Star Trek Online Forum

Mac OS X 10.7.3, Crossover Games 10.3, Mac Pro with Radeon 5870.

I installed the game with the cross tie and it initially tried to run full screen after first getting an unsupported graphics card message and choosing the default settings option. After several minutes on the loading screen with the Cryptic logo I quit as it appeared to be stuck. I changed to running in a virtual desktop in Wine Config and tried again - this time choosing the low settings option. There was a long delay on the loading screen again but I did get into the game. I setup a character although I couldn't see a preview of what it would look like - I assume normally you would see one whilst changing the various settings? Also the gamma adjustment option said adjust to just see three lines of text but I could only ever see two regardless of where the slider was set.

Once in game it appeared to worked OK but keep changing between being smooth and stuttering. I'm assuming this is because my Radeon card isn't being detected properly? Are there additional changes I should make to the bottle beyond what the cross tie does?

The long wait at the loading screen is known issue - the wait time should decrease by quite a bit in subsequent launches (though the next time you get a big patch the following session will have a really long loading wait...)

Much of the rest of your problems boil down the radeon card, most likely. STO in Crossover will almost always report that it doesn't detect the card properly, this isn't too much of an issue. More of an issue is the historical weakness of the ATI Mac drivers when compared to the same card in a windows OS, or comparable NVidia products. We've basically always had more graphical management problems with ATI drivers in Crossover because the support for openGL extensions is not as good.

Personally, I'd stay away from tweaking the bottle too much, and rather focus your efforts on the in-game graphics (namely, lowering them) to achieve greater stability. If you're feeling adventurous you might try tweaking the "useGLSL" setting in the registry, though this is kind of a shot in the dark.

To get there, go to

Programs>Run Command>[select STO bottle]>type "regedit">click run

Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D

if "Direct3D" does not exist, add it as a new key.

Within "Direct3D", add "useGLSL" as a new string value, and try setting it to "enabled". Close, and then try running STO. If this has no effect (or a detrimental effect), try "disabled".

OK thanks - will try the registry entries.

I've often found that there are games that work fine on Nvidia cards in Wine that don't work correctly on AMD/ATI cards.

It's a double edged sword as for native OS X Mac titles the AMD cards tend to have better drivers!

Is there anyway of logging the bugs and requesting that the AMD Mac team take a look at fixing them? From the interviews I've read the team seem quite focused on doing a good job.

I'm honestly not sure how "public" the process is when it comes to ATI. I'll ask someone with a bit more knowledge to weigh in.

Hi,

ATI(or rather AMD) is fixing their drivers if we report a specific bug, but it is a slow process. A "specific bug" means that we have a sequence of OpenGL calls that produce an incorrect result, like bad rendering, a crash or abysmal performance. For those bugreports I write a small C program that reproduces the problem without any Wine involvement. A generic problem like "performance is worse than on Windows" might be fixed by performance tuning that doesn't focus on specific apps.

For some example bugreports for the Linux AMD GPU driver see
http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6
http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=34
The testcases are attached to the bug.

I have similar examples for OSX bugs(all GPUs), but the Apple Radar bugtracker is not public(really bad IMHO). It takes a while until Apple fixes the bugs, in part because GPU drivers are linked to the relatively slow OSX system updates. Also they don't fix bugs for old versions(Snow Leopard and earlier) and it appears that they don't care about old hardware like the Radeon X1600 GPU(first gen Macbook Pro, white iMacs). A bugreport I filed recently got closed with something like "we're closing this bug report because we're aware of it". That's OKish - after all AMD stopped updating the Windows and Linux drivers for those GPUs a few years ago. On Linux Mesa support for those GPUs is improving constantly(r300g), and with Mesa I can fix the bugs myself if it's a priority.

Regarding CrossOver/Wine performance in general: On Single-core CPUs we're pretty competitive with Windows, but on Multi-Core CPUs Windows moves big parts of the D3D work to a different thread. That way it utilizes two cores even if the application is single threaded and is roughly twice as fast as Wine. OSX has a feature like that too - if you want to experiment with it you can use the OpenGL profiler(part of Xcode afaik), attach it to the running game and force on multithreaded opengl. This may or may not improve performance. In my testing it gave only a modest improvement and caused crashes in many games, so we're not turning it on ourselves. After Wine 1.4 we plan to implement a worker thread ourselves, in part because we need it for d3d11 support. Once we have that we're hopefully competitive with Windows on machines with more than one CPU too.

The useGLSL setting Jack suggested usually improves performance by about 10%(depending on the driver), but it does not support Shader Model 3.0 except on Nvidia GPUs.

Well it turns out GLSL was already enabled so I guess the CrossTie must have done that. The game is a lot smoother on the low graphics settings so I guess we just need to wait for AMD to fix the bugs (please keep logging them all) so that the features of 5870 are taken advantage of. It will look a lot better with FSAA which hopefully won't be far away if the next Crossover Games is based on Wine 1.4 :)

I installed ST:O from the crosstie with no issues on my 3.06Ghz iMac running 10.6.8.

