Team Fortress 2 Forum

I'm not sure what changed over the past couple of weeks that would have caused this, but the number of crashes I've experienced while playing TF2 has risen dramatically. The only thing that I've recently changed with my computer is that I added 4GB of RAM (total 6GB). Even playing with the texture detail set to medium results in freezes/crashes within minutes (3-5).

Plus, instead of TF2 crashing to the desktop, I'm getting hard freezes. Force-quit won't work. I even tried to SSH into my machine from my laptop and kill the crashed processes unsuccessfully.

I ran my hardware through the Apple Hardware Test once (no problems) and I'm going to do it again this afternoon.

Anybody else experiencing any recently occurring problems?

Oh good, so it isn't just me.

The night before, I'd been crashing every couple of minutes into a game. I quit after a couple dozen tries, (Sometimes I got hard freezes just like Jason, a couple of lucky times the game just seemed to forcequit itself) and there was a notice of a steam update, so I figured why not, installed it, and went to bed.

Today I tried running the game and was shocked when it went fullscreen with the valve clip at the beginning (up till now I've been running it windowed with -novid) The screen went black before it hit the menu screen, however, and when I got out of the game I checked my launch options and all my commands have disappeared. No biggie, I thought, maybe the steam update erased them by accident I'll just replace them and be on my way. So I did and tried reopening the game but even thought the window popped up as normal the game never started. Just a black screen. Later, I reopened the launch options and it was wiped clean once more. I can't even get the game to start.

Now me, I haven't changed anything to my computer as of late. I haven't added anything to my computer that could possibly have changed my gaming experience beyond that one steam update recently. So what's going on?

Edit: on the suggestion of several people I am reinstalling Steam into a fresh bottle. Hopefully that will solve the unplayable games issue but I still would like to know what was causing the frequent crashes

FYI: I just ran another Apple Hardware Test on my computer to ensure there isn't a problem with my memory, using the in-depth test option. It came back with no faults.

Have either of you tried removing the clientregistry.blob file? This is general first thing to try fix when experiencing problems with Steam, it may save you a reinstall if it works.

Did you apply the 10.5.5 OS update? It's possible that that might have caused it.

Something must have changed. Unfortunately, there are a lot of moving parts. There's CrossOver Games, itself; the OS; and TF2 and the Source engine from Valve. Not to mention your hardware change.

Hard lockups like you describe can only really be due to bugs in the OS kernel or kernel-level software like the graphics drivers. It should not be possible for a user-level program like CrossOver to cause such a lockup. Using an admin account and the Console utility (/Applications/Utilities/Console.app), take a look at /var/log/system.log* and /var/log/windowserver.log. See if there are any messages in there which correspond to the system lockups.

Oh, and you've been experimenting with GLSL and DirectX 9 support. Have you tried disabling GLSL and/or passing -dxlevel 81 to TF2 once (i.e. backing off that experiment)?

I think we are all having problems - is there any work being done to bring CX Games up to the 10.5.5 update?

Reinstalling Steam allowed me to access my games again! However, the crashes seemed to be occurring more frequently, and even more often of the total lockup type where I can't access anything and have to force a shutdown. Today after another one of these, the same phenomenon I mentioned before happened to me again. Launch Options wiped and the game unable to progress beyond the valve startup video. Removing the clientregistry.blob did nothing.

My first steam meltdown occurred while using version 7.0, and the one just now with the most recent version of games 7.1.1

This is happening to all my steam games, by the way.

we can has update plz?

j/k :P

I haven't had a chance this week to play TF2 on CXGames until tonight. There was a Steam update. Not sure if it was related at all. But I did notice that stability improved. FYI: I was playing with medium textures.

Unfortunately, the game still crashed to the desktop after about 30 minutes.

Unfortunately, we don't yet know what's happening with this. So far, we haven't reproduced these issues in our testing.

The problem where Steam loses all of its settings is an issue we've seen before. When you power down the system after it has locked up, without a proper shutdown, the bottle's registry seems to get corrupted. When this happens, there's little recourse but to create a new bottle and reinstall Steam. You can avoid having to redownload all of your games by copying the steamapps folder from your old bottle to your new one after you've installed Steam:

~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver Games/Bottles/<bottle>/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps

In the meantime, can I ask that everybody who is having the problem list the following information: Mac model, GPU, OS version, CrossOver Games version, whether you've messed with the useGLSL registry settings or the -dxlevel launch option. If it happens with multiple configurations, please list them all.

Finally, as a possible temporary workaround, have you guys tried turning down the resolution and/or graphics settings to see if that affects the behavior?

Thanks for your patience.

