City of Heroes

For the last three days, I have been having massive mapserver issues-losing connection on a very frequent basis. My gaming partner two feet away, using the same connection and Windows, does not drop at the same time.

Also seeing this error quite a bit- I had been seeing it before, but not on the mapserver.

Connecting to DbServer 64.25.36.75:7000 (UDP) cookie: 2df8282f..ok (0.55)
Connecting to mapserver 64.25.36.91:7009 (UDP) cookie: 5f725932..Error calling setsockopt, ending socket buffer size is not what we told it! (131072!=262142)
Error calling setsockopt, ending socket buffer size is not what we told it! (131072!=262142)
(0.20)


Could this be related? Not sure yet if this is a report-worthy bug- I just updated to Dev version of wine yesterday as part of my troubleshooting efforts. Anyone else having the same issue?

Around the same time, I went from having the rubberbanding bug occasionally on login to having it much more often than not. Again, don't know if that is related.

I don't think the new mapserver problem is a Linux issue. My son and I were playing just a short time this past weekend (He on Windows, me on Linux), and he lost connection to the mapserver whereas I did not.

I've used Mark's fantastic patcher to install the game from scratch (running wine 1.4-0ubuntu4) with the restricted drivers installed (ATI Mobility Radeon 4500 HD).

Here's what happens:
1) Running with the restricted drivers enabled runs fine up until the initialization, then it LOGS ME OUT OF UBUNTU. It literally takes me back to the login screen, kills all the processes (so it seems) and when I log back in it's like nothing was ever running

2) Running it with the restricted drivers DISABLED causes audio to play (and the terminal shows input when I type) but no video at all - the game RUNS fine, sans video.

It's rather curious, and any input would be fantastic (I can give whatever information you need with some coaching on how to get it)

1 thing worth mentioning: the only "error messages" I'm getting per say are these:

p11-kit: couldn't load module: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkcs11/gnome-keyring-pkcs11.so: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkcs11/gnome-keyring-pkcs11.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

err:winediag:X11DRV_WineGL_InitOpenglInfo Direct rendering is disabled, most likely your OpenGL drivers haven't been installed correctly (using GL renderer "ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series", version "2.1 (3.3.11627 Compatibility Profile Context)").

So, if i've done something incorrectly or have something installed wrong, any steps to repair would be fantastic.

I assume by "restricted drivers" you mean the closed-source drivers from ATI, and by "restricted drivers disabled" you mean the open-source drivers for ATI cards. In that case:

1) With the restricted drivers enabled, it sounds like your X server is crashing. You may be able to find something useful in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old, or your computer's system log (usually /var/log/messages, but Ubuntu might store it somewhere else).

2) With the restricted drivers disabled, you can try using the "-usetexenvcombine" command-line parameter. It puts CoH into a simplified rendering mode that the open-source drivers can almost handle, but unless you've got better luck than I do, it still won't be playable.

The "Direct rendering disabled" message sounds like it could be important. Does it happen with the closed-source drivers, the open-source drivers, or both?

Hi Everyone,

I've followed the workaround instructions to get this running, and am using Mark's excellent custom launcher. It seems to get the game 'running', but its not playable. The game starts, I log in, choose my server, select a character, and click to enter. The zone begins loading and gets 2/3 of the way and then crashes. It appears to be a directX error, I can grab the dxdiag report before the dialog goes away. Other than possible driver conflict issues, I don't know what is causing the crash.

I am running Xubuntu 10.04 using wine 1.2/1.3 with xorg libraries installed. I have manually added all the recommended directX DLLs in winecfg, and am running the latest drivers for my card (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-295.40). To have gotten this close only to fail now is rather disappointing. Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this?

Thanks for your time,


-B.C.

Update:
Running fully updated version of linux mint, latest Nvidia drivers, other games running fine on this machine (ie: Oblivion).

I get the same crash at the same point while loading a character. This is the message in the terminal:

err:shell:SHGetFileInfoW pidl is null!
[xcb] Unknown sequence number while processing queue
[xcb] Most likely this is a multi-threaded client and XInitThreads has not been called
[xcb] Aborting, sorry about that.
oes.exe: ../../src/xcb_io.c:273: poll_for_event: Assertion `!xcb_xlib_threads_sequence_lost' failed.
X Error of failed request: BadLength (poly request too large or internal Xlib length error)
Major opcode of failed request: 68 (X_PolyArc)
Serial number of failed request: xxxx
Current serial number in output stream: xxxx

Fixed:
The problem appears to be related to the fact that I was using an install created by the CoX Good vs Evil dvd. Even when fully patched, the game would hang on the loading screen after choosing a character.
1. I went into my winXP virtualbox, downloaded the NCSoft launcher and installed the game with that, and patched.
2. Copied the NCSoft folders over to wine.
3. Dropped Mark's cohlaunch.pl into the NCSoft\City of Heroes\ folder.
4. Ran the launcher with --repair first, and then normally (./cohlaunch.pl --keep --en -live -renderthread 0)
5. CoH now runs flawlessly.

Hi everyone,

COx works perfectly except that my CPU usage was really high, and X was using ~40% of CPU while COH was at 100% or more.
I fixed the issue by doing two things, setting the ddr to opengl and disabling the glsl.
Now everything runs smoothly and coh only uses ~30% of cpu.

Wine isn't still recognizing correctly my graphic card Quadro2000M, if you have any ideas how to fix that, let me know.

Well apparently it only fix the issue while on character screen, it doesn't fix the issue in game. X still take between 20 to 40% of the cpu and city of the heroes takes everything else.

Sorry for the spam, but I found from where the X usage come from, and it is due to vertical sync enable in the game.
Just disable it and watch your X server going to 9%-0% cpu instantaneously.

Hope it will help some of you.
Now coh is taking all the cpu for him, I am pretty sure this is due because there is no sync, so coh generates as much frames as he can, and totally overwork. Depending on the soft limit the devs have put this can explain everything.

If you have any idea how to fix the sync issue in coh you are welcome to comment here.

Weird. Nothing like that in ~/.patches. Running a repair just in case.

There's nothing like that in ~./patches.

I've written an unofficial command-line patcher/launcher. I've used it to install City of Heroes from scratch; beyond that, it's totally untested. It's available from www.carnildo.com/cohlaunch/index.html

Use at your own risk -- I take no responsibility if it breaks your game, wipes your hard drive, or kicks your dog.

If you want a GUI-based launcher, boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=267429 discusses modifying the unofficial NCSoft Universal Linux Launcher ( sourceforge.net/projects/ull/ ) to work properly with City of Heroes. I've got no relationship with the authors of the ULL.

I'm a novice at programming on modern computers and a novice Ubuntu user. I've tried both programs and have gotten nowhere so far. I have PERL and all the other requirements for both, so - as far as I can tell - that's not the issue.

With > perl cohlaunch.pl -live -renderthread 0

I get an error:

File does not exist: /tmp/PatchListManifest.xml at cohlaunch.pl line 258

There is a PatchListManifest.xml file under City of Heroes/.Patches.

With ULL the program starts, but it has no data in it. It asks, "Please select game to configure" but there are no options. I've scratched my head about that, but have only found fleas. :p

I've fixed the bug with cohlaunch.pl -- originally, it used /tmp to store files, and I missed a few places when changing it.

No clue about the ULL bug -- I don't use it.

i had that error with the ULL. make sure your Games.xml file is formatted correctly.

delete the original text in the file, and use the Raw Paste Data from the bottom of the pastebin page to replace it.

that fixed it for me.

here's the current thread for the ULL on CoH forums:

boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=267988

will this work with Crossover Games as well?

never mind, i saw your response on your page. =)

sorry about the useless posts, this is my first time posting here.

i'm receiving this error:

Can't locate XML/Simple.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.10.1 /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.10 /usr/share/perl/5.10 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at ./cohlaunch.pl line 18.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./cohlaunch.pl line 18.

Kubuntu 11.04, Crossover Games. i ran the program from the CoH directory.

You need to install XML::Simple, either through your package manager or through Perl's CPAN interface. I've updated the web page to note that as a dependency.

great, that did it, thanks! trying a "reinstall" with the script right now. i'll report back, since when i try to repair with ULL i always get errors.

i'm not sure it's working quite right.

it creates a new directory, .patches, in my City of Heroes folder. in there it has a folder detailing the transition from one version to another, and it has the new files in here, instead of replacing the files in the main directory.

also, it has .X-D-E-L-T-A at the end of every file. o_O any idea what's going on here?

just to elaborate, the "repair" worked, in that it installed a much more recent version of the game (2050.blahblah). but when i tried to update that version to 2060.blahblah, it messed up with the errors i detailed above.

The .X-D-E-L-T-A files are binary patches that the launcher should be applying to the existing files. I'm not sure why it's not, and I don't have a computer I can use to test it right now.

that's cool, Mark. thanks for your reply and all your hard work on this. take your time, should you decide to keep working on this. the community appreciates it.

i'm just trying to gather error data for you to hopefully help you isolate problems and fix the script.

also, if i haven't already said it, thanks for taking the time to do this. =) i, and i'm sure others, greatly appreciate your efforts.

I'd also like to thank you for taking your time and helping us with this Mark.
You're the man!
//CX

Thanks so much for this! Every other thing I've attempted has resulted in failure at some point or another. When I ran your script earlier, it checked for updates, didn't need to patch anything, and proceeded to start the game. But I couldn't login because servers were down for the live publish.

The next attempt, it detected the new patch and downloaded and extracted everything. Unfortunately, it doesn't want to apply the patch. It quits out, saying "Unable to decompress patch CityOfHeroes_Main_2060.201107262317.0.0To2060.201108050059.1.0.ncpatch"

Is this an unrar or an xdelta thing? I doublechecked that both meet the requirements that you specified. Am I missing something else?

i am also receiving this error, which may explain why i had the error i posted earlier (where the files didn't update and had .X-D-E-L-T-A appended to the end.

someone else who has looked at it suggests the following:

"The script is definitely failing on the 'unrar' command, most likely due to a file format issue, since the file appears to be passing the MD5 checksum prior to that."

just to try and narrow this all down.

Version 0.6 is up; it's been tested against today's update, and is currently being used to install the beta client (38 minutes left on the download: there's no upgrade path from anything but older i21 betas).

It's still not working for me. As far as I can tell, the patching works fine, but the program hangs on the loading bar.

I'll send the terminal output in an email.

That's odd. "Hangs on the loading bar" is usually bug #10081 and is fixed by adding the "-renderthread 0" command-line option, but you've provided that option and you've got far more console output than #10081 produces.

Have you tried running CoH directly, as "wine cityofheroes.exe -project coh -renderthread 0"? That'll tell if it's the launcher causing problems or not.

wonderful mark! the patcher is working just right now!

i do have a separate concern, and i understand if you won't persue it. i use Crossover and not straight wine, so the launcher won't actually launch the game for me (though it will patch.) is there anyway you could do something for crossover compatibility? if not, i understand. they offer a free trial on their website if you're interested.

i don't know if that will even fix my problem though. you see, when i try to run cityofheroes.exe -project coh -renderthread 0, it loads the game, but the server list is only populated by one UNNAMED server. i'm not sure why this is. =/

if you have any ideas, i welcome them.

thanks for everything! the script is great and i'm sure will work for most people.

You can open and edit the script if you like, modifying the line within that launches with wine so that it instead uses Crossover, with any flags in proper context. Unless Mark objects, of course. ;)

I encountered the "Unnamed" server myself, but that was when I was attempting the test server. When I patch and launch the live sever, I'm not having problems.

And Mark, thanks again for your work on this!

ah, ok. i may just give that a go then. =) thanks bart!

thanks for the suggestion, Bart! i got the script to launch CoH with crossover by editing the wine call at the end to:

~/cxgames/bin/wine --cx-app

that did the trick.

unfortunately, i'm still only seeing the Unnamed server. =(

Actually, to the best of my recollection I've never been able to start the game using cityofheroes.exe. I always had to go through cohupdater.exe. At your suggestion I tried again, and I have sent you the error output in an email.

When they shifted from the test server to the beta server, for some unknown reason I was no longer able to access either the test server or the beta server. The last time I was able to access test was when dual pistols was up for testing, and I was on for the level 50 bump, but a patch came through within a day or two of that bump - in midday, while I was online - and I was never able to access test afterward. Then they shifted the focus to beta and I was never able to access beta.

I have no clue as to what's going on. For me this is just a magical box with gremlins or gerbils or whatever inside. ;)

hi scott,

try this command:

./cohlaunch.pl -live -renderthread 0 -auth 64.25.36.4

let me know if that works for you.

While I haven't tried your suggestion, I am getting sporadic, limited access to the game. I'm just puzzled by all the inconsistency.

For instance, if I start the game using cohlauncher and specify the -compatiblecursors 1 option, sometimes it takes, sometimes it doesn't.

Also, I'd expect if the darn game starts it would work trouble-free like it did when cohupdater would launch it. But that doesn't seem to be the case. I've got all kinds of bugs going on.

Now I've installed winetricks, and slowly the NCsoft launcher is coming along. It's presently at the gray screen, but doesn't seem to obey the /LaunchGame=CityofHeroes yet.

hi scott, i'm afraid i can't say. i, and others, have stopped launching the game with cohlaunch.pl, due to its persistence and potential bugs related to that.

for now we run cohlaunch.pl when we need to update, and launch the game separately with either WINE or CrossOver when we just want to play and know it's up to date.

if you're all up to date now, and it sounds like you are, try just launching the game with WINE and see how that fairs for you.

for now we're waiting for the next update to cohlaunch.pl which will launch the game and then exit out.

Well, to answer your earlier question, if I add the -auth option to the program command, I can access the game directly through WINE. However, it has only worked once for me, and I was in the game so briefly it didn't matter. As soon as I moved I crashed, and I haven't been able to get even that far since.

I don't know why my experience is so erratic. But yes, cohlauncher.pl seems to work great as an updater. I'm not sure it consistently passes all the command line arguments, but other than that, I actually had a more stable experience running under it - who knows why - than I'm getting right now trying to run CoH directly under WINE.

the only other thing i can think of is to compare what version of WINE you're using with others.

or perhaps it has to do with UNITY and compiz. try disabling compiz before you play and see how that goes.

You can check to see what command-line options the launcher passed to City of Heroes by looking for the "Command Line Arguments:" entry in the CoH console output. The launcher should be passing everything except "-project coh" (the launcher provides its own copy of this).

A number of Windows users with ATI graphics have reported stability problems when running CoH using newer drivers. I don't know if these problems are also present in Linux. If you've got an ATI graphics card, you could try downgrading to the 11.3 drivers (what I'm running); this may require downgrading your X server as well.

I've put a new version of the launcher on my website. It exits as soon as City of Heroes launches; additionally, I've added a "--silentlaunch" option that will suppress all console output from City of Heroes, and a "--silent" option that will additionally suppress output from the update process.

thanks so much for this update, mark!

testing today, i'll report back.

thanks to help from the CoH forums, we were able to solve the UNNAMED server problem.

if, when trying to log in, you only see one UNNAMED server, you need to launch the script with the following additional argument:

-auth 64.25.36.4

that works for me!

thanks, mark, for all your hard work on this!

Test server requires -auth 64.25.36.21

Hi Mark,

A new question/problem. Is it necessary for cohlaunch.pl to continue running after it calls for the game to launch? If so, is it necessary to continue to print out feedback from the game into the terminal?

I think, over time, this output is overwhelming my system and severly slowing everything on my system down.

Can we either: close cohlaunch.pl, since it is no longer needed after launching the game, or put it into some kind of silent mode after launching the game so it's not reporting everything that's going on to the terminal?

Thoughts? Thanks!

After cohlaunch.pl starts City of Heroes, all it does is sit there waiting for CoH to exit, at which point it in turn exits. The output you're seeing should be entirely from City of Heroes, and there shouldn't be enough of it to cause a slowdown.

That said, the next version will use "exec" rather than "system" to launch CoH, so it won't be uselessly waiting.

great, thanks Mark!

hi mark, i was wondering, do you think it would be a good idea to include the auth ips into the script?

you already have -project coh in there, so i was wondering if you were now planning to also include the auth ips for the various servers as well (live, test, beta.)

just for quick reference, the auth ips are:

live: -auth 64.25.36.4

test: -auth 64.25.36.21

beta: -auth 64.25.36.19

it appears necessary to add these arguments in order to successfully connect to the server when launching the game.

They aren't always necessary (I do fine without them).

