simple track-down-and-fix - because they were put in there for a reason. Instead, it becomes a major engineering feat to unravel why it was put there, what it does, and what can be used as an alternative. Simply leaving it out of the Mac version might hopelessly break it.

It's not all a gloomy forecast though. The work already done to support Cider more cleanly, the new graphics engine as of the last two issues, and the use of OpenGL rather than DirectX does make CoH far more portable to Mac than most games out there.

Not sure if this is known or not, but I'm on a mac mini and my client pretty much never crashes. There's a memory leak or something though - so if I leave the client open for hours on end, it slows down and eventually crashes. (Entering edit mode in a base will do the same thing in 5 minutes, btw... overload, crash.)

2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 gb ram
Snowleopard 10.6.4

mac

Haven't been crashing here on Mac or PC in a while. Looks like they plugged most of the memory leaks. For me, at least.

Rarely crash. Only thing I have on my end (MacBook with latest 10.5) is that my framerate isn't too impressive much of the time with little regard to my graphics settings. Dropping from just under ultra to minimum nets me an improvement of maybe 2FPS over my 15ish (in an outdoor zone). Considering I can run Aion (in bootcamp) on the same hardware at 40+ FPS in most cases and that I have similar issues with Spore, I find myself blaming the emulation.

Well, to make it more confusing, Portal and HL2 run just fine Mac-side on my computer.

Just got a new Mac Pro, started running CoH, and got a crash to desktop. Now CoH will not run. All I can get is a message saying City of Heroes cannot run. This is followed by what I guess is a code: -1712. Anyone got any help for me on this?