Mac Pro - 2.8GHz 2xQuad-Xeon (Early 2008)
GeForce 8800GT 512 VRAM
OS X 10.5.5
CXGames 7.1.1

I had played a bit with the use GLSL for DX9 effects, but I reverted back to the original settings. In fact, after I started having problems, I completely deleted CXGames/Steam/TF2 and did a fresh re-install. Before, I could play with the texture detail set to Medium. But after the re-install, I still had some freezes/crashes. I was playing earlier today with the textures set to low for awhile and had no problems (was ugly though).

Any update on what is going on? Things are so bad (even on a fresh install) that I just stopped using Crossover to play TF2 altogether. Anyone get things working better?

Only one person provided the sorts of details we asked for. We need many people to report, those for whom it is working poorly and those (if any) for whom it's working well. Only those sorts of details from a significant number of users will allow us to detect patterns (like, it's good for folks with ATI graphics and bad for Nvidia).

Mac Book Pro 2.4 C2D 2 gigs of ram
GeForce 8600GT 256 VRAM
OS X 10.5.5
CXGames 7.1.1 (and before 7.0 I have tried both)

I tried with GLSL and it was awful so I deleted the bottle and tried (a few times) with new bottles using a fresh/normal install of Steam. Same issues.

15" MacBook Pro (the ones from this summer)
2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB RAM
512 MB GeForce 8600M GT
Mac OS X 10.5.4 (will update to 10.5.5 to see if problem persists)

I'm getting freezes that forcequit TF2 usually after all-blacking a variety of models. I'm playing with all settings at High or Very High where allowed, with normal reflections and no HDR (or similar effects).

The problems began occurring after I ran a -dxlevel 90 in Launch Options, found it to run not-as-smoothly and promptly went back to -dxlevel 81.

Regarding the black models, I've been led to believe that it's the game dropping textures. Whenever I change the texture detail in-game, all models are restored to the usual, until the problem occurs again.

I have to say, however, that up until my foolish foray into DirectX 9, TF2 was running absolutely beautifully (though the blood texture never seemed to load at all, giving me huge black squares whenever a character bled) and I admire the work you guys have done. Now I'm eagerly awaiting support for Left 4 Dead!

Did you try to remove the "-dxlevel 81" from the command line after switching back? Having it there makes the game behave slightly different.

I don't think the black models are related to lost textures; You can try to run mat_reloadallmaterials to try to restore all textures and restart the graphics engine. However, Linux users have reported this issue too, and I have never seen texture loss in the driver on Linux(but I did see it on macos, those bugs should be worked around though)

I'm one of the new users since the lame duck weekend, first of all I'd like to thank you for making something that makes it so that I can play Team Fortress without rebooting.

Unfortunately I've only been able to play every so often without the game crashing. Sometimes I will lose the entire application, but primarily the game itself crashes and I am left looking at the steam application. This seems to occur when there is a heavy server load and you get the famous old Half-Life stuttering sound bug. I started with the 7.1.0 build of Crossover Games and used it to download and install TF2 after I had installed Half Life Source from a steam archived backup. Not sure if you support that, but considering the lame duck weekend ended up being the same weekend that Fallout 3 came out I wasn't patient enough to wait for the entire engine to download as well as the game content. The only other issue I've noticed besides the crashes are missing textures when someone uses the ubercharge on my character.

iMac 2.4GHz
OS 10.5.5
2GB RAM
Radeon 2600HD Pro
Crossover Games version 7.1.1

Mac Pro - 2.6GHz 2xDual-Xeon (Original Mac Pro)
GeForce 8800GT 512 VRAM
OS X 10.5.5
CXGames 7.1.1

I'm one of the newcomers as well. I haven't tried messing with any settings, just running CrossOver Games as it came. TF2 crashes every 3-5 minutes back to Steam and is completely unplayable. Since I'm new I've never seen it run flawlessly to begin with. Started experiencing crashes after the very first install.

Hope you guys can fix this. thanks!

MacBook Pro C2D 2.4GHz
4GB RAM
256MB Geforce 8600M GT

Total system lockup tends to occur once every half hour. I have my graphics settings at moderate level, I can't say I've noticed it happening less often when I reduce them. Interestingly, it seems like the system is still partially functional. The mouse isn't frozen and unplugging my external hard drive caused it to unmount. Also when I left it alone for 15 minutes the screen shut off like it's set to. It seems like the Mac OS X windowserver crashed. Next time I run TF2 I'll keep an Activity Monitor window open to see if I can peg any huge use of system resources.

I've been having this problem too. I just bought The Orange Box on Steam, TF2 crashes after roughly 5 minutes of playtime. Portal and HL2 work (mostly) fine, however.

I'm another newcomer since lame duck event. Originally had crashes about once an hour which would freeze Crossover but still allow me to hide the app etc, the game would eventually quit back to Steam. In the past few weeks the crashes have been happening about every five minutes. Since first install I've also had the black models problem; with no apparent pattern some games/servers will have different models appear all black, or even portions of them (sometimes just the Sniper's face, sometimes everything on the Engineer but his hardhat, etc). I haven't tried changing DirectX or GLSL, not really familiar with them. If anyone could link me or give me a nutshell version of what to try regarding that I'd be grateful.

