City of Heroes Forum

I was getting frequent crashes when running CoH, sometimes needing a hard reset of the machine to recover. In particular, staying in Atlas Park for more than a minute would automatically cause the game to crash. I mentioned this in an earlier Linux thread, although I am running Crossover Games Mac.

Not being able to play the game for more than five minutes at a time got really frustrating. I decided to fiddle with the graphics settings to see if there were any options that were potentially causing the crashes and could be turned off or down. I made changes to the settings as follows:

Advanced Graphics Settings: Enabled

Particle Physics Quality: Medium
World Texture Quality: Medium
Character Texture Quality: Medium
World Detail: 80%
Character Detail: 100%
Max Particle Count: 50,000
Vertical Sync: Disabled
FSAA: Off
Shadows: Disabled
Use Geometry Buffers: Disabled
Anisotropic Filtering: Off
Texture Crispness: Smooth
Shader Quality: Low (No World Bumpmaps)
Water Effects: Low Quality

With these settings I have been able to play for at least 30 minutes without crashing, including crossing zones, and lingering and moving through Atlas Park for as long as I like. I will no doubt be giving this more of a test now that I don't have to restart, login and reload the game every few minutes, and I'll be able see just how long a session I can play.

I have had a couple of crashes when testing the settings, but the above settings offer a remarkable improvement over what I was experiencing with the default or augmented settings.

For reference, I am running at a resolution of 2560x1579 on a dual 2.8 GHz Quad-core Xeon Mac Pro with 2 GB RAM, and a 512 MB nVidia GeForce 8800 GT.

With the occasional crash also turning up when managing enhancements I am not entirely convinced the crashes are caused solely from graphics issues.

Because of this I also changed the audio setting from 'performance' to 'compatibility'.

With all these changes in effect I can play for over an hour without experiencing a crash, although they still occur occasionally.

what I've found is that in crossover games that there is no such thing as mapserver connection, it tends to hang the whole, game, however after issue 12 I haven't had as many crash issues. It could also be an issue with the internet connection, though unlikely as my windblows machine doesn't have the same issue.