Tabula Rasa Forum

As far as I can tell, I have ULL and TR set up correctly, based on the instructions in the other thread. I open a new shell in my tabula bottle, run ULL from there, and then Launch TR from ULL. I get a square logo loading screen, and a warning that my graphics card doesn't support vertex shaders 2.0 or pixel shaders 2.0 (I have the X1900, which runs WoW happily at full detail, but may not have the best DirectX 9 support since it's the Mac Pro-specific version of the card). I click through that, and a maximized X window opens up. I get about a half-second of audio (an intro movie, perhaps?), and then a near-complete UI lockup. I can move my mouse, and the computer is still accessible via SSH and HTTP, but the UI is shot. Logging in and killing the wine processes doesn't help. After about 5 minutes, the display goes to a plain Aqua background with the spinning "shutdown" lozenge wheel, and hangs (remote shell is still fine). ps wax reports that the WindowServer process is "trying to exit" (E).

I'm suspecting the answer is "your graphics card doesn't cut it", which would be sad since I can run LotRO and Orange Box via CXG just fine. Any ideas what I should check? Is there a configuration change that would tone the graphics down before it tries to bring the game up? How would I recover from this crash more cleanly?

Thanks.

I don't think it's the graphics card per se, but rather bugs in Apple's graphics drivers. Such a lockup of the Window Server should not happen, regardless of what CrossOver might try to do.

It's possible that a different brand of GPU would avoid the lockup because it would use a different driver. Similarly, an OS update might fix it someday (we hope!).

Is there a way to configure the video options for the game prior to launching it? Either a configuration file or command-line arguments? If so, try turning the video settings to their lowest to see if that avoids it. If so, you can test turning the settings up bit by bit.

To recover from the crash you can use your SSH session to do "sudo reboot" or "sudo shutdown -r now". It might still take a while to give up on the Window Server process exiting.

Lastly, you can help move issues like this up the list of Apple's priorities by filing feedback or a bug report (if you have a developer account with them). Check your system logs (using Console.app) for whatever details you can collect to help them diagnose the problem.

sudo reboot worked where sudo shutdown -r now did not.

I did try dialing all of the graphics settings in client.cfg down, but I still got the warning about my hardware not meeting the minimum requirements. The lockup happened at the same place, a split second into trying to play some kind of opening sound effect.

Nothing in particular showed up in Console; when I rebooted from the SSH session, the WindowServer said it was still fine in ps. That only showed up as exiting when I tried killing the wineloader processes.

I'm assuming that there's nothing I can do inside the bottle to make it happy with my graphics card, given that it works for HL2, LotRO, etc.?