According to the CoH forum, those numbers come from an "addcache.xml" file. As soon as I figure out where that file comes from (it's not part of the normal updating process), I'll be adding support for it to the launcher, so I won't need to release a new version of the launcher if those numbers ever change.

ah, i see. well, all i can say is that the .xml file comes from the NCSoft launcher. not sure if that's any help to you though. =)

i'm looking forward to the next version! =D

Hi Mark!

So I played for a good few hours with 0.6.2.

Good news: after CoH started, it was no longer spewing every action I took into the terminal, so there were no negative effects from using cohlaunch.pl

pseudo-Bad news: cohlaunch.pl was still listed as a running process until i quit the game. i say pseudo-bad as since it's so small its resource use is negligible so there were no bad effects from it "running." it wasn't doing anything in any case.

thanks for putting in those silent commands too. i do appreciate having them there, even if it's just in case CoH decides to spew again at some point in the future (but hopefully not.)

all in all i'd say great work! i think it's good to go. do you have any future plans or tweaks you want to make to it?

thanks again for all your efforts! you made CoH on Linux possible again!

I've released version 0.7 of the unofficial launcher. It has support for the European client and CoH in languages other than English, and it now automatically provides the "-auth" parameter and any other parameters that the official launcher would supply.

As long as the patching system doesn't start using patch manifest options I don't support, I expect that future changes will be limited to bugfixes and better error checking.

works like a charm, mark! thanks again!

I've just uploaded version 0.8. This adds the ability to repair an existing installation, and has a few minor bugfixes.

I used your patcher without issue until today. When I go to log in I get: "junk after document element at line 20, column 0, byte 1002 at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.10.1/i486-linux-thread-multi/XML/Parser.pm line 187"

Also found this thread in the forums:
boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=268043&page=7

Looks like it's broken for i21.

You should be able to work around it by deleting the ".patches/Additions.xml" file; I'll have a fix up soon.

Out of curiosity, I reinstalled. Now I'm getting the following:

% ~/City_of_heroes ./cohlaunch.pl
Warning: City of Heroes may require the '-renderthread 0' option to function properly
Using wget for file transfers.
Using xdelta for patching.
Using unrar for decompression.
Using md5sum for MD5 checksums.
--2011-09-02 01:45:34-- cohlive.patcher.ncsoft.com/CityOfHeroes/Main/Manifests/PatchListManifest.xml
Resolving cohlive.patcher.ncsoft.com (cohlive.patcher.ncsoft.com)... 184.25.109.96, 184.25.109.120
Connecting to cohlive.patcher.ncsoft.com (cohlive.patcher.ncsoft.com)|184.25.109.96|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 14385 (14K) [text/xml]
Saving to: "PatchListManifest.xml"

100%[======================================>] 14,385 --.-K/s in 0.03s

2011-09-02 01:45:34 (524 KB/s) - "PatchListManifest.xml" saved [14385/14385]

City of Heroes is up to date
--2011-09-02 01:45:34-- cohlive.patcher.ncsoft.com/CityOfHeroes/Main/Additions.xml
Resolving cohlive.patcher.ncsoft.com (cohlive.patcher.ncsoft.com)... 184.25.109.120, 184.25.109.96
Connecting to cohlive.patcher.ncsoft.com (cohlive.patcher.ncsoft.com)|184.25.109.120|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable

The file is already fully retrieved; nothing to do.


junk after document element at line 20, column 0, byte 1002 at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.10.1/i486-linux-thread-multi/XML/Parser.pm line 187

I've uploaded version 0.8.1, which should fix this.

Thanks for taking the time and helping us Mark.
MUCH appreciated!

Thanks so much!

FYI, it still patches and loads after today's patch. Haven't tried to actually log in, since the servers are still down.

The patch has an operation (FileDelete) that the patcher currently doesn't handle. I don't know if leaving these files will cause problems or not. I'll have a version of the patcher that supports this soon.

Cool, thanks! Someone reported on the boards that the script was working with the beta servers.

I played for an hour or so after the servers came back up, and only had the same problems everyone else had (Namely the login servers being throttled.)

Version 0.8.2 of the patcher is out.

Thank you! Appears to work--servers are down again, but I got to the login screen.

Thanks for taking the time to put that together, Mark! I was able to use it to install (did have to run --repair one time) from scratch and play the game last night.

just wanted to say thanx works great for me on Ubuntu 10.04 wine 1.3.29

If the NCsoft launcher does not work with WINE - does not install, does not run - then has the game fallen into the "garbage" category?

Or is someone able to get it to run, and if so, will they please share information on how this is accomplished?

I have updated my system to Ubuntu 11.04, added the 2 previously mentioned command extensions, and still no luck.

Yes, looks like garbage now. Someone want to do some additional testing. Sounds like you may be able to get into the game with some workarounds (I am going to try in a bit) but that it has issues upon load regarding playability.

Hopefully there is a way to get this to work without requiring a Windows license, or at least to identify the specific problem so either the WINE folks or NCsoft can be made aware of it.

Near the end of June, comments at wine-bugs said they had a fix for the initial path not found error that was thrown by the "blah.exe" command structure used by the NCSoft Launcer.

However, after resolving the SHELL_execute parsing issue, the .Net code throws a new error: "System.IO.FileLoadException: The specified user does not have a valid profile." Currently, no one knows what constitutes a valid profile, though a variety of things have been tried.

As far as I can tell, CoH can not be loaded at this time with WINE. Also, in looking through bugzilla, it doesn't look like anyone has been actively working on the problem since the end of June.

Looking at trends, it seems that game development companies are moving away from stand-alone games in favor of game systems that incorporate the ability to purchase features for your games, or buy more games, as well as patching games you currently own through that system. The NCSoft Launcher system has a lot of end-user similarities to Steam, for example. It is my opinion, therefore, that the .Net issues we're seeing now with NCSoft are only going to become more common.

I've upgraded to wine 1.3.20 and can no longer log into the game. The game still hangs on the "Loading" screen, unless it is launched with the -renderthread 0 parameter, but since the upgrade I'm getting a CoH error about "Unsupported drivers or graphics card X11". The error didn't appear with 1.3.19.

I'm using LXDE, with the latest NVidia drivers. Drivers installed today, error also appeared with the previous version.

I'm reluctant to outright file it as a bug, as the game also installed a new update today and I'm not sure if it's a wine issue or the game update blew it up.

Disregard previous. Turns out the game works on a clean wine prefix. I imagine a dll override to accommodate another application was the problem.

This happened after I added the latest wine update from the natty kubuntu repos. When mouselook is activated it's pretty unusable -- it "jumps" instead of panning smoothly. That makes mouse-based navigation nearly impossible for me. Other mouse-based activities don't seem to have any issues, though.

Prior to update mouselook was fine. However, at the same time of the update, my x server was updated as well so I can't swear it's a wine problem...

Rolling back to 1.3.19 fixed this problem, so I'm going to make an educated guess that there's a regression in 1.3.20 that affects this somehow.

Confirmed from my end as well. It was fine in 1.3.19, the aforementioned problem appeared (again?) in 1.3.20.

I'm not the most savvy Linux user, so I'd rather not be the first to attempt to switch to the new launcher. If anyone else here gives it a try, could they please give some details about their experience?

I'm not even sure I'd know how to do the upgrade, frankly. :)

I'm installing it now. It requires mono, and that's downloading now... I'll post my results here.

I can't get the launcher to run. I've been reading the Aion and NCLauncher forums, but nothing suggested there has helped me get past my current stuck point.

Installing dotnet2, ie6, vcrun2005, gdiplus, and dx3d via winetricks allowed it to run, but when it starts all that I get is a grey window. There is a 'path not found' error that can be fixed with a script located at dpaste.org/Fb7X/

Unless something changes we're going to be locked out when the new launcher becomes mandatory.

Use the flag /LaunchGame=CityOfHeroes to have it start up CoH directly. You'll also want to edit the Games.xml file in the conf dir to use the -renderthread 0 flag as it doesn't appear to be passed from the NCSoft launcher to the game.

I appreciate these tips, but I'm not entirely sure how to apply them.

Where does the /LaunchGame=CityOfHeroes flag go, and where does the -renderthread 0 flag go in the Games.xml file?

You need to run

wine NCLauncher.exe /LaunchGame=CityOfHeroes

The Launcher will still have a grey screen, but it will start up the game.

The conf file is at

~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/NCSoft/Launcher/Config/Default/Games.xml

Search for CityOfHeroes.exe and look for



which you need to change to

-renderthread 0

Well, I tried to implement those changes, but I still don't get anywhere. The launcher doesn't do anything - no gray screen - just runs the "busy" cursor symbol for several secs, then nothing.

Same problem. I still get the path error when using those params.

I've added the /LaunchGame=CityOfHeroes and the -renderthread 0 flag to the Games.xml file, but it doesn't help me at all. What happens is I click the NCsoft Launcher desktop icon, and the "busy" cursor symbol appears for maybe 10 secs, then nothing. That's the same response I get without adding those two tags.

If you're getting the NCsoft launcher to work, you must have done something else in addition to these 2 things. Any ideas?

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10, with WINE 1.2.2.

Where do you run the script? I am getting an error message that says
"ls: cannot access *.ncpatch: No such file or directory
More than one or no patch found!"

I am new to this so please pardon my ignorance. Thanks

UPDATE:I got the updater to start but it crashes and hangs. I have to stop it, then restart it and starts from the beginning when I do that. In essence its looping. I'll provide an error message if I need to.

This is the error message I get when the install hangs.

err:gdi:alloc_gdi_handle out of GDI object handles, expect a crash
err:gdi:alloc_gdi_handle out of GDI object handles, expect a crash
err:gdi:alloc_gdi_handle out of GDI object handles, expect a crash
err:gdi:alloc_gdi_handle out of GDI object handles, expect a crash
err:gdi:alloc_gdi_handle out of GDI object handles, expect a crash
err:gdi:alloc_gdi_handle out of GDI object handles, expect a crash
err:gdi:alloc_gdi_handle out of GDI object handles, expect a crash
err:gdi:alloc_gdi_handle out of GDI object handles, expect a crash
fixme:wininet:InternetSetOptionW Option INTERNET_OPTION_END_BROWSER_SESSION: STUB
fixme:wininet:InternetSetOptionW Option INTERNET_OPTION_RESET_URLCACHE_SESSION: STUB

Best solution I've found is to run the launcher in a WinXP virtual machine, then copy the files over. The NCSoft launcher doesn't work under either WINE or straight Mono.

Ever since the Beta server was started, many months ago, I have been unable to access the game on that server. What happens is my updater goes into an endless loop of checksumming and never seems to download a manifest and compare.

My game works fine and test server works fine, but for some strange reason I've had this problem with Beta for months, despite all my attempts to fix it.

Anyone know what's going on and/or how to fix it?

I have no idea what I'm doing wrong.

A clean install of city of heroes is playable -- the colors are too bright and I can change maybe three graphics options, but it works well enough, but I wanted to use the advanced graphics options, so I came here and tried the registry fix suggested above.

When I attempt the registry fix, all of my characters transform into things that look like ghosts, and when I log in, the rest of the textures do the same (except buildings look less like ghosts and more like gray blocks).

I've tried every combination of wine 1.2RC6, 1.1.42, 1.0; nvidia driver 173.14.22 and 195.36.24 possible. Please help.

The "fix for shaders" note is irrelevant these days. Ignore it.

So *is* there a way to get nvidia cards to work in ultra mode?

Ok, I've tried everything I can find or think of to make City of Heroes move past the "loading" screen. I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 and I've upgraded my NCSoft to i17. Does anyone have a single idea, the work arounds posted here are not working.

I think it still has to be the multi threading issue. Make sure when you load, the line in your launcher looks something like this:
env WINEPREFIX="/home/jsmith/.wine" wine "C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe" -renderthread 0

Good Morning,
I in fact was already using that line in my launcher, but I cleared it out and redid the line, assuming I had a typo I was just not seeing. I change the jsmith to the correct name and still I'm being hung up on the loading screen. I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 and COH I17. I just cannot figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I saw somewhere that someone had to actually click on the LOADING banner while it was up to make it go forward... Try that.

I tried clicking on the Loading banner while it was up and nothing happened.

Was it working before I17, or your upgrade to 10.04 Ubuntu? Just wondering if it could be Wine needing a reinstall, or the Graphics driver... Which graphics driver are you using?

It was working before I17 and Ubuntu 10.04. I'm using an Nvidia card, and 10.04 upgraded the drivers, which simply says version current, with no driver number. The problem is that I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 and after it finished, I went to City of Heroes to discover that it was applying the I17 patch. So I ended up doing something I avoid, updating two things at the same time.

I also checked a few other things, and the program hits that loading banner and the processes shows it is sleeping.

Have you tried starting application from the command line to see if you get any odd output on the console at that time?

I have run into odd behavior from wine before where reinstalling it or compiling the latest version from the source code repository seems to fix a regression that would affect me.

Well, thank you, in fact, that worked, so that means wine is having a problem. Thank you for your help, I truly appreciate it.

It is the blind hog and acorn theory (if you are unfamiliar, a blind hog finds an acorn every once in a while). I guess wine has progressed to the point that it is starting to behave like windows even though it is a Linux app. :)

No kidding. I so appreciate your help. I came to linux after windows locked out my windows computer for the fourth time. I really like linux but admit I'm still a noob.

Setting 3-D sound to disabled (in safe mode) solved the problem of sound acting up intermittently ... for a while. Since then I've upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 and now sound disappears entirely a few minutes into the game. I have the 3-D disabled and the mode set to compatibility. Anyone else having the issue or have suggestions for a fix?

I noticed this too the other day. Seems to happen after zoning. Have you logged a bug? I don't know if it is PulseAudio or Wine, but I lose sound just in the game, some not all. Using 10.04LTS as well.

This appears to be resolved for ATI cards as of the latest release of City of Heroes, Issue 17. could someone please confirm for NVidia users? I am working via Wine 1.1.43, on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, with ATI driver version 10-4.

Confirmed on Nvidia 9800GT, latest drivers, Ubuntu 9.10-64.

Thank you, Issue 17. All I need now is Ultra Mode and a fix for Dinput.

I bought myself a fun new 9800GT in order to run games. It comes with PhysX ability and such, however I can not figure out how to install PhysX and get it recognized by the game.

Also, was all excited to get Ultra Mode, but it appears not to be functioning on Linux at this time. Any advice?

Hardware-accelerated PhysX requires an AGEIA card -- City of Heroes can't use GPU-accelerated PhysX. This isn't a major drawback, though, because modern CPUs are more than powerful enough to do the physics calculations on their own.

Ultra Mode works just fine with ATI cards. It's just NVidia that's got problems.

Anybody have an idea why Ultra mode doesn't work for NVidia? I could swear that a few versions of Wine ago, I lost some graphics capability, too.

Just what the title says. Ran fine yesterday. Is anyone else having better luck loading the game this morning?

I encountered the same problem, it looks like the problem occurs when the client tries to use more than one processor core. Pass city of heroes the command line argument -renderthread 0, it should look something like "wine cohupdater.exe -renderthread 0". That fixed it for me.

I've updated to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS lucid lynx, and I've been getting the same problem of not getting past the loading banner. The command line change doesn't work for me. Any ideas?

The game loads, but as it fades into the game, I lose all ambient sounds, and my own noise. Music will come in, as will assorted background and fight noises, but by and large I lose sound entirely.

I'm having the same problem. I can load (using the -renderthread 0 option) but sound comes and goes. There are some sound effects like typing in the chat box that seem to work all the time but music is gone after a few minutes as are most sound effects.

Actually, I solved it. Turns out the 3D sound was the culprit.

Switch it off. If, like me, the game crashes when you've done so, open it up in Safe Mode and turn off 3D sound. Game should run fine from that point on.

Of course, it means you can hear the overbearing "WHOOOOOOOSH" of the new hover sound, but y'know.

Thanks! That should work. :)

Started trying to play a mastermind, and so I needed a complex set of keybinds that uses /bindloadfile. Every time I tried, testing various paths and locations, I got an error that it could not open the file. Is there perhaps a detail I am missing that would let me find the file, or is this another bug?

The most likely cause is that the Windows path to the file contains space characters. This is a game bug rather than a Wine bug: the game simply sees the space characters as command separators rather than as part of the path.

Not in this case;
I was trying to reach home/justice/Games/binds/bots.txt via /bindloadfile z:\Games\binds\bots.txt - though I also tried z:\home\justice\Games\binds\bots.txt, z:/Games/binds/bots.txt, ~/Games/binds/bots.txt, as well as copying the files into the main game install directory (~/Games/City of Heroes/) and /bindloadfile bots.txt.
There are no spaces in these, and I am well aware of the need to surround space-containing strings in quotes in CoX binds in any case.

