City of Heroes Forum

COH/COV launches and gets to login screen now! also will run in instances (such as Hospital, Bases, Rickti Warzone Vangaurd Base) but not in the general ZONES, is a HUGE improvement over previous versions however. should be moved to Bronze almost silver.

Sorry but the launch screen works but when you get to the login screen it's completely blank and the mouse cursor is screwed up. I haven't tried putting the compatible argument in the launch string of the shortcut yet to fix the mouse.

Also, when you click the next button to start the game after the launch screen, you get an error message stating: 'You card or driver doesn't support GN_NV_vertex_program'.

Just downloaded the Trial, after the typical wait of d/l and install it launched fine. I had to turn the graphics all the way down because of low fps at 1024x768, but once I did that it was very smooth. The only major problem I found is the point-and-click with the mouse is...flakey. On some things it works just fine (selecting chat box, clicking "do you want to exit now?" button, dragging options sliders), other things such as activating or dragging powers from the power tray, selecting inspirations, or trying to switch between server and global friends lists, were non-functional. I suppose this is related to the standard DirectInput mouse problems, but this is such a huge step forward from 6.0 I'm not griping too loudly.

In terms of score, I'd give it a Bronze at least, but it probably really deserves a Silver because of the universality of the mouse problems

Oh yeah, 2.0ghz Core Duo MBP/1GB RAM/128MB ATI X1600/OS 10.5.2

What were your settings? How'd you get past the blank login screen? I'm using a 2.0 MBpro 17" with 4 GB RAM running 10.5.3. I can't get it to work at all and I get that error message after hitting the agree button to the EULA.

for me I'm using a 1.83 core duo 1.5 gb of ram running 10.5.2 using ATI radeon x1600 128 mg of memory. I need to make sure I have a toon that is in the hospital etc. so I can chane the options and see if I can change the info. I will do so today. and see if I can go to the zones. I also say I can set up the zones. I also work for Apple.

Rand Neilson wrote:

I also work for Apple.

I shamelessly take the chance to lobby a bit here: It seems that this game requires GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array, which some MacOS drivers do not support, notably the GMA950 one. I'll file a feature request in Radar later, I just thought I'd lobby a bit 😊

I doubt this will work but I was going to try and install the OpenGL drivers from NVidia since my MBpro uses the GeForce 8600M GT 256 MB. No matter what I do I can't get past the screwed up mouse and completely black login screen. Is there something I have to set in the Wine configuration within the bottle?

You can't install the Windows drivers in CrossOver. The drivers require direct access to the hardware, and MacOS has exclusive control over it, so CrossOver has to use MacOS' drivers

Was worth a try. I figured I could copy some of the drivers. Thanks though. Hey, does the error message I'm getting:

You card or driver doesn't support GL_NV_vertex_program

Is that the same type of error you were describing earlier?

Yes, it is the same sort of error. Although it puzzles me a bit more. This extension is supported on Nvidia cards, and the game should not depend on it because it is a Nvidia specific extension. ATI cards do not have it. It might be that the game thinks that you have an Nvidia card that doesn't have the extension it requires, ie, it misdetects an ATI card as Nvidia. This is could happen because MacOS uses different GL_VENDOR strings than Windows, and it is really a game bug if a detection like that goes bad: The GL_VENDOR string must not be used for any sort of capability detection because there are no rules how it should look.

That would make sense if I had an ATI card. But I have an NVidia GeForce 8600M GT video card with my MacBook Pro 17". If you want I can copy my system parameters from the profiler.

The most important thing I found was: Do not touch the mouse or keyboard until the login screen is fully rendered! And its corollary: When loading into a zone, do not touch the mouse or keyboard until the toon is fully visible!

However CoH renders the cursor arrow, it does it in a very strange way (when you see what the arrow looks like you'll understand). If it moves while Crossover is trying to intercept the graphics calls, it gets confused and hangs...at least that what I found after a couple hours of repeated testing.

okay using the ATI cards (tried a couple of computers here at work) COH is running just don't touch the keyboard or mouse until you see your character! however I have found that it works spotty at best on the GeForce computers, got one to run no problems, the other not so much. the Drivers are VERY different for mac and crossover is dependent on the mac drivers right now. however some of the other games that use similar driver (styles?) are working so hopefully it can be something that is over come in the next few releases.

Okay another update. in addition to running at 1078 x 879 default, can update the graphics in options to desktop (choosing what it thinks the desktop is (1440 x 879) for my 17" imac here at work, also allows full access to the dock and all applications, for some reason the default and max resolution 1440 x 900 disables all of this. still not ready to go to silver because of the Nvidia issue, however if you have an ATI card, the game is dang close to gold.

I can't even get into the game to set the resolution. No matter what I do, after the launcher, I get a black screen, I hear the music, the mouse cursor is all screwed up and I can't do anything. If I guess where the quit button is I get lucky and am able to quit out. Otherwise all I See is a completely black screen that I can't even Command-Tab out of.

the issue is the NVIDIA drivers, I've tried on an Imac 24" that also uses NVIDIA, same issue, as along as the machine is using the ATI or intel GMA/x1300 drivers it plays just fine (the Intel chipsets not so grand but playable) something about the way that the NVIDIA drivers deliver video that the current version just can't seem to over come, hopefully newer versions will clear up this glitch.

Cool, thanks Rand. Sorry if I was repeating myself previously. I guess I wasn't understanding what was being referred to. I love my MBpro. This is the first computer in years that I bought in Oct and am still excited and treat it like it's brand new. Really I can't wait to remove my bootcamp partition and just create a virtual disc for use with Office 2007 (since I don't want to buy Office 2008 for mac and I already had 2007). I'm sure it's almost there. =) Code Weavers is doing great work on the WINE project. I'm impressed with how the project has progressed so far.

Hi,

I just got a reply from Apple on the GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array issue. Basically they say that no graphics card supports this any more, but the ATI and Nvidia driver still advertise the extension for compatibility reasons. Apparently not only Windows Apps are affected by this issue.

GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array is a pure performance optimization extension. It offers only two simple functions, which do not affect the rendering result. So it should be safe for us to pretend support for the extension, and offer a dummy implementation which just does nothing. That should make City of Heroes happy on GMA 950 MacBooks.

I will look into the GL_NV_vertex_shader problems on Nvidia cards. I am pretty sure this extension is supported on MacOS as well, so it puzzles me that the game complains. Maybe it wants a completely different extension, but the error message is wrong.

Cool Thanks Stefan:
This will be very cool once we can get CoX to run on Mac. I don't know why NCSoft doesn't want to support Mac like Blizzard did but it's a Korean company so they might not have the Macintosh pull that other countries do.

Until recently, NCSoft had no direct control over the development of City of Heroes/Villains. They've been ramping up the staffing of CoX, but I can't imagine they'd be able to look at cross platform development in the near term, as they have a long backlog of game-specific development to focus on.

The future may hold more from the dev team on this subject, but we're almost certainly better off laying our trust in teams like Codeweavers and the core Wine team.

True, well I guess I should have been more specific. I wish Cryptic developed a mac port. Especially now that there are so many tools available that don't require a code rewrite to port a PC to a Mac executable. I hope NCSoft will be motivated to do a mac port or hire a couple developers to port CoX to the Mac side of the force.