Introversion

Pattern Buffer has been a significant challenge for me since I seem to have problems with Armour and Officers. Particularly when I right-click to transform Armour or use an Officer, my machine crashes hard (the screen freezes) and I can't even force-quit. The 1.2.2 update has not remedied the problem.

Incidentally, when the level crashes, the sound keeps going for a time until I try to force quit. It's weird.

Any ideas? Thanks.

-Allin

Try resetting the level; if that doesn't work, then try creating a new profile, and playing through again.

Can't even force quit? That is impressive. How are you killing the application? restart? logging out, then back in again? kill -9? I ask this, because if you are using the last option, it implies that you know what the command line is, which might make things a bit easier.

I assume that if you are force quitting, then you are not gettinga blackbox file, da? (located in ~/, and called blackbox.txt). If you are getting a blackbox, post it. Also, try the following:

Find Terminal.app (it should be in /Applications/Utilities), and fire that up. At the prompt:


It should spit out several lines of text, and launch Darwinia. Once it has done that, play Darwinia as you normally would, and if/when it crashes, look to see if anything has been outputted to the terminal. You might be able to find the same information by running Console.app, and looking through the logs, but I have honestly never tried that.

Also, what are your system specs. iMac? PowerBook? MacMini? RAM? video card? proc speed? &c.

One other idea -- if you are using a Mac, the default settings are to use a one-button mouse. From my experience, a two-button mouse will work with the default setup, but can behave oddly at times. Find ~/Library/Application Support/Darwinia/full/preferences.txt, and set ControlMouseButtons = 2 (the default on Macs is 1).

At any rate, I am kind of stabbing in the dark on this one. Let me know if anything comes of these suggestions.

xander

xander-

I am familiar with the terminal. However, I can't even get the crashed Darwinia out of full screen (remember when fullscreen games locked up in OS9? It's like that.) The ONLY way I've been able to get out of it is a hard restart or shutdown. Like I said, Force Quit only stops the sound from the game, but doesn't actually make it go away. I can't Command-Tab to switch applications, or anything else that I've tried. Maybe I should try to crash it in windowed mode to see what happens...

The machine is a Powerbook G4 Titanium 800Mhz with 512Megs of RAM. It used to bog down too much to play on the later levels, but the patch helped a lot.

-Allin

kahrlmetalworks wrote:xander-

I am familiar with the terminal. However, I can't even get the crashed Darwinia out of full screen (remember when fullscreen games locked up in OS9? It's like that.) The ONLY way I've been able to get out of it is a hard restart or shutdown. Like I said, Force Quit only stops the sound from the game, but doesn't actually make it go away. I can't Command-Tab to switch applications, or anything else that I've tried. Maybe I should try to crash it in windowed mode to see what happens...

The machine is a Powerbook G4 Titanium 800Mhz with 512Megs of RAM. It used to bog down too much to play on the later levels, but the patch helped a lot.

-Allin

Ah... I see. That is weird. I would suggest trying to ssh in and kill it, but that seems like to much work for not enough payoff.

Let me know what happens in windowed mode -- that was going to be my next suggestion.

Also, did changing the ControlMouseButton setting do anything, or did it still crash?

Does Darwinia output anything useful to the logs? (either fire up Console.app, or look through the latest logs located in /Library/Logs/Console/ )

Also, in addition to trying windowed mode, what do different screen resolutions do in non-windowed mode?

Really, I am just throwing out ideas here. In all honesty, I am at a total loss to explain the behavior of Darwinia. Mayhaps we can puzzle this out...

xander

kahrlmetalworks wrote:xander-

I am familiar with the terminal. However, I can't even get the crashed Darwinia out of full screen (remember when fullscreen games locked up in OS9? It's like that.) The ONLY way I've been able to get out of it is a hard restart or shutdown. Like I said, Force Quit only stops the sound from the game, but doesn't actually make it go away. I can't Command-Tab to switch applications, or anything else that I've tried. Maybe I should try to crash it in windowed mode to see what happens...

Holding down cmd-opt-esc should force any app to quit, even if it's full screen. This makes me think Darwinia may be triggering some sort of crash in the OS. Getting that console information, and trying it in windowed mode could be helpful.

Not always true... I remember stress testing the betas, and it would just lock, and not responde to anything.

It was unpredicitable as far as when it did it, however, so maybe it's not the same bug?