I'm using Intrepid Ubuntu, ATI 3300 IGP, and WINE 1.0.1, which has worked excellently for me so far. However, after downloading the huge patch for i17 I find that once I click "Accept, the "Loading" bar comes up and the program halts. So I never get to the login screen. My computer doesn't crash; I can browse the internet normally after this has occurred. I've verified my files, I've tried clicking the Safe Mode box on the program, and I've configured WINE to use a virtual desktop, none of which has helped.

Is there perhaps a new splash screen that uses different graphics settings?

TYVM Jeff! Using the -renderthread 0 tag fixed my problem and now I can access the test server.

I've shared this solution on the CoH forum, for what it's worth. :)

After going through the things mentioned I got the game to load to the server screen. Once there it attempts to go into the game, but the game closes. When I attempt again, I get the message that the account is logged in, so I know it's somewhat getting me in the game. The actual game itself is not loading. Any help?

What video drivers are you using, and what version? What version of Wine?

I'm using the standard drivers that loaded with Ubuntu. I believe it has to do with the Intel 900 chipset. Could this be the case? And if so, any workaround on it? I don't care so much about graphic quality when playing on my laptop(Ubuntu). Most of the time I play it's on my desktop, this is just for layovers and such.

I know that there have been issues, with CoH and Intel graphics chipsets in the past. You may want to try some of the switches listed in some of the responses here to see if you can get it running with the graphics turned down. It won't be pretty but it may work.

In doing some cursory searching for Intel Chipsets City of Heroes and Linux drivers, I have run into other having some issues:
mediakey.dk/~cc/gaming-with-intel-gma-900-gma-950-915-or-945-glgvgm-based-chipsets/

ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1128075

Sorry this is in reference to this...
Coh crashing on fixing geom.pigg

it states to cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem, then change the middle number by echo 4096 32768 131072 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem.

I try that and I am getting:

echo 4096 32768 131072 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem
bash: /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem: Permission denied

Any help would be appreciated.

Good news. I got the change made, but it still hangs at the geom.pigg and shuts down. Any other help would be appreciated.

I'm getting permission denied when attempting to echo the command. I've tried sudo, and getting the same thing.

No idea what's going on. When I start up the game, it works fine. Sound is grand and everything is smooth.

However, the moment that my mouse leaves the screen to my second monitor, or I alt-tab out to another window, I lose sound. It basically starts popping and crackling (and you can hear that it is still receiving sound in the PulseAudio control panel, as sometimes the sound for what I'm doing will burst through on a pop or crackle), but sometimes it just shuts PulseAudio down entirely.

This doesn't seem to happen with other programs, just CoH, so I'm wondering if this is Wine or the game itself.

They added support for 3D audio recently, try enabling it if it's disabled or disabling it if it's enabled and see if that helps any.

I've been running CoH for a few months, during the period when that "Garbage" rated test appeared. I have not had any changes in usability.

That user only tested the installation (from the DVD) and not the game itself. CohUpdater still works fine and will install the game without a glitch.

I've gotta say that I've not had great results. I haven't played CoH for a long time because of it. When I finally got into the main game (which wasn't easy) I could never get the controls to work right. My character's movement would "stutter" as if I kept letting go of and pressing the direction buttons repeatedly. It was pretty much unplayable.

This is a fairly well known issue - I'll bet you're running a fairly recent distro (and maybe an Ubuntu 9.x). Open up your keyboard prefs while you're playing and turn off the "hold down key repeat" option (whatever it's called) and you should be good to go.

Did anyone ever get a bug submitted for that successfully? Seems like all involved devs (Wine / X / Ubuntu) all did the "not me" shrug.

This is bug #18296. The workaround is to turn off keyboard autorepeat (the specific method depends on your window manager).

As far as I can tell, I was running with the new version in the command line. I was using the default .wine prefix, however, would that have made a difference? I should create a new prefix for COH, perhaps.

In case anyone besides me missed this, a very helpful tip in the costume menu crash bug report made my day today:

bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10080#c63

After installing the necessary (and quite a few unnecessary) packages in my mostly-stock Ubuntu, I was able to recompile wine with the tiny change listed. Now I get decent graphics on my old nVidia-based laptop, and I can use the costume change menu, AE, etc. More importantly, my contacts list doesn't crash the game. (The Radio contact graphic, among others, uses the same functions as the costume selector.)

It's not perfect. Some of the character previews in the AE system show up too small to see, but I can work around that. I started looking for this trick when the --usetexenvcombine switch began giving me graphic artifacts that were driving me up the wall.

Didn't work for me. I recompiled with the single change, and trying to check the costumes crashed the game with the pbuffer error.

Ok, just to cover the easy stuff, you did make sure the new copy was running, right? It's first in the path or you removed the old binary? This worked perfectly for me right off the bat. Note that I downloaded the generic source for the current release as a tar ball. I didn't try to get it with synaptic.

As far as I can tell, I was running with the new version in the command line. I was using the default .wine prefix, however, would that have made a difference? I should create a new prefix for COH, perhaps.

I don't know that it would matter, but I recreated my .wine directory. I also uninstalled everything wine related and then ran the new make install, just in case.

I'm going to try compiling the newest version (1.1.28) with the character change, and use a fresh wineprefix. Will let you know.

It works!

Fantastic!!!

I had a patch come through when I loaded up CoH today, and discovered that now it will not launch, even direct (CityofHeroes.exe -project) under Ubuntu 9.04 and the latest installation of wine. Anyone else seeing this issue?

Here is what I am seeing when I am trying to launch it direct. I am using an ATI graphics adapter.

X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 136 (GLX)
Minor opcode of failed request: 3 (X_GLXCreateContext)
Value in failed request: 0x23
Serial number of failed request: 149
Current serial number in output stream: 149

I was getting the same thing. After a git update and a forced reboot (power outage) all seems to be working again, although I have no idea why. What wine version are you running?

Interesting. Well, I have only been using the latest version that Mr. Richie has been making available. It is currently 1.1.27 as of today. I did go through and I believe I have the head now of the git version, but it still is displaying as 1.1.27, unless I am missing something. What version are you showing? I am getting a bit further on this version than on 1.1.26 which wouldn't even give me the "Loading" banner after the updater ran. Now I am getting the Loading banner, but after a second or two it throws an OpenGL can't find context error "Failed to Create OpenGL Context". It is possible I don't have the head, or maybe the application corrupted and is not handling the issue well. My next step will be to remove the application and start with a fresh install. On an interesting side note, seems the license agreement display doesn't hang any more on this version.

Removing and reinstalling CoH didn't help. Still have my OpenGL error. So, I am now either waiting on a new version of Wine which may or may not fix the issue, or a release of CoH that will correct the graphics issue. I will wait until I see if someone else is having this issue to log a bug as it may be something odd or unique to my setup. Good thing I kept my Windows partition. Had to run a lot of patches on it though. :) On a side note, I did try Virtual Box 3.0 since it has beta 3D graphics acceleration in the works. It gets as far as I get now and hangs. So, that isn't working either.

hrm, well I've also got the most current amd radeon driver and I don't run via the patcher (I run CityOfHeroes.exe instead). I've tested a few more times and it still seems fine (and I imagine we're at the same version of wine).

I'll see if I can recreate it and report back if I find anything.

What version of the ATI driver are you using? Mine is 9.7 closed source driver from AMD/ATI. I guess I could try rerunning the installer on it. Ubuntu 9.04. Not missing any patches there. Running on Intel Quad core 2 GHz proc with 6 GB available RAM, and plenty of free drive space available. I may be missing something somewhere, but I just can't imagine what it might be. It screams graphics issue. And I am guessing that the Dev's changed something in the Graphics.

Well, ATI released driver version 9.8 for their proprietary Linux driver today. I installed it and rebooted, and now everything is happy. I am running the head of the wine code tree as of this Sunday afternoon (2009, Aug 16).

Has anyone had luck configuring the open-source "radeon" driver under Linux for this?

I'm currently running it with a 9200SE and the OS driver (especially now that the closed-source one has dropped support for new X for older cards), and it works surprisingly smoothly, but it seems as though something is wrong with loading of textures?. Most objects are single-color, including heroes (!), although the occasional wall or ground area will have some sort of texture/bitmap drawn on it.

Is this a driver bug, a CoH bug triggered by the OS drivers, or the general patheticness of my 9200SE?

I don't think it is the patheticness of your 9200SE. I used to play CoH with an ATI 9100 (on low settings, of course, and on Windows). It was a little slow on CoV maps, but I leveled to 50 on it, so it wasn't horrible.

Frankly, I'm amazed the OS driver even pretends to work. It gives me some hope for the future. Now if we could only get multicore working on CoH ... :)

FWIW, I'm playing CoH on the WINE + FGLRX from November '08 and it's working great. Maybe you can run an older version of FGLRX that still supports your graphics?

This is a completely bizarre situation, because it appears that when I try to run CoH under Wine I get a 100% working game EXCEPT that Super Jump doesn't work -- essentially when SJ is active, I don't jump any further than a regular jump.

Works fine under windows, and everything else in CoH seems to work just fine under wine (except the costume changing bug of course) but SJ doesn't work.

Could it have something to do with the key bind for jump not sending the commands fast enough when the key is pressed down? Essentially SJ uses the "+up" command and I figure if it's not getting a steady stream of "up up up up up" commands it assumes you want to stop jumping. I've noticed when I use the "+up" command for characters who use fly (to gain altitude) it's a lot jerkier in wine then it is in Windows, so I've been wondering if there's something interrupting that keyboard signal. If so that might explain why SJ is pretty much unusable for me in Wine.

(Running wine 1.24 on CoH I15, Kubuntu 9.04)

This sounds a lot like the issue I ran into with keyboard repeat rate. What I ended up having to do was go into gnome's keyboard control panel and turning off key repeat.

... sort of aggravating having no key repeat, though. I wonder if I can just up the delay on the keyboard repeat settings.

I tried that. Works great until the delay runs out. Now something I noticed with mine is, it seems ok if you are pressing another key with it sometimes. For example. Running forward and SuperJump, so Pressing my space bar while pressing the W key (I use standard mappings). But, it was a bit of a hassle. I use GnomeDo on my box, so I have the keyboard app in the launcher. When I need key repeat I just click up there and activate it. Go in the game, click (I use windowed mode) and deactivate it... Ok, so maybe it is three clicks, but not that bad really. I only had this problem after updating to Ubuntu 9.04.

This is still happening in 1.1.30, but apparently in the related bug up top, it's an Xorg problem.

Another thing I'm noticing, though, is that when I'm running and I select anything with the mouse, be it in my control panel, or even just moving the camera, anything I'm doing on the keyboard stops.

This happens in Half-Life 2, as well, but most noticeably in CoH.

I had an issue like this a while ago, it's detailed further down in the comments. The updater is crashing because your network settings need to be tweaked.

The post is 'Coh crashing on fixing geom.pigg', just look down a bit.

Thank you for directing me to this, as I've suspected that the problem was in this area. It seems to me that long ago I may have had a similar problem in Windows. However, I don't know my way around networking (or Ubuntu) and I can't find the area I'm supposed to tweak. The only field I can find that even looks like it could take a number like you suggest is labeled "MTU" but even it won't take a number above 10,000.

Also, is there some sort of magic or rationale associated with the number you selected: 131072?

One more question: are there any other network setting that should be automatically made for running CoH?

root@tsunami:~# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem
4096 16384 4194304
root@tsunami:~# echo 4096 131072 4194304 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem
root@tsunami:~# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem
4096 131072 4194304
root@tsunami:~# exit

Thanks! This worked perfectly and I've been on the Test server for the last couple of days. I've even downloaded the latest patch and everything is working fine. :)

If anyone else needs to do this, I opened up a terminal window and typed the following 2 commands:

sudo -s
echo 4096 131072 4194304 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem

Basically I started at the number that it was set at, and doubled it, tested it, doubled it, tested it... until it worked.

Is anyone else here able to get on the test server?

I used to be able to access Test with no problem, including during the early days of i15 beta, but about two weeks ago they issued a patch that threw a wrench into the works. Most Windows people couldn't complete their update of the patch and couldn't access Test either. Nor could the Mac people, and neither could I.

As of a few days ago, Paragon Studios issued a patch for the bad patch, and now considers the matter fixed. Windows people can get on Test, as can Mac people. However, I'm still stuck. I contacted tech support and they sent me a file called MAC_CoH_Installer_US.dmg and suggested I use it to run the same updater that they use for Macs. The file is found here: download.cityofheroes.com/US/MAC_CoH_Installer_US.dmg

Well, my Linux-fu is inferior. I haven't figured out how to successfully crack open this file format and put it to use on my WINE 1.0.1 + Ubuntu Intrepid system.

If anyone can help me with this, or give me a workable alternative, I'd really appreciate it.

Also, this isn't just a test server problem. This is the beta of the new updater we'll all have to use when i15 goes live, which is probably sometime very soon. I'm trying to avoid getting shut entirely out of the game, so ... HELP! :)

It's currently working fine for me - just logged on to check (Ubuntu 9.04, ati 4850 video). Can you log in to www.plaync.com with your account and download the Windows installer? Last time I had an issue I had no trouble reloading everything from that.

When I re-install from plaync.com the updater behaves the exact same way. It gets to geom.pigg and crashes. Subsequent attempts to update crash as soon as the updater moves from "Downloading file manifest" to "Fixing files."

I am using WINE 1.0.1. Would this problem go away if I tried a later version of WINE?

I'm hesitant to do so, as people seem to report frequent crashing under later versions of WINE, and under my current version everything (except Test) works fine.

I have that problem under Vista. What I ended up doing to fix it was I went in and removed the .piggs and had it pull them back down from the net. It worked until the next update. I don't think this is a wine issue. As a result I have been playing under Ubuntu and I can't remember the last time I have played under Windows.

I have tried both downloading the .piggs from the net and copying .piggs in from my live folder. Both methods yield the same result: a choke on geom.pigg when I run the updater when it gets to "fixing files."

Well, at this point, I am affraid to say, you may want to blow it away, uninstall wine, and reinstall. If that doesn't work, then you might want to search through the posts or post a question here:

boards.coh.com/postlist.php?Cat=0&Board=technical&page=5

Unless someone else has some suggestions.

City of Heroes/Villians has resorted to creating COH_NA.exe (or something like this) files to distribute the game via internet. AFter running installation, launching cohupdater.exe, the updater crashes every so often until it comes to the point where it crashes on loading because the version information is not available. Can anyone look into this?

My system:
Dell inspiron 8200 with nvidia geforce 4 440 MX. 384 MB, ubuntu 9.04
directx 9.0c latest installed on wine, wine 1.1.23, disk space 37 GB
only problem with this laptop is the I/O buffer, but that problem only happens upon startup of computer.

Using Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64, wine 1.1.19 up to 1.1.23, Intel 945 chipset without any special graphics card.

After installing without any major issues, the game freezes on "loading fonts" (via console). Installing winetricks did not help. It does run using 'CohUpdater.exe -usetexenvcombine', but it's not pretty and kind of slow.

Does anyone have any idea how to get this running?

It is possible that it may have to do with your graphics card that you are trying to run the game with. CoH in the past has had some know issues with running correctly with Intel Integrated Graphics adapters. And as the game has developed it has made more demands on the Graphics adapters. It may be helpful to know if there is a specific driver for your graphics adapter and if it has 3d support, plus OpenGL support.

Thank you for the tip!

AFAIK, it's using the open source driver, provided by Ubuntu, and I haven't been able to find an alternative. You may be right about OpenGL support, as Google Earth is also very very slow to run.

Problem solved.

I bought an ASUS GeForce 8400GS Silent 512MB DDR2 PCI-E, installed it, and the game now works as indicated in the test result.

Google Earth is also back on track.

ubuntu 9.04 wine 1.1.22 GeForce FX 5500 (gawd I should jsut put that in my tag line and be done with it)

How do i set the launcher to low graphics mode so I can use the tailor shop without instantly crashing ?

The statement 'CohUpdater.exe -usetexenvcombine' is a little beyond me , I tried adding the -usetexenvcombine to the end of the desk top short cut , and the updater doesn't even load.

Made a copy from the menu for wine ... but it doesn't run at all...

I'm doing somethign stupid .. I can tell....

A straight add this laucher to desk top , with no modifications, and the launcher runs so i got that part right at least ...

