City of Heroes Forum

I've just installed CoH through crossover after trying the 'native' Mac OS X version -- there's something to recommend Crossover over the Cider version:

• 20-30% better framerates
• If you have a color profile set up for your screen; the Cider port will reset it.

However, I've hit a couple of bugs:

• When mousing over a mob, other player, etc -- the work 'flickers'; this is most noticeable in instances (I have had luck fixing this by running "/cursorcache 1" in-game every time I start up)
• I get an crash back to desktop every few minutes - most often when I'm trying to open a fullscreen panel like 'Manage' for enhancements - but happens at various other times too.

The log of the crashes I am having all end with something like:

wineloader(2543,0xa0726720) malloc: mmap(size=32768) failed (error code=12)
error: can't allocate region
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug

***snip (about 100 lines of the above)

error: can't allocate region
set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
what(): St9bad_alloc

This indicates that the process has exhausted its virtual address space. That is, of the possible range of addresses that you can represent using 32 bits -- 4 Gigabytes -- very nearly all of them are dedicated to some purpose or other. So, any attempt to allocate more fails.

Now "dedicated to some purpose" doesn't necessarily mean they are actually being used. They may just be reserved. Still, the effect is the same.

The presence of "St9bad_alloc" makes me suspect that this is caused by Mac OS X Leopard's OpenGL drivers. In particular, Leopard has a feature where it uses LLVM (a compiler technology) to convert OpenGL shader programs which are too complex to run on the GPU hardware into code which can run (slowly) on the CPU. We've seen a lot of issues with exhausted address space and LLVM. I don't know if LLVM is just memory hungry, or if it's leaking, or just caching every program it ever compiles, or what.

The best advice I can give you is to try to configure CoH to use simpler shader programs, or none at all. This might be termed "Shader Detail" or something similar in the game's graphics options.

It's my experience that running with shaders off makes the game go a long time without crashing. Also, that even with shaders on (on low quality - I have not tested higher), regular use of the /unloadgfx command helps to prolong play without crashing as well. I try to remember to use this after zoning or leaving a graphics-intensive location, such as the university, the auction house, or under the statue of Atlas.

This does not seem to be an issue with the official Mac version, for whatever reason.

Other reasons Crossover is superior to the Cider encapsulation currently...

The Cider encapsulation does not support a true 'windowed mode'. You can use cmd-return to force it to display in a window, but that window is not resizable, and is constrained to the current resolution in the graphics setting. Also, the resolutions are all generally 'full screen' resolutions.. if I want to fill most of the screen without being in fullscreen mode, my closest option is to set to native resolution for my imac (1440x900) and just let the window trail off the bottom of my screen. The smallest resolution below that is 1152xsomething. This is obviously sub-optimal.

Additionally, in fullscreen mode, my second display is reset to black. Uh. No. Not acceptable.

On the other hand, right now Crossover still has some outstanding issues. I've found that crashing is minimal since Issue 13, as long as I don't crank up my textures (I'm running on Tiger, not Leopard)... But I still have the keyboard input stutter problem, and frequently mouse-based camera rotation 'catches' in Crossover.

That is, I use the mouse to rotate my view, but the view gets 'stuck' and won't turn without really EXTREMELY exaggerated movement.
The mouse is functioning correctly, and this issue does not occur within the Cider encapsulation of CoX.

I'd honestly much rather use crossover, but -right now- the issues in Cider are less problematic; once I get the display fiddled wher eI need to, I can keep playing without any unpleasant surprises under Cider.

Just out of curiosity, which Mac are you using and which video card does it have in it?

Bob Watson wrote:

The log of the crashes I am having all end with something like:

wineloader(2543,0xa0726720) malloc: mmap(size=32768) failed
(error code=12)
error: can't allocate region
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug

***snip (about 100 lines of the above)

error: can't allocate region
set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
what(): St9bad_alloc

If you are seeing something like this, please open a support ticket or send an email to info@codeweavers.com and reference bug 4711 (you will not be able to see the bug). We are working on collecting the details to this issue.

I use the Crossover Games version of COH consistently over the Cider version.

The game sometimes crashes, but no more than other players I've noticed since issue 14 came out.