I also have the long loading times. I did not change any of the graphics settingsfrom default and so far gameplay is pretty good. I do have occasional crashes.

This game takes over the whole computer and I can't even cmd-tab into other apps. Is there a way I can fix that? Also when the game crashes I can't get back ot the Mac OS and have to reboot.

Thanks!

Normally if it is just the application or Wine that has crashed you can use command Q to get out of Crossover Games or failing that command, alt (option), escape pressed twice.

In the past with other games in Crossover I have had a window server crash which did need a hard reboot (unless you have remote access to your Mac to restart the Window server). This I assume was due to bugs in the graphics drivers being triggered by the game.

Thanks I'll try those. I've noticed that the majority of crashes happen during a transition, I'm docking at the earth spacedock, entering a solar system, etc.....

M Wilson wrote:

Normally if it is just the application or Wine that has crashed you
can use command Q to get out of Crossover Games or failing that
command, alt (option), escape pressed twice.

In the past with other games in Crossover I have had a window server
crash which did need a hard reboot (unless you have remote access to
your Mac to restart the Window server). This I assume was due to
bugs in the graphics drivers being triggered by the game.

Things were working well...until.... I was clicking on something near the upper right corner and what looked like a windows fullscreen/minimize button set came up and I clicked on the big button. I dropped down to windowed mode and nothing I've tried makes it go back. It doesn't look or run as well in windowed mode. Help!

Thanks!

I run whenever possible in windowed mode. What I did was enter in the bottle manager for each bottle that needs it (aka, crashy when not used), click on the control panel tab, run "Wine Configuration".

Now this is where the fun begins :D

Click on the "Graphics" tab.

Click the bottom three checkboxes in the top portion, Decorate, Control, and Emulate (shorthanding it).
For the resolution that we will emulate - use your native resolution your desktop uses. In my case its 1920x1080. Whatever you are using, plop that in there.

Hit Apply, then OK.

Restart the bottle just in case, by clicking on the tab "Bottle" and clicking "Quit Bottle".

You can then safely use windowed mode, ALT-TAB out of the game without crashiness. Now, I do this on any game that gives me grief using whatever the Crosstie or standard bottle settings normally have for me. I don't fix what ain't broken :D

STO is one of them I did this to. I forget offhand, since its been a long time since I had to muck with this, but IIRC, the game could act up a bit when switching resolution and FS/Win mode. If it does try to quit out of the game gracefully to have it save the settings. Otherwise you can manually edit the config file:

For me:
/home/schotty/.cxgames/Star Trek Online 20111124/drive_c/Program Files/Cryptic Studios/Star Trek Online/Live/Localdata/Gameprefs.Pref

Note that this is for the live server, as opposed to either of the test servers by the "Live" directory.

HTH.
Andrew.

gshine wrote:

This game takes over the whole computer and I can't even cmd-tab
into other apps. Is there a way I can fix that?

STO defaults to a Fullscreen mode on initial install. But there are other options you can use. Once in the game, click on the Game Menu icon (the computer icon in HUD you can use to exit or change settings), select Options, then select the Video tab. You will see a Display Mode pulldown that allows Windowed, Fullscreen, or Windowed Maximized.

Using either of the Windowed settings will give you the ability to cycle to through other running programs or get to the Mac dock.

Steve

Emulating a virtual desktop, thus running in a window, has allowed me to recover from crashes more gracefully, but I've yet to see the bridge for more than a second. I will need to play around with the settings some more to see what is acceptable. I blame my ATI card.

My experience running STO under CX has been rather peculiar. At first, the game ran poorly, with low frame rates, even at lower resolutions and with many graphics settings turned down. It looked like I was playing a game from the early nineties, and performance was lousy. Maybe two weeks into STO, I was ready to give up on this game, and out of sheer curiosity I tried to up the settings to my iMac's native resolution (2560x1440), just to have one more look at "what could have been," so to speak. To my bewilderment—and delight—STO ran smoothly, and continued to do so even after I turned up various graphics settings, one by one, until now I'm running the game at settings comparable to what I would use in native apps, reducing merely things like extensive ground clutter and extreme environment viewing distance. I still get crashes when beaming into Sol Starbase, and on busy nights STO sometimes gives me the "Oops!" after my frame rates bog down in crowded planetary environments (such as Bajor) and then freeze entirely (not sure if that has to do with CX or the general bugginess of STO), but the game is now amazingly playable (and pleasant to look at). I'm not sure how to explain this. One possibility I see is that since STO downloads a lot of stuff as you play, overall performance improves dramatically after it has completed those processes.

In a word, hang in there. Your mileage may vary, but it's just possible that things will get better.