This is what the failed command on the launcher looks like
[code]
env WINEPREFIX="/home/kevin/.wine" wine "C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe -usetexenvcombine"
[/code]

Yeah yeah ... the -usetex.... has to be outside the final close quote not inside...below is the corrected line.

env WINEPREFIX="/home/kevin/.wine" wine "C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe" -usetexenvcombine

wow..everyone looks so ghost like..you can get into the costume editer ...but you can't see what you're doing ? And the new Valkry wings just don't show up at all...

By the way the costume editer is not the problem , because you go into it when you're making a new charactar , and it works fine. It seems to be the selection screen with the 5 costume slots that shuts you down. Thus you can make a charactar and design the costume ... but very difficult to edit after wards.

I have two short cuts ...er .. lauchers ... on my desk top now. One for normal graphics , one for low graphics. Editing a costume is going to be a cycle of back and forth , back and forth I see...

If I make an AE mish it's gonna be one guy with a costume and standard mobs for the rest of it... I aint editing 10 costumes this way !

The crashes have gotten out of control for me - I can't zone more than once or twice without either just segfaulting or getting the physxcore.dll (or whatever) crash. /unloadgfx doesn't help.

So I have two questions:
1. Is it possible my video card ram or some such thing is just a wreck? Is there any way to test the card's health?

2. Are ATI users having any success? Less crashiness? I'm thinking I could just snag an ATI card and replace my nvidia 7600gt (at least I could avoid the nvidia related bugs). Is there any graphical / performance drawbacks to using the ATI card with either the free or closed drivers?

Any advice would be appreciated.

I'm using the integrated ATI chip on the 790GX and things have generally worked pretty well for me since I started in January. However, I'm running on plain vanilla Intrepid and WINE 1.0.1 with auto-updates turned off. The reason why is that back in January, after installing the OS and playing the game for 3 days, an auto-update occurred and I could no longer get the game running. I tried everything I could think of, tinkering unsuccessfully with the system for two weeks. Finally I just reinstalled the OS from DVD, turned auto-update off, and recopied my game folder from my Windows drive. Everything worked again.

Since i14, however, I've been getting graphics errors where the zoning screens start off normal, but hours into gaming they become altered and eventually just white screens. After a few hours I also get graphics anomalies in-game where a certain set of zone graphics (like grass or a rocky hill) will simply fail to appear. Typing /unloadgfx will fix the zone graphics, but the white zoning backgrounds continue to appear. So something in the updated game is not compatible with WINE 1.0.1 + November's ATI driver.

If anyone does have CoH running on Jaunty with ATI hardware I hope they'll let us know about it, as I'd be happy to upgrade if it is safe to do so. :)

1) It is possible it could be a video ram issue, but it could also be something else. If you have some other graphics intensive applications to run, that might be more telling of if it is your graphics card or not. I would think that not would be more likely.

2) I switched over to an ATI Raedon HD 3450 when I got a new computer just recently. It came with the system, so I thought I would give it a shot. I am using the AMD build drivers (close source) and I did experience some unexplained crashes last night during the 5th Year Anniversary event. Right now, I can't say if it is Graphics card, or driver, or update to 9.04 Ubuntu. There are too many factors to isolate. Now before I updated to 9.04, I was not experiencing this.

You could do some looking around to see if there are some Mem Test applications available for your video card. I know that the new Ubuntu distro disk has a Mem Test utility, but I don't see any option to test Video Memory specifically. Off the top of my head I can't think of any software to do this other than Microsoft's DirectX testing console, but it is not specific to the ram but the capabilities of your graphics card.

So I replaced my Nvidia 7600gt with an ATI hd 4850 over the weekend (using the closed driver). There's a number of interesting differences:

1. Water effects (low quality) work again. Hooray!

2. High quality water effects are available but do the antialiasing broken thing (screwed up repeating graphics)

3. Any level of antialiasing doesn't work. The mouse over help actually states that AA and high quality water effects cannot be used simultaneously with an ATI card (something like that), but neither work. It's the same thing as the Nvidia cards do in low quality graphics mode.

4. No costume selector / architect pbuffer crashes at all (as we expected I suppose, but it's still nice to have that back)

5. One graphics setting won't stay enabled when set (offscreen rendering or some such thing?)

6. The crashes are still present, but I'm currently trying out two things to narrow it down (disabling sound completely, and patches in this bug: bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13335 (last two patches; they still apply to current git)). Tried them out for the first time today and did not crash in the normal amount of time it would take. Will test some more and if it appears that this fixes it then I'll submit a bug link to appdb.

7. It takes way longer to start loading (maybe up to 30 seconds?) which may just be how ATI drivers work.

8. Surprisingly, performance feels about the same between the 7600gt and the hd4850

Overall it feels like an improvement. Just thought I'd share the differences I've found between the two.

Very interesting. I went from wine 1.0.1 to the 1.1.21 release and the crashes have gotten out of control. I've been reading through the source code and running traces on all the channels I can find that might be relevant to NVIDIA cards but so far I haven't found anything I could do to resolve the specific errors that these cards seem to encounter. Oh there's plenty of stuff for NVIDIA cards in the code, but it doesn't seem like those DLLs are ever being used. Does anyone have any suggestions on what DirectX stuff should be the native libraries and which should use the builtin ones? I'm going to try 1.1.22 but if it doesn't improve the crashing I'm going back to 1.0.1.

Try the patches from here:

bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13335

It's done wonders for me, no crashes since, but of course ymmv. I run all wine dlls, no native.

I noticed they were having a free "weekend" from now until May 3rd for any previous subscribers, so I went to check out the current state of playability. There seems to be two major issues.

1) The lockup if you don't click the "Next/I Agree" buttons in rapid succession.

2) There seems to be some problem very much like the rubberbanding problem now. If I try to run my character straight forward, sideways, or backward, the animation continually resets and the character ends up moving at about 1/3 normal speed. Hovering the mouse over the "Loading..." banner does not correct this, as it did with the old rubberbanding issue.

I noted that if you run the character at an angle (press forward/backward and sideways at the same time) then let go of the sideways key, the run animation and your speed will behave like normal. Stop moving, and you're bugged on takeoff again. This would seem to indicate some kind of DInput bug.

Is this pretty much what everyone is seeing?

This was tested with Kubuntu 9.04 final and an nVidia 9800GTX+ card with the 180.44 drivers.

I don't think that the second issue you listed is a rubberbanding issue. What I have discovered is that it seems to be keyboard repeat rate related. Since nothing seems to have changed in wine, it appears that Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) has somehow changed the behaviour of the key board repeat rate. I was experiencing the same thing, and I went into my keyboard options under System > Preferences > Keyboard, On the General tab, I unchecked Repeat if key is pressed, and loaded back up CoH. No issues anymore. What got me thinking about this is I noticed I could move freely if I pushed down my left and right mouse buttons to move forward, and I didn't have the reset. I haven't played around to see if there is some way to have the best of both worlds, by playing with the delay or the repeat rate. I wanted to get some time in for the 5th Anniversary celebration.

After almost 5 years of playing, I finally got my temporary title. :) I am attaching a screen shot of my wifes character with her title.

Thanks for the very informative observation!

I don't want to kill key repeat completely, so I'll play with the delay/repeat rate when I get home from work tonight to see if I can find a sweet spot that works with Wine. At the very least, you've given me a workaround.

Thanks again!

Testing tonight, I can totally verify everything you say.

With KDE 4.2, there seems to be some issue between Wine's dinput routines and the keyboard repeat.

I played with the delay, but as soon as the delay is exhausted, the stuttering in movement starts.

I'll open a bug proper for this.

Thanks again for the info.

I would think that you would need to open the bug with X.Org. Wine is most likely not the culprit here. The version of wine (latest release) was working fine under 8.10 of Ubuntu on Gnome for me, and others. You and I are both experiencing the issue in 9.04 Ubuntu and Kubuntu. This means that it is something underlying that is common to both of us that changed. Ubuntu, with 9.04, and this would also affect Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, changed the underlying X11 up to version 1.6, so, odds are their implimentation is different from previous versions, or there is a bug. Odds are it is different and people sitting on top of this are going to have to adjust. So, open the bug with X11. You may need one here just to reference back, so someone over there can check into it if it is an implementation change. I know I had to do that with the NVidia bug for the PBuffer issue, of which I am not sure what has happened on NVidia's side, I think it is low priority...

Actually, open an issue with Ubuntu/Kubuntu first regarding this. They can tell us which way we need to escallate, or if they can fix it and contribute back to X.org if it ends up being their issue.

Has anyone opened a bug on this with Ubuntu yet? I couldn't find one on launchpad, but if no one else is willing I'll try and work something up this week.

I don't know if Evil was going to or not. As a result I haven't submitted one yet because I don't want to bombard them with duplicates. If we haven't heard back from Evil, feel free. I won't have time this weekend to do it. I hardly have time to be responding. :)

I did open a bug report... but I was under the too specific misconception that it only affected KDE4.2 users at that time, so Vitaly closed it within minutes stating that it was a KDE4.2 bug.

This was pretty irritating, because if it's the only app having the problem, so the chances are still at worst 50:50 that 4.2 hadn't turned up a Wine bug.

Anyway, if you guys are still having the problem, and having it with Gnome and other managers, please feel free to open your own - less specific - bug.

The root cause may very well be due to an Xorg change, but the fact that it only affects Wine still leaves the chance of error in either's court.

Looks like the Nvidia pbuffer error is going to become more of a problem with I14. Seems they're using whatever display technique that they use in the costume selector in several places in the architect interface. So, currently, without adding the magic registry key for opengl disabled extensions it's nearly impossible to get through an entire mission config without crashing with the 'ol pbuffer error. Going to try the current beta drivers tonight or tomorrow if no one beats me to it (185.13 - download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/185.13/ )

Didn't someone pass a bug report on this along to Nvidia / AaronP on nvnews.net? Would it help if more of us did?

Any luck? I haven't had any problem with Issue 14 so far, but I didn't try the Mission Architect yet. I recall the graphics being pretty unpleasant with the registry buffers disabled, so if that can be avoided it would be good. Even better would be the ability to USE the costume selector (and the new Mission Architect) and still have decent graphics.

Does the Updater still crash with the latest releases of Wine?

Has anyone looked into the Mac version to see what it does? I don't know much about that OS beyond the fact that it uses a Linux kernel. Would that version of COH work on other variants of Linux? Seems unlikely but not impossible.

I've already checked around the net, and seem to find other people having this issue. While I have Wine 1.1.14 installed, suddenly I can't run CoH at all. It goes through the update process fine, and when I go to click "I accept" on the following page, it freezes up, using all of my processor and doesn't move for about 15 minutes (maybe more, since I can't wait longer to see).
I saw that while getting an older version of wine, I could run CityofHeroes.exe straight, which started up fine, but I cant log into any servers. In fact, the only server mentioned was "UNNAMED" and it kicked me back to the login page when I tried.
Are there any hints as to why this is, or is it just wine acting up?
If so, being a bit of a beginner, I may need some help finding and installing an older version.
Thanks!

The loader hanging is bugged here: bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16794. Some people can get through it by clicking really fast through the two screens, some can't. To get around it completely run "CityOfHeroes.exe -project coh". That'll get you the real server list instead of the UNNAMED thing.

See the other bugs / hints on the appdb page for more info. Have fun!

Is anyone else having wicked crashes these days? Ever since I13 it seems I can't zone more than 3 or 4 times without the whole thing dying.

Yes, I see the same things. it seems worse when I play villains though. On heroes I can usually zone 8-10 times before crashing.

I have, as many others, had problems with the sound and general lag in CoH.

After some thinking and comparing the old kernel to the new one I figured that it couldn't hurt to try and turn off a couple of features. So this is what I did.

Turn off the following:
Processor type and features -> Tickless System (Dynamic Ticks)
Processor type and features -> High Resolution Timer Support

Change freq. to 1000 (probebly doesn't matter but what I did)
Processor type and features -> Timer frequency (1000 HZ)

You probebly doesn't have to do all this. It is probebly only one of this changes that really matters. But it now works flawless for me so I'm not going to touch them ;)

Does anyone else have a problem with losing sound without warning while playing COH? I have it happen randomly (as best I can tell) without any diagnostic or warning messages that I can find in any of the normal log files. I suspect it's something with Pulseaudio but don't really know for sure. I have to quit the game, and sometimes reboot, to get sound back. On a possibly related note, clicking to change 3-D sound from enabled to disabled will crash the game instantly. I'm using Ubuntu (Intrepid), Wine 1.0.1, quad-core processor, a Nvidia 8500 graphics card with the latest drivers direct from Nvidia (180.77 I think), integrated sound, and have installed the latest DirectX from Microsoft.

I've had the same issue for the last six months. It used to happen much more frequently, but has been better lately. I've found that running
"sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart"
and then
"/etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart"
in a terminal with the game running restores the sound.

So, run the command twice, once as root and once as myself? That didn't seem to make a difference for me. It was better for me too for a while, but today it's constantly losing sound.

Exactly. I've had pretty good luck restarting alsa by root and then by the current user, although there has been a time or 2 that I've had to run them a few times to get the sound back. I don't know if it matters, but I have wine set to use OSS for sound.

I'm glad I'm not the only one with this issue, I thought I was doing something to cause it.

I upgraded to 1.1.13 this morning when I woke up. Got home tonight and tried to start up CoH, and it now hangs in the loader, when I get to the EULA confirmation.

Interestingly, it asked me about installing Gecko for the first time ever. Guessing this might have something to do with it?

I logged in in Ubuntu 8.04 under 1.12, upgraded to 8.10, reinstalled 1.12, and had the exact same crash you experienced. (I wanted to get a new graphics driver; the 8.04 port is an Nvidia driver with a graphical glitch not limited to Wine, but rather to a specific set of drivers.)

boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12882935&an=0&page=0#Post12882935

Dunno if that link will get deleted, though; the last thread mentioning Linux that I remember posting did.

The most recent version of wine is 1.1.12 not 1.1.13. I am experiencing the same issue. I'll create a log and bug. I have added a warning to the application page.

For what it's worth it doesn't hang for me if and only if I click the next / I agree buttons reeeeeally quickly (like a double click on next). If it loads the eula page then it hangs. This was after I let it download/install gecko again.

Don't forget that at least until another patch comes down you can run CityOfHeroes.exe -project coh and skip the loader.

Good information. Actually I did not know that. I have added it to the Warning note as a work around.

A couple other useful commands can be found here:

wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Game_Client

-renderthread still doesn't work in wine (hangs), works in the last version of Cedega I tried (5.x) and in Windows
-test/-project "XXX" all work correctly
-console works fine too, although running directly from a terminal (instead of say a desktop shortcut) gets the same output (which can be redirected / captured)

cohupdater.exe -usetexenvcombine is new to me, wonder what that does (or if it works).

Never tried -exitlaunch, it's a weird thing to have in there.

Apparently according to the us forums

boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12814303&an=0&page=0#Post12814303

the american servers are going to be upgraded with the Mac patches. It will be interesting to see how this affects us Linux users and we should all be on the lookout.

As of Issue 13, for me, chat no longer loses the first keystroke. Anyone else noticing this? May not be a wine bug, or at least not anymore...

It doesn't, but it still does not type the slash when / is used to open the chat window, and does not remove focus from the chat window when hitting enter.

Has anyone noticed any graphical oddness going in to the consignment house? The textures flow and warp in a way that seems quite lovecraftian.

December special event:

"Azathoth has been summoned over Paragon City. While this event continues, a monotonous piping will force heroes and villains to dance. Eruptions of chaos will appear randomly, destroying anything in their path. Players can earn a special badge for destroying any of Azathoth's minions. We don't expect to give out many."

All I saw was some peculiar shadowing on the walls. I can't remember off-hand if that was visible on my system before I13 or not. I just reinstalled Ubuntu, Wine, and CoH, and I'm not using the OpenGL registry settings.

I'm noticing some texture display corruption on buildings and costume pieces.

Anyone given the test server a run since open beta? I may just need to wipe out .wine and start clean - I can't set any of the fancy graphics options anymore but I can open the costume selection window. It's like some manner of bizarro world.

Yep. I'm getting the same thing. The water effects, shader quality, geometry buffers, depth of field, bloom, and desaturation options are disabled. However, only the first three are enabled on the live servers with my system.

I can definitely open the costume window on test as well. I haven't seen it in so long, it's like a new toy! I had to test it on live again, just to make sure, but it crashes there as per usual.

I hope the changes carry over.