Macbook Pro 2.4GHz, 2GBram. GeForce8600M GT 256VRAM. Crossover 7.1.1

Jeremy Agostino, a crashed window server is the most common problem we're facing with graphics drivers. Usually the problem is triggered by a software rendering fallback. There seems to be a bug in the CPU shader optimization code(MacOS uses LLVM for that). That in turn causes an exception in the graphics driver which takes down the window server. The bug on the crossover side is that something causes a software fallback. The first bug on the mac side is that the software fallback corrupts memory. The 2nd bug is that a memory corruption in a 3D application can take down the window server.

I haven't been able to reproduce the black model problem so far. Is there any indication that it is related to the crashes? Does anyone see only one issue, but not the other?

If anyone wants to do some more debugging, you can start up the OpenGL profiler(it is part of Xcode I think), and attach it to the running Team Fortress 2(run TF2 in a window). The GL profiler can be set up to break on a software fallback. If there's any software fallback, then that's a bug in CrossOver.

I'll give that a try myself on my Mac, but it has an ATI card, not an nvidia one, and I've never seen crashes or black models so far :-/

(sorry for the double post =/ )

MacBook Pro (early 2008)
Mac OS X 10.5.5
2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo
4 GB RAM
nvidia 8600M GT, 512 MB VRAM
CX Games 7.1.1

Running TF2 in windowed mode, 1600x1000
These were problems I encountered without messing with GLSL in the reg or DX levels:

-Black textures (whole people/only faces/seemingly random would be all black)
-Invisible weapons (sometimes the weapon I was holding would be invisible...I could still use it but I just couldn't see it. Mainly occurred on class selection and item/character info screens)
-Scroll wheel didn't function normally
-Character's faces didn't have expressions or speak
-Voice chat seemed to lag when I was speaking
-Ubercharged people didn't have the 'shiny' effect (probably because of the lack of DX9)

It never crashed on me, and despite all of that, it was still playable. Not great, but certainly playable.

I then fooled around with enabling GLSL and doing dxlevel 90, which took away a lot of text and made characters unusually shiny.

Since that didn't really work too well, I reset it to dxlevel 81 but kept GLSL on in the registry.

...and to my amazement, the black/invisible textures were gone, and characters spoke and had expressions and stuff.

However, 10 minutes into my first game, it crashed to Steam for the first time. I reloaded it and played for another 30 or so just fine. The scroll wheel issue was still present, though.

I can go into more detail if you want, but there ya go, hope it helps. I'd be willing to run some test/configs/CPU monitors if you want.

Macbook Pro 2.4Ghz 4Gb Ram (Late 2008)
Nvidia 9600M
OS X 10.5.5
CXGames 7.1.1

I'm getting the crashing at the death cam. Only the game crashes. Counter-Strike Source runs fine.

TF 2 crashes on me whenever I try to join a server or open up the Character Info and Set Up screen; it just goes POOF. I have GLSL off and I don't really want to mess around with DirectX 9.0c though I have the installer downloaded, but I am not going to do anything with it just yet. Half-Life 2 and CS:S work perfectly fine and my sound acceleration is set to Basic. Also, I have some nasty audio looping going on

MacBook Pro
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 Gigs of Ram
GeForce 8600M GT
10.4.11
Crossover Games 7.1.1

I just changed my setup. My main setup is now a MacBook Pro 2.8GHz (Unibody) - 4GB RAM - Nvidia 9400M/9600M GT. I installed CXGames 7.1.1 and Team Fortress 2 to see how it played on the new machine. With the 9600M GT enabled, I crashed into the BSOD within 5 minutes of game time. Didn't look good.

However, the 10.5.6 OS X update came out today. After updating, I was able to play for a good three hours at the default settings (resolution set to 1440 x 900). So, try the 10.5.6 update and see if it fixes any of your problems.

EDIT: Never mind; turns out I had one of the faulty 9600M GT GPUs. Apple is in the process of replacing my computer as we speak.

I tried playing again after the update, and the crashing still happens...but I am playing windowed mode at 1280x800

I was able to do some testing on a MacBook Pro with an Nvidia GeForce 8600M. Mac OS X 10.5.5 (not yet upgraded to 10.5.6). CrossOver Games 7.1.2.

I was able to reproduce the black models, the crashes out to Steam, and the Window Server lockup.

I have a theory about the latter. I think it has to do with the drawing of Leopard's translucent menu bar. Has anybody experienced the Window Server lockup (essentially the whole GUI locks up until you reboot) who didn't have the translucent menu bar enabled? If you've been experiencing the lockup with any regularity, try disabling the translucent menu bar on the Desktop tab of the Desktop & Screen Saver pane of System Preferences.

