Very interesting stuff, thanks for the information Mister Rik. I'd like to try this, and although I don't have a convenient way to create a fresh install of Lion to compare font libraries with, I found that the Apple website has a list of all the fonts that come with their OS. That might suffice...
On the same page where the fonts are listed, they also mention that you can use the Font Book application to disable fonts - I wonder if that could work as well.
"There's villainy ... and then there's supervillainy. The difference is performance."
-Doc_Reverend
Quote:
Wish I would have remembered that - it would have made the job a lot easier!
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Originally Posted by _Toxa_
On the same page where the fonts are listed, they also mention that you can use the Font Book application to disable fonts - I wonder if that could work as well.
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Follow-up
I went into the Font Book app, and began disabling fonts that did not appear in the list of OSX Lion fonts, provided by Apple on their support site: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5098?v...S&locale=en_US
So far, so good. I've left the Paragon Market browser open for some time now without a crash, and I opened the market browser after playing for a couple hours, again with no crash. I'll follow-up again if it turns out to be a fluke...
"There's villainy ... and then there's supervillainy. The difference is performance."
-Doc_Reverend
That's great to hear!
In the last few months I've posted about a couple serious problems I've had with the game:
Paragon Market crash: Is this only affecting *me*?
Getting frustrated: apparent memory issues
I filed a bug report with Support about the first issue, back in March, but apparently they were never able to find the cause of the problem. As to the second issue, I've been trying to determine if I simply have some sort of hardware problem (bad RAM, corrupted hard drive, etc.) going on before filing a report with Support.
As part of my ongoing experiments, I decided to perform a clean install of Mac OS X 10.7.4 (Lion) on one of my external hard drives. This is the same external drive on which I have City of Heroes installed. So I installed Lion and then rebooted from that external drive. After launching the game, I decided to try accessing the Paragon Market. And what do you know, the Paragon Market came up and functioned perfectly! That pretty much confirmed that the problem was at my end something on my internal hard drive was causing a conflict of some sort.
Since my actual main reason for installing OS X on the external drive was to root out the source of my more recent problems, though, I started thinking, "What is in my "old" OS X install, on the internal drive, that isn't in the "new" OS X install on the external drive?"
The answer to that question was: "FONTS".
For whatever reason, I had a memory from my past experience with Macs (going all the way back to System 7) that having a large number of fonts can end up consuming system resources. And I also remembered a little thing called "font conflicts". It so happened that I had over 800 fonts installed in my internal drive's Fonts folder (I do a lot of "hobbyist" graphic design in Photoshop, and really do use all those fonts). So my first step was to go in there and remove all those extra fonts. I opened the "new" (external drive) Fonts folder in one window, then opened the "old" Fonts folder in another window, and proceeded to remove every font from the "old" folder that didn't exist in the "new" folder.
Aside from the possible benefits of removing all the 3rd-party fonts, this led to another interesting discovery: I had somehow ended up with multiple different versions of all or most of the system default fonts. Like so:
"Verdana"
"Verdana.dfont"
"Verdana.ttf"
It was the same for nearly every font that gets installed with OS X - I had at least three different versions of each. Note that's "versions" not "variants". ".dfont" and ".ttf" indicate entirely different file formats for the same font. My 2008 iMac shipped with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) installed, and since I've had it I've upgraded to 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and then to 10.7 (Lion). These upgrades were done on top of the previous installs, rather than as "clean" installs. And it kind of looks to me like the different versions of OS X may have installed different versions of these fonts without deleting the old versions. Additionally, it's possible that Microsoft Office added its own versions of some of these fonts.
So, along with removing the 3rd-party fonts, I went ahead and deleted the versions of these "system" fonts that didn't match the versions in the "new" Fonts folder. In most cases, this meant leaving only the version that had the ".ttf" or ".ttc" extension. Once I'd finished this "Spring cleaning", I rebooted from the internal drive, launched City of Heroes, and went to the Paragon Market. And it opened right up and worked properly, without crashing my game client. Problem solved.
Additionally, I went on to play the game for a few hours, and after quitting the game I had none of the problems I described in the "Getting frustrated: apparent memory issues" thread. This will require more time and observation to confirm, though.
But ... fonts. Who would have thought? I suspect Apple didn't set up the OS upgrades to get rid of the old font versions because having them there wasn't going to cause any problems (and I think some older "legacy" graphics/page layout software popular on Macs may be dependent on having specific fonts installed so as not to "break" older documents). And indeed, I'd had no troubles at all except with City of Heroes. I think the key is that the "Mac version" of the game is, as I understand it, actually the Windows version wrapped in Cider. And I'll bet Cider isn't equipped to handle conflicting Mac font versions.
So to anybody else who is running Lion and experiencing issues similar to mine, check your Fonts folder.