City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Graphics issues on a new-ish Mac Mini: Going Rogue

CuppaManga

By CuppaManga,
Posted on: 2011-07-17 23:04 in Mac Users

 

Posted

Greetings!

First time poster -- I've been reading the forum all weekend and am impressed by the knowledge here. Hoping for some guidance. I purchased CoH: Going Rogue on Steam, on Friday, because I'd always been curious. I've had a wildly mixed experience, technically.

My rig is a Mac Mini bought in January: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.4 GHz, L2 Cache: 3 MB, 2 GB, NVIDIA GeForce 320M w/ 256 MB VRAM. Monitor is an Acer S231HL, Resolution: 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz, Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (if that helps). I realize that's pretty low-end for this game but it seems like it should meet the minimums and exceed a couple.

I am experiencing two main issues. Sometimes the screen will go black, as the game launches and the monitor will alert that there is "no signal." Usually, the signal comes back but the screen image will break up into "snow" or "static" and become unintelligible. I tried launching the game several times on Friday and couldn't get through character creation.

Saturday, I researched. I decided to make sure every other application was off, while trying to launch. I checked Activity Monitor to make sure no big background processes were running. I read that you could run the whole process without Steam, so I only used the NCLauncher. I tried Safe Mode, with no improvement. I figured if I could get through character creation, I could go to Menu > Options and check the graphics settings.

I found CuppaManga's great guides and started to go through applicable steps. When I got to the advice that I should trash my Preferences folder and restart, success! I still got the snow a a few times and had to force the client to quit a couple of times, but I got through creation, went to Options and set most settings to minimum. I ended up playing a couple of hours and having fun.

Today, I tried to play again, to be greeted by the snow issue, even worse than before. Even though I had almost always been able to get to the first "Loading" screen but even that was failing. I tried trashing Preferences. I restarted. I tried downloading the client from the website to make sure I had the newest one. I checked the client and OS for updates. I ran Disk Utility on my machine. I got the City of Heroes Test client and ran that. I sometimes get as far as the Login screen, but the picture breaks up before I get any further. I have mixed frequent trashing of Preferences and restarts into this process.

Anyway, it's late and I'm throwing my hands up for tonight. I really enjoyed the game and would really like to play again. I'm probably missing something obvious and could use another perspective. Thanks, in advance!

 

Posted

Thanks so much for the reply. That's bad news but all is not lost. I have an older monitor that might work better. And I have been able to log all the way in twice. I'm hoping to just get lucky and get in to reset the Graphics Options. Will report back on end result for anyone who may have this issue in the future.

 

Posted

To sum up, it was definitely that resolution issue. My instinct had been to lower the graphics settings but, in that case, it worked against me. With some patience, I was lucky to get a session that lasted long enough to get to the Menu > Options. I was able to set the resolution to 1920 x 1080 and quit. I was then able to boot into a stable session, and tweak the graphics down a little more.

I didn't have too long to play with it but the session lasted an hour or more. I occasionally get some lag, but I was able to successfully run CoH:GR on the rig described above.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!