CrossOver Support - Community Forums

So I had an earlier post, did tried some things decided that the post now needed to be a thread

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I'm not sure if this is the same problem, but I am having TF2 crash
at what seems haphazard intervals. Twice now it has crashed when the
voice says "The bomb is nearing the check point!". I have also had
it crash several other times but I have yet to notice a pattern. I
have only had this problem in 7.2 crossover games, but I did not
have it in the my old version (7.0.1 i think).

My comp spec are
MacBook pro
OS: 10.5.6
processor 2.4 GHz intel core 2 Duo
Memory 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Video card: NVIDIA 8600M GT

I have tried changing the graphics settings but there was no
difference.

So now I got a 7.1.1 demo version (could not find the archives so I could back update) and I ran into a similar problem with that one, after about 2.5 hours the game crashed for no real reason. Ill post any new things I find in this thread.

try adding:
-dxlevel 90 to the team fortress 2 launch options.

beware that this makes the resolution go very low therfore add: -w xxxx -h xxx to the launch options.(x is a number for example for 1280 x 800 resolution type: -w 1280 -h 800)

I dont think this is a fix. If it is a memory leak then setting the resolution really low would just make the symptoms appear at a later interval. If they are already not appearing till 3+ hours in then reducing graphics settings could make this appear at 5 or 6 hours out

Master_Drow is right about this. The memory leak is in the game, and as it seems to me it is independent of the settings.

However, the leak is pretty small, I think 4kb/sec. I have a patch for the release that avoids vertex buffer caching unless it is really necessary. TF2 creates an impressive amount of vertex buffers(~100 MB of data), so this change will save around this amount. This will probably delay the crash long enough so most users won't see it any longer.

I'm also getting frequent crashes after upgrading to 7.2 (Crossover Games). It happens around every 15 minutes or so, sometimes a bit less. My Mac's specs are very similar to the OP's. Man, this is really getting on my nerves. I get all set up (Engineer!), and bam - sound repeats, Steam window appears in front of a black screen.

If you are crashing way too often then you can lower the graphics settings. This will make the crashes happen later. For example at my standard settings I can get about 45 to 60 minutes before a crash.

A note for the advocates here: My memory reduction patch is in the tip right now, so the nightly builds might work better. I don't know if we switched the cxgames nightlies back to the tip. If we didn't, the CrossOver Office nightlies might have it. If the nightlies help with this problem I'd be certainly interested to hear.

Thanks for the updates, Stefan. I can't tell you how happy I am to see the support and work you guys put into this software. Anyway, I lowered my resolution from 1680x1050 widescreen down a notch or two (can't remember the res at this moment) and it seemed to delay the crashes a bit, but not by more than a few minutes - frustrating, because the servers I play in are usually filled to capacity, so if you're booted, outta luck. That's besides the point :) I guess I could go a bit lower, but it's going to start looking like complete crap very very soon. Stefan, are you saying there are frequent "alpha/beta" updates that you put out? If so, I didn't know that. I'll take a look around. Looking forward to a fix or something for this - either from Valve, you guys, or both.

There are nightly builds available to advocates. They aren't released, they are just compiled and made downloadable automatically. So no promises given, they may not even start.

We also have unsupported releases, but we didn't put out any since CrossOver Games 7.2 since we've never had a build that was stable enough to justify shipping it.

I see - I think I'm going to avoid the nightly builds just because I'd rather not risk messing anything up. It's strange, I don't remember this crashing issue to be as bad in previous versions of Crossover Games - but it's good to know that you've (successfully?) been able to trim down the memory leak that TF2 has.

Well, we didn't trim the leak, we just trimmed the overall static memory usage by about 100MB(highest graphics). At a rough 4kb/sec leak, 100MB extra free memory buys you around 7 hour playtime before you get to the amount of memory used before.

CrossOver 7.2 chaches textures slightly more aggressively, so I think that's why the problem is worse than 7.1. But I did reproduce the same crashes in 7.1, for me they occur at approximately the same time.