Mac CoX. Crash. Crash. Crash. Crash. etc.

60 months CoX vet. (Would have been longer but I took two lengthy breaks.)

Was delighted that CoX was FINALLY made available to Mac users.

Having bought CoH. CoV. Rogue patch. I didn't want to 'buy' it again for the Mac. So was delighted when it was made available for download from my a/c page.

Downloaded. Installed it. Np.

Fire it up...ran as smooth as butter. As good as the PC version...or...so I thought.

Then, suddenly? Crash. Out of the blue. Some obscure error message. ie. No good reason. Lately? No reason. Just ups and quits.

Eh? What's this? A program running on the Mac that crashed. I ran it in Bootcamp for a year prior to the Mac version...and it was occasionally 'flakey' around the edges. But never this bad. And I had it for at least 4 years on the PC tower prior (and was no saint on that either...)

But the Mac version has cleared 'quality control' and has been deemed 'good enough' by Transgaming when it is nothing short of SHOCKING! It's nothing short of an insult to Mac users and a slap in the face for their patience in seeing a much loved game finally delivered.

It's not like NC Soft have a great variety of Mac models to support :P ie Apple have a handful of machines which don't get updated that often and a paltry 2-3 mid range Gpus to support! :P So how did this version of CoX get stamped for approval? Did anyone on a Mac play test this for any length of time over ten minutes? Did anyone run patch 19? Do NC Soft have any Macs? Do Transgamer? I'd heard much about their very lauded 'port' tech'. However, on THIS evidence...they need to work harder on their tech'. Is it THAT hard to do a native port?

It's the worst program I've ever run, Mac or PC for crashing. And for little reason. I don't want to go into all the little technical reasons others espouse on the forums. Meh.

Mac programs 'just work.' Or, they're supposed to. Can you imagine this program trying to get approval on the Mac 'App' Store? I aint a betting person. But I can imagine Jobs saying, 'No.'

I aint a technical person. That's NC Soft's job. That's what I pay them subs for. To get the Mac version working. I'm not playing about with command lines...or graphic buffer preferences...etc. That's why I have a Mac. Ease of use. ie I get to sleep at night and keep what's left of my hair. It's their job to fix it.

For the last week, it's been crash, reload. Crash. Reload. My PC bretheren snickering or humouring me or being exceedingly patient. 'D.C, invite please?' (If you're a Mac user...you'll know how many times you've crashed and suffered the ignominy of...)

My patience finally snapped tonight on an Arachnos map with the bag of crisp Corruptor rad/rad I'd been playing. About 8 attempts to complete the mission on a poor archetype (that isn't 'meant' for soloing...) saw me kicked from the instability universe no less than...I lost count. At least 10 today. Then had to start the mission again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

I've had enough. That's it. *Draws a line in the sand. Sure, I could buy myself an external HD and put Windows on it...and install the PC version again. But I can't say I'm a fan of Windows. CoX to Mac was supposed to be a homecoming where I didn't have to use Windows again for anything. So...disappointing. How DID this pass quality control? Thousands of Mac users are paying £10 a month for this? Outrageous.

Cancelling tonight. Is this a rant? I don't think so. I wasn't trying that hard.

It will be a while before I come back. I don't know. Maybe I'll try Angry Birds for a while...

Azrael_9. 'Steaming and Hopping Mad.'

PS. Running on a Core 2 Duo, 8800 GS, 4 gig, 500 Gig HD iMac.

PPS. And the amount of times it locks up the entire system...forcing 2-5 hard boots before I can even load it again. I'm not accustomed to have my iMac gridlocked by something so unstable.

PPPS. It would be nice to have somebody from Cryptic, sorry, 'Paragon' grace us Mac forum people with their presence for an explanation as to why the Mac experience is so tardy...and what they're going to do to fix it.

I'm not with Paragon but I can offer some somewhat handy advice to slow the crashes to a bare minimum (I don't have any crashes, but I also have an nVidia-based Mac, most of the crashes seem to be with ATI).

First, though, you'll need to tell me which Mac model/year you're using and which video type and model you have. Then turn off Geometry Buffers, Ambient Occlusion, and FSAA (they aggravate the problem), and then turn World Detail and Character Detail to no higher than 100%.

And then run a simple little test:

Create a new user on your Mac (set it as an Administrative user). Log in, and then try playing CoH for a bit. See if it crashes about the same or less often. This will tell me if you have anything loaded into memory that might be causing problems with CoH.

Lastly, next time it does crash during the above test, copy and paste the last 10 lines of Console (Applications > Utilities > Console) into a reply here.

I recommend, taking a deep breath and seeing if you can fix the problem by changing your settings. On all video games on all platforms, the wrong settings will cause horrid results.

How are your graphic options set?

I know the feeling, man. I recently canceled my subscription because, in large part, due to the random amount of assertion failures, sound loops, mapservers, and crashes that I get. It makes playing the game nigh impossible.

The issue is definitely with i19, since I didn't have these problems prior. Been trying things like running the verifier before each login, completely reinstalling CoX, running on minimum graphics, and the glitches don't seem to follow any rhyme or reason. Could go a day without a single problem despite running mothership raids and TFs out the wazoo, next day, I crash twice every half hour doing the exact same content.

I'm just going to wait for i19.5 and i20 to see if the problem gets fixed by then.

It's good to know that vets are having the same problems I've been having as a new player (although not new to MMPs).

@CuppaManga, your suggestions were just the thing I was hoping someone would post. I'll give them a try.

something else to consider is that changes are underfoot at Transgaming.

In the past the Cider Engine used to drive OSX games has been derived from the Cedega engine technology. In Transgaming's own words, Cider and Cedega are the same source code, just one is compiled to targets for the Linux Kernel and the other is compiled to targets for BSD_Mach.

However, Transgaming's source code tree for Cedega has been in a state of flux for... well... let's just say Cedega 8 was in the testing stages about a calendar year ago and there still hasn't been a stable release. Various versions of the Maudite testing engines have broken CoH compatibility in new and unique ways, leading me to believe that Transgaming hasn't been able to provide a stable source code base to update the OSX client against.

Then, earlier this month, Transgaming dropped a bomb. The Cedega / Cider tech is being opened up through http://gametreelinux.com/

When the change occurred I popped the developers some questions on that subject. Here's a copy of what I sent.