I have an explanation for why the costume selector might be working in I13. It appears that as of i13 the game is officially opening up for mac. Which would require some update of the codes. I believe they said something on the coh forums abotu teaming up with a coding company to help them optimize the code for cross platform gaming with that respect. hopefully as a result of this we will see alot of improvements. who knows maybe after i13 we will end up seeing this as gold or higher

They're using Transgaming's Cedega to make the OSX port. Probably because Cedega's been able to run CoH better for longer than Wine/Crossover has.

After doing a little more playing around, these are the changes I've found so far that you can expect when I13 drops (other than the actual gameplay changes of course):

- Costume selector now "works" (possibly because of FSAA changes on the coh side)
- FSAA in-game is changable, but setting it to anything other than off freezes the actual game graphics (the menus are still accessible). It's quite odd.
- All the fun fancy effects we got from the reg key mod no longer work (if there was a way to pass arbitrary driver info / version it seems like we could get all of that back - anyone know where that data comes from?)
- Everything now looks about how it does/did in Cedega (i.e. a little crummy but functional)
- Still haven't tested the other known bugs too thoroughly (lag bug, renderthread, etc) but would be interested in other people's input.

So it's kind of a mixed bag. I miss the fancy graphics (I've never played it under Windows, but it was looking pretty decent to me with the reg key), but it is nice to actually be able to modify costumes. Everything feels a bit clunkier overall to me, but that's subjective I reckon. Guess we'll see what happens.

Ubuntu 8.10
nvidia 177 driver
c2d / 4gb / blah blah blah

I removed the HKEY_CURRENT_USER-Software-OpenGL-DisabledExtensions suggested above. All of the graphics issues went away, but the costume selector again crashes the game. So it looks like there is a choice between decent graphics and creating costumes coming up. :-P

The water effects do not work, but the shader can be set to High again.

Confirm. But at least we can use Icon now. Been waiting forever to ware a cape.

GL_NV_register_combiners is the only required DisabledExtension needed to access the tailor, but will cause the graphics weirdness. The rest of the extensions were tested separately and nothing will bring back water effects. In fact the texture extensions seem to have no effect on the game at all now.

Confirmed, I have to have the GL_NV_register_combiners in the DisabledExtension registry key to allow the costume selector to pop up.

I am not experiencing any of the graphics weirdness reported. But, as my machine is 8 years old, I have to run most everything turned down anyway.

Has anyone else confirmed?

I can confirm that having just the GL_NV_register_combiners in the DisabledExtension key lets you access the costume selector. but I see strange flickering when I do (have the extensions disabled). best way to see it is run around the counter in Icon. That usually produces the flickering.

Hmm, it would seem when I do go inside places, stores, icon, Midnight Club... I do get some kind of graphics oddness.

I tried the GL_NV_register_combiners setting and was able to access the costume selector, but it's not worth it for me.

In an indoor setting, including instances, mousing over any selectable character causes what looks like a complete scene redraw. All complex graphics appear to be rebuilt from the core out. For example, you can see a hellion's bald head for an instant, then his hair is added. The whole process causes a lot of flicker.

This might involve shuffling all the graphic objects along the Z axis, rather than a complete redraw--perhaps to add in the target box display. I can't say.

It's nice that I can get to the costume selector when I want to, but I couldn't play that way for any length of time.

I tried to download this, but the downloader kept crashing with a segfault. As per a comment below, I increased my tcp send window size, and it finally worked when I got it to 131072. I'm using Ubuntu 64-bit 8.10.

Currently installing City of Heroes on my Kubuntu 8.10 desktop.(64bit, AMD Athlon X2, ATI Radeon HD 4850)

Fresh install of WINE(1.1.9) and City of Heroes.

1. Had to close the updater and restart it as progress(if any) of download wasn't showing.(This happened twice. Applying the patch went fine.)

2. First log in(to an existing character, in Peregrine Island) resulted in a lot of graphics corruption.(img183.imageshack.us/img183/5279/screenshot2008120215025qo9.jpg) Turning on 'Safe Mode' enabled me to log in properly and adjust the advanced graphics.(Turning on FSAA resulted in similar graphics problems. Couldn't set Shader Quality above Low(With World Bump maps)

Things That Worked:
- Costume Selection via menu
- Chat. No lost keystrokes
- No rubberbanding

Things That Did Not Work:
- Chat. Does not snap back out
- Alt-tabbing
- Entering Superbase(Slowly gets to about 3/4ths loaded, then hangs. Resulted in image verification upon launching the updater again, after a hard reboot, due to the alt-tab issue)
- Numpad subtract acts like 'regular' subtract
- Unable to load in to Rikti War Zone(same as Supergroup Base, but doesn't load as far before hanging and when you log back in, you're in the war zone.)

I honestly can't say what's due to WINE or what's due to ATI Linux drivers. Hopefully things'll improve on that end as ATI and City of Heroes are working together more, lately.

Could you write this up and submit it as test results?

I recently upgraded to Fedora 9 and was forced to do a reinstall of City of Heroes, due to an odd graphic problem. It did the update and install fine, but when I use wine to start it it gets as far as the loading screen, blinks, then shuts down...leaving my resolution at about 800x600. (I'm at 1440 x 900). I haven't got it past then, with two reinstalls and a completely updates wine.
It worked fine for me on Fedora 9, why is it failing now? Does anybody know?
Thanks,
Athena

Erm...It worked fine on Fedora 8, is what I meant. :/

Try running it from a terminal (copy the command from the launcher) and see if it outputs anything useful...

Are you running 64 or 32 bit?

I managed to solve the problem by installing livna and getting the drivers (recently upgraded to F9 and forgot). So no problem at all now, thanks...though I always run CoH from the command line.
I'm 32 bit actually.

The only major problem know it well known, the tailor..it crashes everytime. Hopefully they eventually get that sorted out, it's a pain to have to run to the Windows box for every costume change (especially since it's graphic card is awful)

Thanks for the help anyway!

Just wantedto note that with the latest Nvidia Drivers Cursors Look right now (or they do for me anyways). I don't have -compatiblecursors, and they look just right, if smaller than I remember, but that might just be because it's been so long since I've had normal cursors. I should also add that I do have the extension exclusions mentioned above, so they /may/ be neccessarry.

oops forgot to mention, new Nvidia Drivers version 173.14.12.

What version of wine? Still getting stretched cursors without -compatibleCursors 1 in the shortcut, and 173.14.12 drivers, wine 1.0-1 on fedora 9

Wine version 1.1.3.

pleased to report my cursors are now working also! v1.1.5 and nvidia 173.14.12

Now that Livna finally released an update from wine 1.0 to 1.1.5, cursors are working properly for me as well, sans compatibleCursors. Yay!

Also would like to add, that due to a recent cleaning of my registry I have discovered that the aforementioned registry exclusions aren't neccessarry for functional cursors.

I wouldn't think they would be, but they are necessary for proper OpenGL operation of the game ;)

After reading some of the posts regarding the costume selection bug, I got to thinking. Since Costume Selection and everything works fine with ATI cards, as I understand it, due to it having no pbuffer support (or something like that) would there be any way wine could intercept the calls and tell CoH that the Nvidia cards don't have it either? or somehow disable it entirely? Would there be any way to do this, and would it have a chance of working?

From what I understand from the bug posts, yes it is possible, however, the wine developers do not want to do that as they are concerned about putting hacks in the code. Another avenue is to work with nvidia, whom I have contacted, and to try to get them some data that they can use to see what they can do.

Wait, so is this a Wine bug, or an Nvidia driver bug? Or a little of each?

Just an oddity I've noticed, perhaps since I did that registry fix, but definitely since Wine 1.0. The cursors with the -compatibleCursors flag used to be pretty decent, but recently they became all white, no coloration and rather distorted when it changes into the "hand grabbing item" cursors. In-game, I typed "/compatibleCursors 0" to try turning it off, and the grabbing cursors became colored and good quality!

So, I tried taking the compatibleCursors option out of the shortcut. No go, cursors are still scaled and interlaced wrong. So, I'm just confused now.

In the registry, in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\OpenGL, have the string value DisabledExtensions set to:

GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object GL_NV_register_combiners GL_NV_register_combiners2 GL_NV_register_combiners3 GL_NV_texture_shader GL_NV_texture_shader2

(basically list each extensions with a space between each)

I can then set the in-game shader option higher than low with bumpmaps.

I think you *could* leave out GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object, I put it there because it helps World of Warcraft.

Awesome info, thanks. But I don't have such a folder in the Wine directory; should I create it and the key? (Don't know much about registry fiddling)

Well I created it, and now not only can I set Shaders to High but also Water to High, and it doesn't bug me about having old drivers. But is this lowering performance or something as it seems we're disabling extensions?

I cannot seem to find the web page where I originally found the info, but if I remember, it said that on recent video cards, Wine (or was it the game itself? Can't remember) uses older OpenGl extensions by default and doesn't try newer ones...

Something like that... hehe. :)

I will try to find the web page where I got this...

Ahh. here it is:
www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name?app_id=1299;forum=1;msg=37609

Cool, so it is the game that's using the older extensions by default somehow. Randall, can you put a comment about this above? This is a pretty awesome fix for almost all of the game's graphical issues, if something could just be done for the chat bug and the costume menu crashing, this game could be Gold status.

I'll put this information in a note like I did for the other information that I have up from you, Dan.

Sorry, I was a bit out of reach recently.

If you can, you should probably amend the note that it's a fix for nvidia cards only, didn't look like they found what to do for ATI cards (not like ATI has drivers for xorg 1.5 yet anyway...)

Good point. Done.

just another note, I did leave out the vertex_buffer_object extension.

holy cow there's some decent effects in this game, I had no idea. thanks for the tip!

You rock! This fix and setting my advanced options back to default fixed 90% of my graphics problems, including some horrible lag in mouse turns. Since I'm a teleporter by preference, I really hate lag.

Now if I could just figure out why mouse turns keep jumping in windowed mode.

Is anyone else getting rubber-banding every time you run CoH? If I use the mouse to turn and any keys to move, I get it every time. I also get big jumps in my mouse turns after maybe 60 degrees of movement. This is with a fresh wine install and a fresh CoH install from the updater.

My wife and I were getting this on both of our machines during double XP this weekend. She uses WinXP, so it was a server issue. The /sync command in the chat box cleared it up for us. We had to do it on both machines at different times. It forces a sync between your machine (client) and the server.

This seems to be fairly random as to who it affects, but we do have a bug logged about this that may be relevant.

bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13718

I get this if I don't click on the small loading bar immediately after it appears, as if there was some sort of focus issue going on.

Ok, I've started following your advice religiously, and it seems to head off the problem every time. Thanks.

I have noticed that sometimes my mouse cursor will not appear when mousing over the loading bar until I click it. Sometimes it appears immediately without a click. Maybe that corresponds to times when the rubber banding would and would not occur, respectively.

It's bizarre.

I couldn't believe this, but I tried it today:

The four times I did not click the "loading" bar, I got rubber-banding issues.

The four times I did click the "loading" bar, it worked fine.

Weird... but it works. Thanks!

I'll update this just in case anyone is following.

I logged in today several times and the rubber-banding had completely disappeared, except for some minor, lag-related flickers. As far as I can tell, it wasn't anything I did.

However, before everyone says server issue, let me point out that I was able to play CoH on Cedega with no rubber-banding of any kind yesterday during the same time periods when Wine was floored by it. I used the same City of Heroes directory for both programs (a soft link in the Wine directory), and that hasn't changed. The registry files were different but I tried to make the settings the same. Both Wine and Cedega were new installations.

As for the bad leaps in my mouse turns, when I'd turn 60 degrees and then find myself looking behind me without any transition, it only seems to happen in Wine when I'm running CoH in windowed mode. I fiddled with the mouse settings in Gnome, and even tried running in a new X session without a window manager, but the mouse turn problem never went away as long as I stayed windowed (even without any window decorations). Now that I'm running full screen in a separate desktop on my original X session, it works normally. Weird.

The rubber-banding issue may be related to or exacerbated by network and/or server problems, but Cedega doesn't seem to be prone to it.

I should also note that I tried an unrelated Cedega fix yesterday on a hunch, changing my tcp_wmem settings like so:

cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem
echo 4096 32768 131072 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem

As far as I can tell, it had no effect on the rubber-banding even after a restart, but I haven't changed the settings back.

There are different ways you can rubber band; there is isolated rubberbanding due to lag spikes, which you can monitor through your netgraph (/netgraph 1); forced rubberbanding back to the same position when you are out of sync, which can be remedied by /sync; and the issue which is currently a bug for this application in Wine, the client rubberbanding issue.

It's not a server issue, as on the server it just looks like you're stationary or moving more slowly than on the client while you rubberband. You can tell that it is this issue if it persists even after zoning, and you are able to eventually move your server persona. I've gotten this several times, with no consistent way to reproduce it except to restart the game until I get it.

As I said in my comment in the bug report, I have always been able to make it go away by repeatedly restarting the game. Usually, one restart is sufficient but I had to restart about 10 times once. During a session in which I have the bug, it will persist the entire session, as far as I can tell; I haven't really tried just changing characters, but when I don't have it, I've never incited it by changing characters, so I don't think it will help either.

Hi all, I am running wine 1.0 on Ubuntu 8.04 64-Bit.

Whenever I try to run CoH/CoV, it runs in a window, that looks to be about 640x480 or so..is there a way I can just tell it to run in fullscreen mode? I am running from the menu shortcut that wine created.

Also, when I get to the main login menu for the game, I get the following message at the bottom:

"Important: Your computer appears to be using older drivers for your video card. City of Heroes may run poorly without updated drivers. Go to www.nvidia.com to get the latest drivers. In some cases, such as laptops, you may need to get the latest drivers from your computer manufacturer's site."

According to "nvidia-settings" my drivers are version: 169.12

I have always gotten this message when I have tried playing in Ubuntu, no matter what version drivers I have. They have both also happened in any previous version of wine I have used as well.

I do not currently have an active account, so I do not know if the warning above is actually affecting game play in any way.

If anyone could help resolve these two issues, I would appreciate it.

Brett,
There is a newer version of the nVidia driver on their site that you should get. The version is 173.14.05. This will fix a texture issue where you get striping on some of the textures. You will however always get that "older drivers" message at the login screen. Just ignore it.

As for your resolution, you adjust that in the game itself under Menu, Options, Graphics (tab), then set your resolution. You may or may not be able to run it in full screen. I seem to have issues when It try to run in full screen versus windowed. But I have apps loaded that I like to watch when I am playing anyway, so windowed works better for me. If you want to play around and see if you can get it to work for you, then you will want to play with the settings in the Configure Wine. If you don't feel that brave yet, then you should be good to go with the defaults in there. The main settings you would be looking at is Graphics and Window settings. There are 4 check boxes there that control how wine integrates the Windows application into your desktop. I have the middle two checked currently.

There seems to be an issue currently with the ingame resolution options. If you change them, then click apply, it will reset the resolution back to before you changed it and tell you to restart. When you restart, the resolution won't have changed. To get it to change you have to set it to the correct resolution, apply, set it again, and then quit the game with the options menu still open.

Very good information. Something I have not experienced.

Dan, I hope you do not mind, but I think this is important enough to set a note on the main page until the issue goes away. I have quoted you and put it as a note. If you would like me to remove it let me know and we can just leave it standing in the comments here.

That's fine, but I'm not sure it's actually a linux/WINE issue, or if it's a global issue with the new way the options are set up as of issue 12. I'll ask my friend to test it in his Windows install.

Just an update: thanks for the help everyone. I switched my video resolution in game to 1440x900, the first time I ran the game after that, I got a message that it couldn't do full screen and would run windowed, but every time after that one, it runs in fullscreen.

With Wine 1.0-1 fixing the ALSA/PulseAudio issue, I switched my audio driver back to ALSA in winecfg, and it works fine in this and other games. Also, sound in other programs simultaneously is working great now (couldn't watch Youtube with CoX open before, set to OSS)

That's good news.

With the OSS though, I can, and often do have music streaming in via Audacity through Pulse, while I am playing CoH...

Has anyone had difficulty with dual monitors? I have to monitors and when I right-click and hold for the camera view, the mouse doesn't seem to lock. It will go right through to the TV-Out, causing my screen to go wonky. I can set up DXgrab but am then not able to tab out for other purposes, so am reluctant to do so.

Last time I checked it was still happening in RC-3, I believe.

I too have this problem, and have not found a good solution. I don't remember this problem when I played before, so I'm betting this is a regression, but I couldn't begin to say when.

