Mac version locks up

[rhinosaurus]

Loving the game, but I'm having a problem.

I have no idea what's causing it, but the game (playing without expansions running as far as I can tell, even though I have them) locks up at seemingly random points. Unfortunately, because I'm fullscreened, I can't seem to alt-tab or enter windowed mode (escape key is non-functional at this point). I can't click on anything or interact with the game at all. Of course, I can't make anything ELSE work either, including trying to access the "force quit" option, since the game seems to be blocking me from interacting with the OS.

This has resulted in me having to force a shutdown via the power button each time, which is at the top my "big no-no's" list.

I've tried searching for error logs and things but can't seem to locate them (or any advice on where to find them).

Appreciate any advice/help!

[rhinosaurus]

This is still happening a ton to me. I've got in on 5-minute auto-save so it isn't that bad.

I switched it to windowed mode and changed the resolution to full screen it, so I don't have to keep rebooting, but still.

[keith.lamothe]

Very sorry to hear about the troubles.  You aren't the only one with issues on the OSX side, but it does seem that the problems are relatively rare (at least if we count the number of people who bought the OSX version and the number of complaints).  The problem there is that we can't reproduce these freezes/crashes/etc on the macs we own (well, Chris owns, I don't have one).

Occasionally we'll see a problem on the windows side that was probably happening on both, but not be able to understand why it would be non-fatal on windows and system-completely-locked-up on OSX (incidentally, we're not doing anything nor can we do anything to block your keypresses from getting to the OS; I'm much more used to keypresses being held back by the OS from getting to the game).

Anyway, the error logs will be in the RuntimeData subdirectory of the game's directory, and are all .txt files.  If you find any and can post them, that would be a big help.

[rhinosaurus]

Well, it looks like the system itself wasn't being locked up, just that fullscreen mode was preventing me from accessing the OS. This happens in a ton of games, not sure of why. Either way, I got around that one with the windowed mode being modified to a resolution to basically fill the screen. This way I still have access to my menu bars and alt-tabbing, so when the game freezes, I can force quit it.

As for the RuntimeData subdir... where can I find that, given that I bought the game through Steam? I'll run a search for that folder through spotlight when I get home if there's no response by then, but it'd be easier to know what the exact filepath is to get there. I poked around inside ~/library/app support/ and the steam directories but didn't see anything.

Game is bloody awesome though. Had a ton of fun on my easy difficulty intro campaign.

[keith.lamothe]

I honestly don't know where steam installs itself on a mac, but on my windows box the path is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\ai war fleet command\RuntimeData

So if you can find steam, I imagine the relative path from there is similar

Very glad you like the game, I really hope we can figure out these apparently-rare OSX stability issues soon, for your sake and others.

[rhinosaurus]

Cheers, will see if I can find a similar path when I get home this afternoon.

[rhinosaurus]

Hope these help...

edit:

In addition to those, this localization error was present:

10/31/2010 10:42:39 PM
-----------------------------------MISSING LOCALIZATION:Carrier

[Signata]

I get some crashing bugs too, but incidentally here is a trick for all you Mac gamers. When a game has full screen control and locks you out of Alt-Tab and so on, you can usually escape a crashed game with Opt-Cmd-Esc. Ordinarily this brings up the Force Quit dialogue so you can shut down locked up applications, but in full screen mode it will just terminate the application immediately and punt you back to the desktop.

Hopefully that will avoid a few reboots around here.

[rhinosaurus]

I get some crashing bugs too, but incidentally here is a trick for all you Mac gamers. When a game has full screen control and locks you out of Alt-Tab and so on, you can usually escape a crashed game with Opt-Cmd-Esc. Ordinarily this brings up the Force Quit dialogue so you can shut down locked up applications, but in full screen mode it will just terminate the application immediately and punt you back to the desktop.

Hopefully that will avoid a few reboots around here.

I've never once had this work with any application that has control via fullscreen. Usually if I can't alt-tab, opt-cmd-esc doesn't work either.

[x4000]

Possibly Apple-Q would work, but perhaps not.

[dumpsterKEEPER]

I've also had success with Opt-Cmd-Esc, and then tapping Enter a couple of times. In some situations, I believe that Opt-Cmd-Esc brings up the force quit dialog box but it's hidden behind the full-screen application. Hitting Enter causes it to select the buttons that kill the application. Depending on how heavily loaded your computer is at the time of the crash, it can take it a bit to respond as well.

[spate]

I've been getting this problem too; it's happened twice while trying to finish the last tutorial mission. It seems to happen after I've been playing for about an hour, and just as a song in the totally excellent included soundtrack ends. Poignant.

[Vampyre]

Hello all,

I just wanted to let you know that I've just encountered the problem... And it seems it was quite the same thing as spate. I was doing the tutorial mission (the last one), and I remember having a check at the watch on the upper left portion on the screen. Last time I checked it was about 58 minutes playtime. I didn't paid attention to the soundtrack, so I couldn't tell on that end. I was about to take over another planet, with a fleet of 421 ships (against a planet with 300 ships on the AI side) when it locked up totally, forcing me to force shutdown. I don't know if it saved in the demo (was trying to figure out if I would like the game, which was the case until it froze... :s), and I thus don't know if I could play where I left, or somewhere near...

I don't have the demo version out of steam, and it was quite easily that I found the logs. I found two logs, which I can post here. I hope this will give you a clue about what's going on, and maybe, a future patch :-)

Thanks for helping solving this out,

[keith.lamothe]

Thanks for letting us know, and posting those logs   The unhandledErrors.txt ones are already-fixed-stuff from version 4.0, which isn't even the latest official version at this point, but the other log had the dreaded pthread error from 4.021 which is more recent.  But it isn't the latest (which is 4.029) which does have some attempts to fix the threading issues (and I've seen fewer reports of them lately, though that may not mean they're happening less).

[resistor]

Thanks for letting us know, and posting those logs   The unhandledErrors.txt ones are already-fixed-stuff from version 4.0, which isn't even the latest official version at this point, but the other log had the dreaded pthread error from 4.021 which is more recent.  But it isn't the latest (which is 4.029) which does have some attempts to fix the threading issues (and I've seen fewer reports of them lately, though that may not mean they're happening less).

I'm still getting the pthread_getschedparam() error regularly, even after updating to 4.029.  Playing the game for more than half an hour or so pretty much invariably ends up triggering it.