The black models for me were limited to the Spy's body, the Spy's knife when playing that character, and rarely some other weapons. In fact, the only other thing I saw for sure was an engineer's toolbox, once. If you get the black models, it might be worthwhile to go into the advanced video settings and change them (most likely the texture detail level). This will force the game to reload the textures. At least, it seemed to do that in my testing. Please report if it works for you guys. And, yes, I know that's not a real workaround, it's just something to try. It might even be informative to Stefan.

Unfortunately, I don't have any more insight into the crashes, yet.

Hey I've had the translucent menu bar off for ages and I'm not getting any errors running TF2 in 10.5.6 on my Macbook Pro with GeForce 8600M 256MB. Things are seeming to run a tiny bit laggier though, but this might be due to the new graphical updates of the game.

I just tried playing with the transparent menubar off, and no crashes!

I'm on my second MacBook Pro with the 9400M/9600M GT GPUs. I'm still having issues with the 9600M GT GPU. Sometimes it crashes and sometimes it plays fine. I've noticed that if it's going to work without the Black Screen of Death, then the fans kick on and spin at about 5,000 - 6,000 RPM. If not, the fans won't spin up and the game will crash rapidly to the Black Screen of Death. I think it's an issue with the graphics driver for the 9600M GT, possibly a hardware issue. I couldn't say for sure. I will have to contact Apple support. In the mean time, I guess I'll be using smcFanControl.

The game plays great though when it plays. I still have random crashes to the desktop, but I also have some of the details turned up. I've been experimenting.

Also, as a side note: I've also gotten facial animations to work in TF2 consistently and without any other defects or problems. I enabled the "useGLSL" registry key, but I did not pass the "-dxlevel 90" or anything else under the launch options. It's awesome!

Well, I guess I spoke too soon. Still some crashing :(

Cirdan, there's a distinction between the game abruptly exiting back to Steam vs. your whole system locking up. My theory about the translucent menu bar was only to avoid the latter. I don't yet have a workaround for the former. Can you clarify which you mean by "crashing"? Thanks.

Ah...ok. I am talking about just the game crashing.

Disabling the transparent menubar has indeed stopped the crashes for me. Team Fortress 2 ran nearly 6 hours without problems.

I haven't had TF2 lock up my entire computer (except for the 9600M GT bug, but that's another problem and it's mitigated with smcFanControl2), but it crashes back to Steam often -- though the details are turned up. I may try later with the shaders turned down.

Gah... here's the thing...

If I turn up my texture detail to "High," the game crashes intermittently (usually 15-30 minutes) back to Steam.

If I turn down my texture detail to mitigate the crashing issue, I run into the tracking issue and my ability to aim left or right in the game is handicapped.

I'm really hoping there is a fix coming soon. 😕

Disabling the translucent menu bar unfortunately doesn't prevent TF2 from locking my machine within a few minutes of gameplay...

MBP 2,3GHz
ATi X1600
OS X 10.5.6
CX Games 7.1.1 & 7.1.2

Hi,

We have a new cxgames beta out since a few days. Can the advocates in who see this problem test the new beta? So far we have no TF2 reports indicating anything on this issue.

Thanks,
Stefan

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Hi,

We have a new cxgames beta out since a few days. Can the advocates
in who see this problem test the new beta? So far we have no TF2
reports indicating anything on this issue.

Thanks,
Stefan

Downloaded the beta -- Steam works fine. Launched TF2 and received a black screen with audio on launch.

Jason Kelsey wrote:

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Hi,

We have a new cxgames beta out since a few days. Can the advocates
in who see this problem test the new beta? So far we have no TF2
reports indicating anything on this issue.

Thanks,
Stefan

Downloaded the beta -- Steam works fine. Launched TF2 and received a
black screen with audio on launch.

Nevermind. Reinstalled Steam and TF2 from backup. Works now.

Initial impressions: so far, so good. No crashes with the details turned up. I'll do some more "testing" later.

I've also done some testing with TF2. So far it hasn't crashed the WindowServer even with the transparent menubar enabled. I also haven't gotten any of the intermittent crashes of Team Fortress 2 itself. I've left the graphics settings at their defaults, with the exception of increasing the resolution slightly and enabling windowed mode.

Thanks for those reports. Sounds good.

I don't know if folks are still encountering the black player models. If so, we have a test build of CrossOver Games which may solve that. If you're experiencing this problem, please go to http://dl.codeweavers.com and enter access code "cxgames_nosrgb" (without the quotes). Give that a try and please report whether or not it fixes the black models problem.

Also, for folks who don't otherwise have access to our beta, this should be comparable. So you guys can test for the crashing problems with this build, too.

Thanks.