I am having similar difficulties. Whenever the cursor leaves the window, even if it's on the same screen, the game treats it like I am spazzing the mouse out. If I roll my mouse one pixel, my camera instantly points at the sky or the ground.

What is supposed to happen is for when I right-click and drag, the mouse is supposed to be captured and not leave the window. I tried selecting the "Allow DirectX apps to stop the mouse leaving their window" setting, but it doesn't seem to help any.

What is padsp? I have no such command (I have PulseAudio and such..)

That was supposed to be a reply.

Dan, it is the OSS processing entry point for pulse audio, as I understand it. (See here for more information www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/FAQ#CanIgetOSSandALSAapplicationstoworkwithPulseAudio ) So you have to setup wine to output to OSS as well.

I have ALSA set as the audio device for wine, and that's supposed to be directly sent to pulseaudio with the plugin...haven't gotten sound to work yet though (on this laptop). Sound worked on my desktop fine but I don't have access to it right now to see how it's set up

Yes, however ALSA in wine will not send to pulseaudio. There is a bug out with both pulseaudio and with wine to fix the issue. The only way around it is to use the OOS and padsp... well, that may not be the only way, but it seems to be the simplest to me anyways. :)

Odd..I just looked at my desktop settings and it was set to OSS, so I switched wine on my laptop to use OSS and sound works...not sure if it's routing through pulse audio or what, Linux sound confuses me...

regardless, probably won't be able to play the game on my laptop as far as graphics until AMD releases an Xorg 1.5 capable driver, at least.

Just got my drivers working in Fedora 9, of all things I forgot to install the 32-bit libs AGAIN (running x86_64). Working great, I'll post a test report later.

major issues still present:
Video drivers not recognized (grays out several options)
Chat bug

Tailor bug and dual-core flag untested

would like to add, I am indeed sporadically having the issue where taxing graphical changes (like traveling) makes mouselook somewhat unresponsive.

Seems to handle CoH/CoV much better, now.

Have a (somewhat) functional cursor, even without the -compatible cursor flag.

Was my wife playing, rather than me, so not certain on the other bugs, at the moment. Not enough time to check for them, but if no one else has, I will later today.

Sound is a little wonky, but that might be 'solvable' using alsa-oss.

Well, costume changing didn't crash me.

The chat bugs are still there(dropping first character, not 'escaping' correctly).

Sound's still odd, with alsa-oss.(might have added the 'aoss' bit to the wrong part of the command line?)

Like I said above, the cursor's functional(read: visible), but still a bit weird(looks like every other 'line' of it is drawn). Better than the compatible cursor, IMO.

My laptop fan's in the process of dying, at the moment, so didn't get to check on anything else.

(Oh, laptop has an ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M graphics card. Even under Windows it's only runnable on minimal graphics settings.)

When you say costume changing didn't crash you, are you using the /cc command, or are you going to the menu and costume? It is the menu and costume that the bug is one. the /cc command works fine.

If you have have/are using pulse audio, you may want to launch wine with this command
padsp wine "C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe"

Costume change done via the menu didn't crash me.(Nor did doing it via the Tailor or the command)

Thanks for the audio tip. I'll give it a shot, next time.

Really? Which linux distro are you using? And what video driver?

Ubuntu 8.04 with whatever the most recent ATI driver is.(fglrx)

Hmm, interesting... so it would appear that the costume creator bug may actually be a driver issue with nVidia....

Seems to be.

Just installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my wifes computer. After updating things and installing WINE/CoH, I logged in and tried doing the costume change, and promptly crashed it.

Ran into something interesting today. My advanced desktop effects stopped working after we had lost power last night. I did some searching around, and if you ran the X.Org patch the you may have this problem. The simple fix is to rerun your nVidia driver install again. This fixes the broken symbolic link (you'll see the error come up) and thus you will be working again. Here is a link to the ubuntuforums for more information if you run into this issue.
ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=828393&highlight=desktop+effects+-working+after+x.org+update

I would encourage anyone that was still having issues with extreme rubber banding to try 1.0-rc4. My problems with that appear to have all vanished. If we could get the three big bugs squashed (character swallowing chat window / no costume selector / no -renderthread) this would definitely be a gold / platinum candidate. Don't forget to vote for bugs if you haven't already!

Unfortunately I have had the Rubberbanding issues under RC4. when they happen they are very persistent and rather strange. I can Teleport just fine and Jump decently well, but anything along the ground is doom to failure, I will continuously snap back to where I came from, but if I jump i will Usually be able to move forwards

We should compare notes - after several days of it being fine in -rc4, it came right back. See bug 13718 and add votes/your info/etc and maybe we can find commonality.

I'm not seeing any rubber banding. I am on 1.0 now, I didn't get a chance to try out RC4. RC3 was fine for me. I did have some problems before the RC's but I played around with Wine configuration tool and changed some of the settings. Right now I have my window manager controlling the windows and decorating the windows. Everything else is unchecked. You may want to play around with those. They tend to effect the behavior of wine a lot more than you would think...

Just wanted to pass along that nVidia released their driver version 173.14.05 as of May 29th.

Yes, and I was planning on trying this out with the new drivers in Fedora 9, but I wasn't able to get 3D working (no 3D openGL apps would launch, not even Compiz). I'll play with it more later.

Dan,
Unfortunately I don't have Fedora installed, so I can't help you out there, however, were you aware of the forums for the nvidia drivers? www.nvnews.net? You can really get some good help there.

Yep, have been reading extensively there for various issues :)

They're having a free weekend now. I went back, for the first time after beta and was really surpised. If not for the bug where we drop the first character of all chats, I might re-up.

Put in your votes for this application and that bug. If it gets enough attention (votes) we may get it fixed faster. You will have to create a login to vote in Bugzilla. There is a code freeze until wine 1.0 is released but after that they will resume normal feature, and bug fixes.

Just an update from my end of things...I was planning to test things on Fedora 9 after it came out, but that has been delayed until nVidia releases drivers that can run the X server and GLX in Xorg 1.5. Which they've said should be ready for the next release, whenever that is.
www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=111516 (scroll down to post by AaronP) I couldn't figure out how to change the GDM startup options for Xorg in F9, but since GLX isn't going to work yet anyway, I'll just wait for the functional drivers.

clarification, my testing has been delayed, not Fedora 9's release, that was May 13th :)

Ok, a little something interesting I stumbled across that I didn't know was there. If you click one of the bugs listed above for this application, you will be taken to the Bugzilla database for Wine (no, that is not what I noticed, I am getting to it...). If you look on the right hand side of the screen near the top you will see a statement "Votes for this bug". If you login to the Bugzilla database, you are granted the ability to vote for up to 20 bugs in the database to draw attention to them, just like you are able to do here with the AppDB. So, I have logged in and put my votes in on our bugs. And for those who knew about this already and are saying, "well, duh," yeah, I guess I deserve that. :)

Not sure if it's an issue with my driver (doubt it but definitely possible) or the game's recognition of graphics drivers, but one main remaining issue I have running CoX on a Fedora 8 install is that several graphics options are grayed out. Particularly, water quality, any texture quality above Low, and bloom/depth of field (though I wouldn't use those anyway). The low textures, or some other issue, appear to be making some world textures show up funny (striped).

Image at www.rpi.edu/~bookd/images/advgraphicssettings.png

My system:
AMD Athlon X2 3800+ 2.0GHz
NVidia GeForce 6800GS 256MB
2G DDR RAM
running Livna driver: xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-169.12-1.lvn8
on kernel: kernel-2.6.24.4-64.fc8 (x86_64)

Only other major issue is chat entry; /slashchat (activating the chat window with an initial '/') doesn't put in the initial '/', which is my primary method of communication and commands, and entering a command doesn't exit the chat window (i.e. it stays active until I press Escape).

Other than those, I'm very pleased with how the game is running, getting good FPS (considering it appears to not be fully using my graphics card and does not respond to -renderthread 1), and I can even alt-tab or switch workspaces from the game now! So happy with whatever they did to Compiz or Metacity (whichever I'm using now when GL effects are disabled..)

A couple more comments on what helped successfully run the game -

This isn't really related to the game as it also affected my native linux Doom 3 install, but on 64-bit I had to install the 32-bit libs for my graphics drivers as well. They used to be packaged on Livna as xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-32bit, but now I just installed the 32-bit version of xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs alongside my 64-bit version. This fixed the problem that was causing Doom 3 not to start, and CoX not to use hardware rendering.

Also, adding -compatibleCursors 1 to the shortcut for the updater really helps with the cursor.

I didn't submit a bug report for the graphics issue I mentioned above, as I'm not sure if it's a Wine issue or even a wine-fixeable issue. I can if it would help.

The graphical striping issue with Nvidia cards has been fixed in the latest beta driver. It looks significantly better now.

I noticed that -compatibleCursors 1 works well - I've also noticed that sometimes I get a blue hand on clickable items and doors.

Wine is just getting better and better with CoH, though the costume selector bug keeps me on Cedega, as does the finicky TV-Out issue (for some reason, right-clicking to mouse-look doesn't grab the pointer, so it will still switch screens and sends the game wonky). I'd like to file a bug report, but am not sure what is needed in that regard.

Steve, which driver version are you using? I have the striping issue, and I am using the latest driver for nvidia cards from nvidia's site (which is newer than the one in the restricted driver repos in ubuntu). The revision is .12 on my driver, came out March 2008 I believe. (You'll have to forgive me as I am not at my home machine to take a look at my specs to be 100% certain.)

It seems like there's a specific graphics option that triggers this - I started on Cedega and never saw the striping. When I switched to Wine I didn't see it either and bumped up all of the graphics options that I could. Still no striping. Now if I switch back to Cedega I do see it but not in Wine unless I bump everything back down. I'm using whatever nvidia driver is currently in Ubuntu's repo.

Hey guys,

You'd be looking at 173.08, released (in Beta) April 10th. They haven't released a full version, but this update was done in large part due to this striping problem, which seems to have been around since drivers went 100.xx.

It is strange that you didn't see striping on one, but not the other - I had the problem with both, and then I'd roll back to an earlier driver and both would be fixed.

You'll find it at the Nvidia site, in the "Beta and Archived Drivers" section.

Yeah, I see that as the one of the tech notes on that version. I have the current 169.12. You seeing any issues with the Beta driver?

None so far. It's actually been working pretty smoothly. The game itself renders fine, and all outside stuff like video seems to be playing well with my card.

I'd give it a whirl, it's nice to have proper graphics in CoH again.

Agreed. I'll play with it in the next day or two and see how it goes. Thanks for the info.

Update: I got 173.08 Beta installed for nvidia. I thought I had run across a bug in the installer where I could not get my 169.12 kernel module (I use Ubuntu Hardy 8.04) to remove and get replaced with the one the 173.08 install scripts were compiling. I did try to do my due diligence and search for this issue on the nvnews.net forums, but I just wasn't seeing my issue. Even hit the Ubuntu forums and searched the web in general. So, I ended up submitting a bug and my driver install log, and one of the developers got back to me and pointed me to this forum post ( www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=72490 ). Now I am up and running with the Beta driver and so far no issues. The driver seems good and stable and all my textures are displaying properly again!

My lesson from this.... Post a question to the community BEFORE I post a defect.... ;)

sorry, was referring to Shader Quality that couldn't be set above low

I may just do that, though I'm thinking it may actually be an unrelated Gutsy issue concerning wireless networking (there is a repeated error right as the computer loops). The same thing happens in Cedega, although Wine is still a pain. I've thought thtit might be my Nvidia 7300GS card.

I'm going to install the Hardy beta some time this week or next, will see if it persists. If it does, I might go file a bug on it. Eiher way I'll post here.

I am finding CoH to be playing worse with 0.9.57 than it was with 0.9.55. Now my game will lock up and freeze (with sound still running, often skipping) when arriving in a new zone, often it will hang when running through Atlas Park or some other high-lag area (I do get lag and always have, but the game seizing up entirely?), and it rubber bands all over the place.

It is so bad that the game froze twice in 20 minutes yesterday, and randomly when I entered Perez Park.

Additionally, I can't alt-tab out any more, nor change desktops. It will register as being focused on Pidgin, but the screen will not change. My mouse will act as if the other window is on top, but I will only see the game screen.

Anybody else having these problems? I also seem to be one of the few who cannot, no matter what, get his game to crash to the desktop - either it just keep looping or the game freezes until I reboot. It is very, very, very aggravating.

The game is effectively unusable now on Gutsy-64 with 0.9.58. I have been trying to play it over the past few days, and can't play longer than an hour before it hangs. An hour is a good amount of time now, because the past three times I've tried to run it has lead to changing zones, and the moment I change zones the game hangs on me.

I turned on Winefix's error logging recently, here is what I get from the moment I pass the patcher to when the game hangs and I'm forced to reset (sometimes I can restart X, most of the time I have to hard-reboot):

fixme:mshtml:HlinkTarget_SetBrowseContext (0x13b3d0)->((nil))
fixme:msimtf:CActiveIMM_Create ((nil) {08c0e040-62d1-11d1-9326-0060b067b86e} 0x13fef34)
fixme:ole:CoCreateInstance no instance created for interface {08c0e040-62d1-11d1-9326-0060b067b86e} of class {4955dd33-b159-11d0-8fcf-00aa006bcc59}, hres is 0x80004002
fixme:shdocvw:ClOleCommandTarget_QueryStatus (0x139f0c)->((null) 1 0x7e2b5460 (nil))
fixme:shdocvw:ClOleCommandTarget_Exec (0x139f0c)->((null) 25 2 0x7e2b5488 (nil))
fixme:shdocvw:ClOleCommandTarget_Exec (0x139f0c)->((null) 26 2 0x7e2b5488 (nil))
fixme:shdocvw:ClientSite_GetContainer (0x139f0c)->(0x7e2b54d4)
fixme:shdocvw:ClOleCommandTarget_Exec (0x139f0c)->({000214d1-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} 37 0 0x7e2b55c8 (nil))
fixme:shdocvw:HttpNegotiate_BeginningTransaction (0x135ead0)->(L"" L"" 0 0x7e2b5544)
fixme:shdocvw:ClOleCommandTarget_Exec (0x139f0c)->((null) 29 2 0x7e2b6a08 (nil))
fixme:shdocvw:DocHostUIHandler_GetDropTarget (0x139f0c)
fixme:shdocvw:ClientSite_GetContainer (0x139f0c)->(0x7e2b6894)
fixme:shdocvw:InPlaceFrame_SetStatusText (0x139f0c)->(0xf7e45f38)
fixme:shdocvw:ClOleCommandTarget_Exec (0x139f0c)->((null) 25 2 0x7e2b67a8 (nil))
fixme:shdocvw:ClOleCommandTarget_Exec (0x139f0c)->((null) 26 2 0x7e2b67a8 (nil))
fixme:shdocvw:OleObject_Close (0x139e70)->(1)
fixme:shell:DllCanUnloadNow stub
fixme:msimtf:DllCanUnloadNow ()
Patching project: Coh Install Dir: C:\Program Files\City of Heroes

checksumLoad returned 1

Verifying checksum

Checksum Verify succeeded, requesting patch

Client is up to date...Patched successfully

Searcing C:\Program Files\City of Heroes for bad files

err:ole:CoUninitialize Mismatched CoUninitialize
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,0,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,28,2): stub!
fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x34d960,0x00000000), stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,30,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,33,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,35,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,38,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,40,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,43,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,45,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,48,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,51,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,53,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,56,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,58,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,61,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,63,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,66,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,68,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,71,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,73,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,76,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,79,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,81,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,84,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,86,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,89,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,91,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,94,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,96,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,99,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,102,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,104,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,107,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,109,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,112,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,114,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,117,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,119,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,122,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,124,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,127,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,130,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,132,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,135,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,137,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,140,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,142,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,145,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,147,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,150,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,153,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,155,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,158,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,160,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,163,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,165,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,168,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,170,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,173,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,175,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,178,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,181,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,183,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,186,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,188,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,191,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,193,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,196,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,198,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,201,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,204,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,206,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,209,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,211,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,214,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,216,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,219,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,221,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,224,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,226,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,229,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,232,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,234,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,237,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,239,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,242,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,244,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,247,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,249,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,252,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:win:SetLayeredWindowAttributes (0x20044,0x00000000,255,2): stub!
fixme:wgl:X11DRV_wglChoosePixelFormatARB unused pfAttribFList
fixme:wgl:X11DRV_wglQueryPbufferARB unexpected attribute 2042

Steve, could you please open a bug on this. I am sure that the regression team would be interested.

