CrossOver Support - Community Forums

natural selection is a half life mod and i don't know how to make it an icon in my dock. can someone help me?

On a Mac go to the Programs menu, Run Command, pick the bottle containing Natural Selection, browse to the .exe, and then hit the Create Shortcut button at the bottom of the window.

On Linux it's the same process using the Run Command app.

Thanks, but the only bottle i have is winxp. how can i do that?

Anthony Worcester wrote:

Thanks, but the only bottle i have is winxp. how can i do that?

If you only have a "winxp" bottle and the mod is installed than it's in the winxp bottle. That's just the default name added to bottles that are of the Windows XP variety.

Okay, so i use that bottle and browse to find what file name? i clicked the folder steam steamapps half life and then ns. ns is the natural selection folder but what file should i look for?

anyone?

please help me.

Can you launch it? Once launched, does an icon appear on your doc? If so, right click that icon and select 'keep in dock'.

lmao noooo it doesnt! sorry, but like 4 people asked me the same question when i asked it somewhere else. when i launch it, no icon appears.

This is a game run under Steam, right?

When you install a game under Steam, it asks if you want to create a Start Menu shortcut. If you tell it do that, then you will get a launcher mini-application for that game in your Programs menu and in ~/Applications/CrossOver Games. You can drag that to the Dock.

Strangely, Steam only offers you the chance to create a Start Menu shortcut when the game is installed. You can't do it later, at least that I've found. (It lets you create a desktop shortcut at any time, but not a Start Menu shortcut.)

A workaround may be to archive/backup the local game files, using the feature built into Steam. Then, delete the local game files, also from within Steam. Then, try restoring from the backup. I've never tried this, but I'm guessing that Steam offers you another opportunity to create a Start Menu shortcut at this time.

There is a wrinkle with using CrossOver's launcher mini-applications, though. When you launch one of those, it then runs the corresponding Windows program. The launcher stays running, and thus in the Dock, for so long as the Windows program and any other program that it launches stays running.

That means that there's a single Dock icon for a whole group of processes. In the case of Steam, assuming you launched it with the Steam launcher, then there's just the one Steam icon representing Steam and all of the games launched within Steam.

Suppose you have a launcher mini-application for Natural Selection (you asked Steam to create a shortcut for it in the Start Menu when you installed it). Let's suppose that Steam is already running. If you then launch the Natural Selection launcher, it shows up in the Dock, but it doesn't stay there very long. That's because of the way Steam works. The Natural Selection launcher runs a Windows program, but that doesn't do anything other than convey the request to the already-running instance of Steam. Once the request is conveyed, the program exits. (It does the same thing on Windows. The Natural Selection shortcut only conveys the request to Steam.) Since Steam was already running, and is already represented by the Steam Dock icon, when Steam handles the request by launching Natural Selection, the new process is also under the "umbrella" of the existing Steam icon in the Dock.

Now suppose that Steam was not already running. When you launch the Natural Selection launcher, it has to launch Steam in order to convey the request to it. Now, Steam is running under the umbrella of the Natural Selection Dock icon. In this case, there will be no Steam icon in the Dock. The Natural Selection Dock icon will remain, not just for however long you play Natural Selection, but for as long as you keep Steam running. If you run any other games from Steam during that time, they will also be under the umbrella of the Natural Selection icon. You will have to fully exit Steam in order for that Natural Selection icon to leave the Dock or go "inactive".

This is weird. Every other game i have the option to do what you said, but not with Natural Selection. I can't back up the game files and reinstall them.

When i go to properties theres nothing there either.

Maybe because it's a mod? Perhaps all of the required files are actually part of other dependency packages?

If you can tolerate the tedium, you can remove the local files and then re-install Natural Selection from scratch. (Warning: I have no idea if Natural Selection saves games, characters, etc. or whether those saved things will survive the remove/re-install process. You can manually back stuff up from the ~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver Games/Bottles/<bottle name>/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps folder if you're concerned.)

Hi guys,

I can clarify some of this for you....

Natural Selection is a third party mod ... this is different from a mod
installed directly via Steam itself (for instance smashball, diprip..)
HalfLife mods are also different from HalfLife2 (Source) mods in many
ways....one of the main differences is that HL1 mods all rely on the
same, single hl.exe file contained in your HL1 Steam installation. In
effect, HL1 mods are launched as a commandline extension/option to the
hl.exe file....ie; hl.exe -game ns ....the executable looks in the HL1
installdir for the 'ns' directory, and loads it's wad files/configs from
that location. Natural Selection will install in ;

~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver Games/Bottles/<bottle name>/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/[steam_username]/half-life/ns

As far as I know, all HL1 mods install underneath the the base HalfLife installdir.
Also, that said, most all HL1 mods keeps their saved games/files in the 'SAVE' directory
underneath the mod installdir...ie;

~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver Games/Bottles/<bottle name>/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/[steam_username]/half-life/ns/SAVE

Any saved games etc will be in that directory - this is the part you may want to keep/archive.
That said, removing a mod such as Natural Selection from the Steam bottle using the Add/Remove
function in cxsetup, will remove the mod files but should leave the 'ns' and 'SAVE' directories
in tact. You cannot backup, get properties and anything else like that in Steam with these kinds
of mods. I don't know what the dock's purpose is in OSX, but if it's just a launcher bar, it may
be possible to create your own launcher for such a thing (but I don't know how, I use linux ;)

I doubt an icon will appear when you launch such a mod (and if any icon did appear, it would
probably be referring back to the hl.exe file, as there is no 'ns.exe' to associate with).

Hope this helps...

Cheers!

I didnt want to comment back because i figured i was anoyying you guys, but i guess i will lol. i uninstalled natural selection and no thing that would let me put it in the dock appeared. deleting it and reinstalling it doesnt work. the reason i wanted it in the dock is because when you close the steam window, you can't get it back up wihtout closing and reopening crossover games, and i dont like to keep the window there so i thought that i could put it in the dock and not have that problem.

Well, just to be clear, the option in Steam would be about creating a shortcut in the Start Menu. It obviously wouldn't refer to the Dock, specifically.

It should be possible to get the Steam window back just by clicking the Steam icon in the Dock. Even if that doesn't work -- I think there may be a bug on Snow Leopard that will be fixed in 9.0 -- you can run Steam a second time using the Run Command dialog. (Selecting the Steam launcher from the Programs menu doesn't work if the launcher is already running, because Mac OS X doesn't run a second instance of it, it just activates the already-running instance.)