As of this version, the contacts window now longer takes forever to bring up the first time. Now its downright snappy. Previously the contacts window could take 5-8 minutes to load, leaving the client largely unresponsive.

Debian unstable, Nvidia 169.09 (nv6200), wine 0.9.57

Confirmed. With Wine .57, the rendering of character thumbnails no longer takes longer then normal.

Have you noticed the texture artifacting with your nVidia 169.x drivers? I've had this since after 100.14, and half my buildings have vertical lines and my characters have messed up patterns on their costumes.

However, I confirm that yes, the contacts are FINALLY going faster, though the costume bug is still there.

Yes, some textures (mostly building textures) show up as alternating black/white bars instead of the desired texture. Haven't seen costume effects affected, mostly from lack of attention.

Does .9.55 really deserve an upgrade to Gold? Nothing has really changed since it was silver. IIRC, The costume change still crashes, the chat bug is still notorious, I still have a problem with my mouse leaving the border of my window and going to my TV-Out monitor, causing me to flail all over the place (which doesn't happen in Cedega). I have to wait at least five minutes for my lvl 35 number of contacts to load, and during this game is utterly unplayable (someone changed to nvidia-glx instead of *-new, but I've rolled back to the 100.14.11 driver and still have the problem)

The game seems completely incompatible with Firefox/Flash being open, meaning I can't keep ParagonWiki in the background to tab-out, and I've had problems with Compiz being active.

Overall, these problems are ones I've discussed while the game has been in Silver, and most seems to be repeatable by others on the forum, and they haven't changed yet. Granted, 0.9.56 isn't in the Ubuntu repos yet, so maybe something has been fixed.

The game runs flawlessly in Cedega, but looks so much better in Wine, however I think comparatively Wine's status should stay in silver until some of these bugs are fixed (the costume change seems small, but you can't go to the tailor until it is fixed).

I don't think it should be upgraded to gold yet either. I'm not having all the problems you mentioned but critical ones like the costume bug really should be resolved before leaving silver.
Seeing as how Co* didn't work at all in .45, it's certainly improved greatly but it's not worth gold with the kinds of problems left.

Ok sorry that is my bad and I do apologise. I played COH the other night for few hours. The chat bug is a major pain alright and quite disruptive but I did not try change costume and my charas are only lvl 14.

So yes maybe Gold status is a little premature I do apologise

No worries, you're the new maintainer :-)

Let's hope Wine's newer updates push this baby up to Gold or even Platinum status soon!

Does anybody know how likely it is that they will fix bug 10080 and get the costume change working? I just got to level 30 and want to get my personal aura and I don't know if there is a way to get it without the costume selection window. Does anyone know a way around this bug to edit my costume or get my personal aura?

For those all those having problems getting the patcher to get past geom.pigg (this may apply to other pigg problems). I found this bit that so far has alleviated problems with the patcher:

"If the updater crashes on geom.pigg, you need to increase your default TCP send window size. To do this issue the following commands at a terminal as root: cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem you should see three numbers. The middle number needs to be doubled (or otherwise increased) to at least 32768. To do this you can echo 4096 32768 131072 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem where the first and last numbers are the same as the values reported by the first command. Users may have to even triple or quadruple the middle number to get past this error."

I had to take mine up to 65536 before it could get past it without crashing (was giving an error along the lines of it not being the expected size when ran through a terminal, can't remember the error exactly as it would take the terminal with it when it crashed, and the error doesn't show up in redirected output for some odd reason).
Hope this helps. I'll let everyone know if I actually get past the updater and into the game.

Followed the procedure to copy old COH from Windows drive to the wine folder in ubuntu. Started COH and it verified all the files, and everything checkedout ok. I click next on the license page and loading bar appears, after about 5 seconds an error box pops up saying "Failed to create OpenGL rendering context". Have not been able to get past this part. I have Ubuntu Gutsy, and the latest COH patch.

I am having this same problem in Fedora 10 x86-64 (both kernel 2.6.27.7-134 as well as kernel 2.6.27-9-159) using Wine 1.1.10. GLXgears runs without problem, as do several Linux based opengl programs (Celestia Space Simulator and Really Slick Screensavers). I have an Nvidia GeForce 8500GT, and am using the Nvidia driver (version 177.82). This is (basically) a fresh install of Linux, Wine, and the Nvidia driver, from the reposito

As a history, I originally installed F10 and installed Wine (1.1.9), and could run City of Heroes using the nv driver - it was not playable by any means, but I could at least log in. Since I've installed the Nvidia driver, I haven't been able to log in under any circumstances. I would appreciate any suggestions or help anyone could offer.

Ok, I managed to fix this (and it was a stupidly simple fix, too).

I'm recording the answer that worked for me here, in case someone else comes along with the same problem; maybe it will save them the three months of grief I've experienced.

When installing the Nvidia driver, make sure to install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i386 as well as xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64. The latter was installed by default for me; the former, not so much.

When I first boot the machine (Ubuntu 7.10) the game runs with the aforementioned bugs. However when I restart it without logging out or restarting the machine I get two other major bugs.

1) Can't run/rubber band effect. I try to move from the spot where I enter the game but I only get a few feet before I'm back where I started.

2) The menus don't work. I try to click in-game menus and nothing happens. The chat window works so I can quit the game by typing /quit.

I got that too one time. I had a wine session that was stuck after having quit the game. I killed the wine process and everything was happy again. See if wine is staying open after you exit CoH...

I've both problems. I loaded just outside of a mission and was able to run the ten feet to click the mission door, but then inside the mission I had to hop to move, and even then I'd rubberband almost back to where I started. Running was completely hopeless.

Using backslash got me into the menu. I found that changing surround sound from enabled (I enabled that in full-screen mode) to disabled when in windowed mode would crash the game.

Chatting could be done with forward slash. It seemed everything had to be pressed twice. to type /netgraph 1 I had to do //netgraph 1, and Esc Esc to exit chat window.

Two things:

1. I've often mentioned a problem of my game hanging for no good reason... I've managed to track it down to having a web-browser open. I don't have any error code because the game basically hangs my whole system.

Firefox in particular is bad about this, but even Epiphany starts to interfere in the game. I can tab in and out of Pidgin with pretty much no issue, and especially when it is windowed. While I don't need to keep checking my e-mail, I would like to see paragonwiki.com on occasion.

2. Also, I'm assuming this is nVidia issue, but the latest set of drivers (including the beta which I installed to clear the pbuffer error with my contacts) are causing textures on characters to degrade to a set of squares, and all water effects and some buildings to look like diagonal lines. I can take a screenshot at some point to show what I mean, but as I say, this COULD be a nVidia problem since it happens with both Wine and Cedega.

Out of curiosity - does anyone know why CoH doesn't like playing while Compiz is running? I seem to recall there being a conflict with OpenGL somewhere.

For the record, 0.9.50 had full screen working without any hassles of remapping keys or juggling windowed mode. It worked as it did under Windows again. Updated to 0.9.51 and it's broken again. Now I have to spend 5-10 minutes swapping between 1024x768 and 800x600 before I can get it to work full screen again.

Any chance of getting this fixed and keeping it that way? Yes I know lots of folks play it windowed. I have a 15" LCD monitor and can't really see it when it's windowed (alas I'm a broke college student so no funds to fix that either).

I swapped over to Ubuntu 7.10 a while back full time and no longer have windows available to use and this is really frustrating. I was *thrilled* when 0.9.50 fixed it.

I second the problem with the new issue #11. I've never tried to run CoH in WINE before, but the exact same thing that happens to Jeff happens to me as well.

I installed Wine 0.9.51 on Ubuntu 7.10 and the updater ran just fine. I get the error messages when I run in a terminal window but it does not crash on 0.9.51. It did crash when I used the version that is in Gutsy repository though.

I've experienced the same problems as previously noted, client crash on costume change and distorted mouse cursor etc. but other than that it's playable!

Hello,

CoH has been running more or less fine for me, until today. I haven't played in about a week, and apparently the CoH Devs published Issue 11 to the live servers. So, when I launch CoH, it tries to update. It launches the updater, downloads a 'file manifest', then tries to fix file piggs/geomV1.pigg. At this point, the updater window just disappears.

I decided to launch coh from a terminal window, to see if any error messages are printed to stdout/stderr. A bunch of stuff was printed, but I think the relevant part is:

Fixing files: piggs/geomV1.pigg
Error calling setsockopt, ending socket buffer size is not what we told it! (16384!=32768)
Error calling setsockopt, ending socket buffer size is not what we told it! (32768!=65536)
Error calling setsockopt, ending socket buffer size is not what we told it! (65536!=131072)
fixme:dbghelp:SymInitializeW what to do ??
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Realized I forgot to say what version of wine I was using. Originally, I was using 0.9.49. When I got this problem, I checked to see if there was a newer version, and updated to 0.9.50. I still get the same problem.

I had a similar issue with the I-11 patch, however I think it may be quite different from what you are experiencing. Just in case though, I had started the patch, and rather than sit and watch it, I got up from my system and went off to do some other things. My screen saver comes up and locks my system, and it caused the patch to crash. When I came back there as an error on the images files. So I had to go through the whole verification process and it had to download and fix itself. But I stayed with it this time and it worked. Using Ubuntu 7.10, and Wine 0.9.50.

Now on another note, with the latest Wine version, I have had to change my Wine configuration in how I run the game. Full Screen will no longer work, I have to run it in windowed mode. This appears to be a regression in the latest version. I haven't had a chance to look for the fixme's and any other errors and search th bug database yet though....

I had the same issue with the update. It indicated that it couldn't download the index file and I had to check all the packages (which I do as part of testing anyway). After that it worked fine.

However, the game is working perfectly for me in fullscreen mode. I can coolswitch in and out normally. I don't even get the complaint about resolution when starting.

Something I forgot to mention previously, which may be important. The very first time that CoHUpdater tried to apply the I-11 patch, I cancelled out of the patch (because I decided I didn't want to wait ten minutes for it to patch right then, and would rather play another game, I think, or something like that). On windows, you can cancel the patch, and then restart it later.

Well, more technically, if you cancel the patch, you probably end up with a corrupt installation which the updater automatically repairs. But, effectively, it just applies the patch when you launch it again. I think what is happening is that for some reason, the 'repair' process is failing when it tries to fix the files.

I might just delete everything but CohUpdater.exe, and let the updater do a fresh installation of I-11.

Btw, I am also using Ubuntu Gutsy (I think that's 7.10 but I don't remember). The only other thing which might be 'non-standard' about my installation of wine is that I moved the drive_c directory to /usr/local/wine_drives/drive_c (I updated the wine config, using the wine configuration utility, to point to the new location, and I did a chown jeff.jeff /usr/local/wine_drives/drive_c so that my unprivileged user account would own the directory.

The reason I did that is that my home directories are stored in a separate, smaller (I think the total size is like 5 or 10 Gig for /home), encrypted partition. I don't need my Windows games encrypted (and the encryption likely introduces some performance penalties, albeit likely small on my computer, since I have a second cpu core that encryption can be offloaded to), and I have a lot more space on the / partition (I think 20 or 30G, don't remember at the moment exactly).

Btw,

Would it be useful to you guys to get the core dump file mentioned in the error messages? Where would that have been generated? Where can I upload it to for you guys to find it?

Here's something odd. After installing 0.9.49 of wine and some ubuntu updates to gnome and its libraries, my desktop resolution shows up as "0 x 0 (desktop)" in the CoH resolution selector. This has the pleasant side effect of getting rid of the "unable to support..." resolution messages when starting the game.

The old pbuffer error is now (at least on my 0.9.49 Ubuntu) crapping the game out on me every time I open the Contacts window.

Previously, trying load the contact window would take my level 31 upwards of five minutes, entirely due to the pictures, and now it won't do it at all.

I am going to roll back to 9.48, which is the last time I recall it working.

I have .9.49 and I do not see the problem in Debian "etch". See if you can do some more tweaking. If not, get the error data from it, then roll back. If the issue goes away, then bug the error. This way, it can get some attention and get fixed.

Excellent.

Quick question about error data: I noticed the Winedebug command earlier in these threads, will that output directly to a file that I can post? Most of the time, when I get the Pbuffer error, it results in my computer hanging and churning and being unable to actually save anything. If I can just output it all automatically, that would be great. There a way to do that? (still figuring out this newfangled Linux thingie ;-)

Also: where would a good place to tweak be? I've been searching online for more specific processes that might affect the Pbuffer but with no luck.

Okay, I've tried to roll back to 9.48 via source tarball, but I'm getting GCC compiler errors and it refuses to install. That doesn't appear to be an avenue, since I've searched for a couple of hours for a solution and can't find one.

Other than that, I'm not sure where to tweak. I've reinstalled the package a few times, poked around the registry, tried to search for OffScreenRendering (and while it appears as if shutting it off is a possible option, I can't seem to find where the heck I would go about doing that - everywhere on the net just says "disable it," without actually saying *where*).

Getting a log or something of the error is nigh impossible, since giving me the pbuffer error when it happens generally causes my computer to churn until it is unusable, making me reboot.

From what I gather, Pbuffer is an OpenGL thing. Would reinstalling my nvidia drivers and/or trying to resinstall OpenGL entirely help?

All said and done, this came out of nowhere, but seems to be the exact same issue as the costume-change bug. I don't know programming, but maybe they're the same. I have no other info to really give in starting up its own bug report.

Geh, any thoughts?

Steve, places to play with settings would be in winecfg (www.winehq.org/site/howto) or there is also an nvidia configurations tool that some other have mentioned on this forum and others. I personally don't have experience with the nvidia settings tool myself, but as soon as I get some time I will try to play with it a bit.

It is possible that the call that crashes the game may be very similar to the Pbuffer error. On mine when I hit the costume selector and get the crash out of wine, wine gives me a popup to copy the error to the clipboard, so I was hoping that you were getting that as well. Then maybe you could paste it into a text file and get the data the developers may need that way. Another possibility for debug information, would be when an app crashes in Linux, it typically creates (or overwrites if one already exists) a file called "core" in the /home/ directory. You may want to check and see if wine is creating a core dump when it crashes.

Now for cleaning up the uninstall, you may want to check Synaptic (if you use the Graphical interface, apt if you use the command line) and search for the wine package and make sure that you uninstall all on it. There is also a way to force a cleanup using dpkg and I believe remove or -r, when apt sometimes may fail.

I have played a bit with the winecfg, but I've tried to find anything that would be suitable to the error, and nothing.

I can attach the error when I get home - I did manage to copy it to a text file at one point before my computer went into a churning loop and I had to reboot the computer, but I can tell you that it looks similar if not identical to the costume-selector pbuffer error. There may be no connection, but when I load the contacts tab, it takes a while to load - not the text, but the pictures themselves. I have a hunch that trying to create the small contact pictures is causing the error in the same way that rendering the costumes in the costume-selector is likely causing the crash (since tha is the only thing the costume selector really does, right?)

I've fully uninstalled WINE through Synaptic, but it is giving me GCC compiler errors when I try to install the previous version via source (since there is no way to find 9.48 in Synaptic AFAIK), which I think it related to my GCC version. I think I read about an updated version being tricky to find just a moment ago, so I'll give that whirl later.

You can get deb packages of the older versions from the archive:

wine.budgetdedicated.com/archive/index.html

Ok, Steve, I dropped Debian Etch and installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) installed wine and CoH and CoV, updated and everything launched okay. I am still seeing the same issues with game play as I had with Debian, and only one new thing which is an issue with Desktop resolution that Duane mentioned. However, I don't really care for playing in windowed mode (I am a full screen junkie) so I went into wine's config and told it to not use the window manager to control the windows (was checked by default). I have launched again, and still goes into the game and is playable (I no longer get the resolution error that Duane discribes). So, I thought, ok, maybe you are using the full desktop effects which use Beryl (I think it is called) for the full on OpenGL stuff on your desktop, and that may be interfereing. So, I installed the extra package for the extra effects for the desktop control panel, turned on some effects, and launched CoH. Still went all the way into game play. So at this point I am at a loss.

You may be on to something with the gcc. For reference, my fully updated Ubuntu Gutsy's gcc version is reporting at 4.1.3 20070929 (Pre-Release). You can find this (in case you don't know) by getting to the Terminal and typing gcc -v

Other than that, maybe it has something to do with your video driver, but I would be hesitant if everything else seems ok, and you are running full effects on your destop, but still possible.

I played around with my graphics, because it pbuffered on loading the zone. Installing the beta Nvidia driver 169.04 cleared up that problem, although now I'm back to waiting for 10 minutes for each and every contact photo to load up. Nonetheless, the game plays and plays well.

Things I notice now:

Might be the new driver, but character selection screen has some strange colour issues on costumes - what is supposed to be a red cross on one character's helmet, for instance, is a black helmet with five rows of four red dots. It is pretty prevalent across the board, but when you load the game it is fine.

Not bugs: Also, what is the best alternative to alt-tabbing out of the game? I've tried to use multi-workspaces, but it doesn't bring me out of the game. If I alt-tab too much, though, it crashes the game. And I use dual-screen but DXGrab doesn't seem to keep the mouse in one spot when I am rotating the camera like it does on Cedega.

Thanks for both of your help, I really appreciated it.

Ah good you got it cleared up. *whew* :) No thanks are necessary as you have done all the hard work. :)

I have the same issue with loading the contact pictures. I didn't have that on Etch though, which seems odd. It may be a new "feature" with 9.49 of Wine. I have noticed though, if you let it sit there and load them up (go take a bio break or what have you) then it is done for the rest of the game for that character. Now I haven't gone back into a character yet to see if it is still cached up (fingers crossed that it is).

For alt-tabbing I don't use the window manager, and I stay in full screen, so, I don't really know. When I am in the game I am in the game and don't like to be interrupted from the game. Hopefully someone else can offer some advice there...

And for the mouse issue, I had mentioned some odd behavior with my mouse in my test results. It doesn't seem to be particular to a variation of OS as I still have it in Ubuntu Gutsy as I did in Debian Etch, but I will have to see if the pointer is changing position on me when I am trying to mouse look. I really wasn't looking for that, but I think you are on to something there, and that may be a bug (hopefully a regression that they missed). I was thinking it had something to do with a buffer for the mouse getting overloaded with input and thus starting to lag behind, as I noticed if I hit a movement key, it would briefly clear up, but it could be I am experiencing a different issue altogether.

The alt-tabbing works fine for Pidgin, but what I have noticed is a pretty consistent conflict with Firefox.

Last night I had the game running wihout Firefox and it went pretty much flawlessly for hours while chatting out of game pretty heavily, but when I had Firefox running I couldn't tab-out without it starting to buckle and lag, eventually stalling entirely.

The tough part is that ParagonWiki is so damn useful sometimes. ;-)

Contact pictures are fine if you have the time to wait, but my lvl 31 takes upwards of ten minutes, I can only imagine how long it would take an upper-level player (that being said, it is also a CoH design flaw to have all contacts stay in your tab for the duration of the game - why would I go back to my lvl 1 contact at level 50?). Still, the game play better than on Cedega, despite the issues.

You could always try another light weight browser to use while you are in CoH. Debian has Nautilus, and I think Ubuntu calls it the Ubuntu Sensible Browser. Then there is always Oprah... It could have something to do with a plug-in you have in Firefox....

Does this affect new characters, or is it just characters with lots of contacts? I don't have any 30+ characters at the moment to test with. So far I haven't had this problem with my ubuntu installation.

What has worked for me in Ubuntu, pretty simply, is copying CoHUpdater.exe into the main WINE Program Files directory (note: OUTSIDE of a possible COH directory, and letting it install even 1% of the downloaded package.

Immediately quit the installer, and then creae a Symlink from your old CoH directory to the Program Files folder in WINE Delete the newly-created CoH folder there, and rename the symlink accordingly. the installer will ask you whether you want to install into that directory or not, just say yes and it will run swimmingly from the old install.

At this point, for some reason, there is no concern about permissions or what-have-you. The only thing is that it will often need to re-verify the game files, so you may have to wait upwards of 2-3 minutes before it begins to load.

I'm not sure why this would be the case, but I recently had to install the X development code (i.e. headers, libs, etc.) to get another package working properly (synaptics only has a really old version available and I needed a newer release).

After the installation, launching CoH will randomly say that it cannot launch in fullscreen mode at 1024x768, instead using 1024x768 windowed. Sometimes, despite my settings, it uses 800x600 rather than 1024x768.

Now I'm spending 20 minutes trying various random things before I finally get it to run fullscreen. Any thoughts on this? I'd remove the X development stuff, but I need that for work, so CoH has to take 2nd string on this :(

Here are the exact error messages, in order.

"Resolution 1024 x 768 not supported in fullscreen mode. Defaulting to 1024 x 768


then I get


Couldn't change to fullscreen. The display driver failed the specified graphics mode. Setting game to 800 x 600 windowed mode.

When I first installed Wine on a clean Ubuntu install (plus the restricted nvidia driver), all I had to do to open CoH in fullscreen was set a fullscreen toggle shortcut in Gnome. After that the game opened in a fullscreen window in fullscreen mode the way I was used to.

However, since I've been doing some tinkering with my graphics settings both in the game and in the nvidia settings application, I've been getting the same sort of messages you do. The game starts to open in one mode then switches to 800 x 600, then goes to CoH windows mode when the game opens, in a window that fits the 1280 x 1024 screen appropriately.

Normally I like fullscreen, but I'm starting to get used to the window. I haven't taken time to fool with it since I haven't had a lot of play time lately.

I think this is related to the fact that Gnome and CoH don't seem able to detect my video refresh rate. The nvidia settings show 60 Hz (which is normal for the LCD), but Gnome and CoH insist it's running at 50 Hz. I suspect there's some disconnect where the window manager is not getting the information correctly, although it's basically working anyway.

Hmm, both nvidia-settings and CoH show 50hz for my monitor refresh. This is the same value that Windows shows so I don't think there's a problem there.

The only reason this is a problem is that the mouse position is *off* by the distance from the bottom of the window to the bottom of the screen, so when I go to click on something it's not in the spot it seems - even though it is still shown there. At this point, I'm back to having to play under Windows as this makes the game nearly unplayable. If I could get fullscreen to work that would be fine. If I could get windowed to work and could adapt to it being so small (and having proper positions) that would be cool.

The cursor thing has happened to me as well. It's caused by CoH thinking it's in full screen while there's actually a window border, or vice versa. You can fix it by either setting the game to the appropriate display then going to a fullscreen window (in Gnome you have to set a key bind to the "toggle fullscreen mode" in the keyboard shortcuts application before you can do this), or by setting the game to "windowed" resolution and playing in a managed window.

I can see where that would cause the problem, but the real problem is that no matter what mode I set for CoH, it never uses it. It takes 20-30 minutes of trying things to get it to finally run full screen.

I set it for full screen, and it refuses to do it. I set it for windowed and there's a 50/50 shot of it working properly. If I new where to set gnome to do a keybinding for full screen I'd try that, but alas most of my X work has been on IBM RS/6000 systems and it's vastly different than linux.

Well, on Ubuntu (and gnome in general) you set the keybind by running "gnome-keybinding-properties" and setting the "toggle fullscreen mode" option. (I set mine to ctrl+alt+enter.)

Before that option was set, nothing I did would make a window go fullscreen. I can see why they'd write it that way. If you don't have the toggle set, how do you get out of fullscreen mode?

With that keybind set and my CoH resolution set to desktop resolution, I get the peculiar message "option 1280 x 1024 not supported, using 1280 x 1024" when I start, but it does run correctly in 1280 x 1024. I should also note that the mouse loses compatible cursor setting even though I specified it. (The pointer still works fine, it just looks funny.)

If you're using another window manager, different rules will apply. Kmix sets keybinds for KDE, I take it.

Overall, I think I prefer the windowed/windowed (1272 x 971) mode now. Bear in mind that you must set "windowed" in CoH options and use a window in your window manager. Unfortunately, I suspect this is all more in the province of window handling than actual wine bugs.

Got CoH(via Good vs. Evil DVD) up and running on Ubuntu 7.10 under wine.

Worked pretty good, apart from the invisible mouse.

Logged out, which prompted the CoH updater to run and grab Issue 11 content(not out yet, but they're installing it anyway).

After a bit, I ran CoH again(via the shortcut wine placed on the desktop)..but the graphics were gone. Shiny textures and logging in resulted in the "Port Oakes" load screen staying on top of the game window. It should be noted that the mouse was vaguely visible, but not much else was.(Power bar, nav, chat, etc. were)

I installed this on 7.10, same version of wine. The cursor looks funny, and panning the view by holding right-click spins me around madly at times, but these are not show stoppers. What is a show stopper is the fact that it crashes when you go into the choose costume panel (at Icon), That is missing functionality altogether, IMO. This has been a known bug for a while - is there a fix for that? I'd love to dump Cedega..

While not quite the solution you're looking for, could the /cc command bypass the problem?

Try /cc 0-4 in the chat line in game.

That does work for changing costume but does not work for visits to Icon.

Another note for Mike - antialiasing won't work if you try to turn it on in the game. You have to use the nvidia-settings tool to enable it at the driver level.

I noticed that Mike was having trouble using alt-left click in CoH under Ubuntu. I just thought I'd point out that alt-left click and drag is intercepted by gnome to let you move a window without using the titlebar. If gnome is handling your windows you'll have to change that behavior or change the way you do it in game.

Actually, I did some more testing after getting your message and have a bit more to add. I'm not sure if it's gnome or something else that is doing this, but there are more oddities in dealing with shirt/alt/ctrl keys in the game.

I normally setup the normal tray as tray 1, the "alt-tray" (i.e. holding down left alt key pops up a temp 2nd bar) with tray 2, and the "ctrl-tray" (holding down left-ctrl brings up another tray) as tray 3. I can't change which of these trays are assigned to what on the two alternate trays. I'm researching to see if I can set these in binds, but it's late and haven't found it yet.

I tried using winecfg and setting it to non-managed mode for the window, but then I get no keyboard input at all, even after clicking on the window somewhere. Not sure if I did something wrong or what. Changing it back worked as usual again.

I did get the anti-aliasing working using nvidia-settings. Thanks for the heads up on that one. I've been using red hat for years and am a new convert to ubuntu, so wasn't accustomed to having a working high res X session on an Nvidia card.

If you all have any other suggestions on things to try to get alt/ctrl working I'd appreciate the input. I'm glad to be able to play, and to be fair it seems to perform better under Wine than XP.

I thought I'd post a few notes about my experience setting up CoH under Ubuntu Gutsy. Hopefully they'll help anyone who's missing a few key points of the process like I was.

It's been several years since I've done much with Linux. I've been playing with Ubuntu for only a few weeks, determining whether or not it would work as my main operating system, and I was so impressed that I've already removed my Windows partition. Of course the thing I was most pessimistic about was running my favorite MMO without having to reboot to Windows.

Last night I did a clean install of Ubuntu Gutsy from the new CD to wipe out the many mistakes I made while trying out Ubuntu. I changed very little except to load as many gstreamer packages as I could and a few utilities. I also loaded the restricted nvidia driver for my fanless geforce 8600gts.

I loaded the distribution version of Wine (0.9.46), and created a directory for my C drive which I entered in the winecfg application under the drives tab. At that point, I copied my backup of my City of Heroes folder to the correct position in my C drive folder. I typed into my terminal:

wine "C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe"

For some reason the updater would stop with a complaint that I didn't have the necessary file permissions or my disk was full. Of course the disk wasn't full, and changing the file permissions on the existing files and directories didn't help.

So I dropped back and punted. I removed the copy of the City of Heroes files and installed from the disc (the Good vs Evil edition DVD, to be precise) with:

wine "E:\setup.exe"

The install ran normally and gave me the option to start CoH, which I did. I got a message when the updater started that wine needs gecko to display Web content. Since I don't particularly like the splash information in the updater, I canceled it and the updater started downloading patches.

At that point I decided to cancel the download and copy my old directory back over again. I changed the permissions for user (me) to read, write, and execute using the nautilus file manager since I've forgotten most of what I used to know about chmod. When I started the updater again, I was able to log in immediately.

When I saw the character screen I was impressed. Then I selected one of my new guys and entered the game. I could see him, barely, but some sort of artifact was drawing sky over everything else. I could just catch glimpses as I turned. When I tried to select the menus, the menu applet disappeared and I had to feel my way to the quit option and the desktop button.

After checking the winehq download page for debian binaries in the latest version (0.9.47) at [winehq.org/site/download-deb], I added the repository to my apt sources per the instructions and grabbed the latest file with synaptic. This time, when I started up I was able to see everything.

The game was loading with (I believe) the default settings in graphics and audio. OSS had been detected, the mouse was not constrained, and the window manager (gnome) was handling the window. Wine was set to behave like Windows XP. The game loaded in the default 1024x768 resolution taking up the full screen. I changed the resolution to 1280x1024 (the same as my desktop) in game, and quit to desktop to restart.

This time the game loaded in a window (oddly enough) and with borders, it was larger than the screen. To compensate, I set my two default panels in gnome to auto-hide and positioned the game window using alt-left click and drag. It was a bit ugly, but it played fine at first glance.

Next I set the winecfg graphics options to prevent gnome from handling the game window. When I restarted, the game went full screen but I couldn't cool switch (alt-tab) out. I had a difficult time figuring a way around this.

I tried starting the game in a new x-window session with some instructions on the Ubuntu site:

ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=51486

Since the instructions were for an earlier version of Ubuntu and some of the file paths have changed from "xfree86" to "x11", it took me a while to get it to work. The updater ran fine in the window, but when it tried to load the game, the second x-session quit. Since part of the instructions involved giving anyone permission to start an x-session, I changed everything back and tried another tack.

After searching the forums and google a while, I found a reference to a full-screen option in gnome. Using the shortcuts application, I set it to ctrl-alt-enter. I also set the window back to managed in winecfg. The next time I started CoH, the 1280x1024 screen started up in a fullscreen window (no borders, just CoH -- without my actually having to use the shortcut, mind you). I could cool switch out to my desktop normally, and could use the shortcut to change to a standard window and back.

The first caveat is that I usually have to left click on the CoH screen when switching back to get it to accept keyboard input. Not a big deal.

The second issue is that cool switching is very sluggish when the CoH window is being handled. The default gnome settings use a lot of transparency in switching windows, which probably doesn't help. At one point I started using the fullscreen shortcut repeatedly and alt-tabbing back and forth rapidly. Eventually the screen went black and the system wouldn't respond to mouse or keyboard input. I couldn't even bring Linux down with alt-sysrq RSEIUB and had to power the computer down. Maybe the keyboard input was being intercepted by the unresponding CoH program.

Over the next few days I'm going to look for more problems in Wine/CoH and file a test report. I'll probably end up turning off transparency in gnome everywhere I find it. It's pretty, but no big deal.

Duane,

I think you can bring over an existing install by running the updater from outside the Wine hierarchy the first time. It will copy itself to the Program Files directory and won't have the permission problems, which are caused by it trying to patch itself. At least, that's how I had to do it under Cedega (which is where I first created my Linux CoH folder). *Installing* it this way definitely works.

You might also try running City of Heroes in windowed mode - that's sometimes solved problems for me in Windows, let alone Linux.

I've settled on running with the window handled by gnome, but full screen since I like having the same game resolution as my desktop. Since I turned off all the transparency effects in gnome, it's running rock-solid. I can play just the way I used to in Windows.

I can imagine trying to take a complex, three-dimensional, openGL application and move, resize, and change the Z axis simultaneously in real time could be stressful on the software. It works fine with standard applications, but it might be too much to expect an emulated Windows game to do the same thing.

The problem might be in the nvidia drivers. My Windows nvidia drivers have always given me the occasional problem.

...actually works better for me than full-screen mode, but YMMV. Glad you have it working!

As of 0.9.47, this game pretty much just works, other than dual-core processors and the costume selector (creator works fine).

In .40 and .41 the patcher crashes, in .39 it works flawlessly.

Man I really wish this worked... Works in Cedega... but I loath them as they are closed source. They dont have 64 bit version... and making it work without being able to compile in 32 bit... thats a huge pain in the butt... If someone fixes it there is $50 dollars in it for them (Canadian... so 45 american... ish)

Hi does any one know what to do when city of heroes dual pack comes up with an error saying Corrupted installer?
plz help

Thinking on installing coh using wine on the Ubuntu distro.

Say in earlier posts probs with Gentoo. Has anyone a completely successful install, loading, and gameplay of coh using wine on any distro, especially ubuntu?

Thank you.

I run CoH on Ubuntu. Wine 1.1.5, Ubuntu 8.04, Nvidia 8800. Game works well. Bug 10080 is not a factor with an ATI graphics card, only nvidia. The cursor issue was fixed in 1.1.5. Not much else to add, follow th tips from this forum and you'll be fine.