CM always crashes the first time...?

[vireo]

Hi, I'm running CM on a G3 laptop, 233Mhz model, and the game almost always crashes the FIRST time I try to start playing a battle -- I hit done after reading my final briefing, it begins loading the map and - bam! - right back to the Finder! Then I open CM, try to start that same battle again and it works like a charm. It only does it once per session. It's not a big problem, but I just wanted to make sure it wasn't a sign of something worse...

Thanks for any help,

Brendan

[Schrullenhaft]

I wouldn't say that this is a sign of an oncoming problem. It does sound strange, but I've heard of other somewhat similar sounding problems on the Mac (usually involving resolutions). What it looks like you are experiencing is that CM's 3D display doesn't want to initialize, but on attempting it again - it does.

What resolution and color depth are you running at ? Are you running an external monitor or just the internal LCD ? Have you tried minimizing the number of extensions/control panels that you load up ? Do you have this problem with every scenario or just some of them ? The Mac laptops (and laptops in general) don't have much in the way of display memory (VRAM) and it is possible that when attempting to load up all the textures something just stops working and CM halts, dropping you to the Finder.

If you're not already... I'd suggest running at 640 x 480 and 16-bit color.

[vireo]

Thanks for the reply, Schrullenhaft. I'm using the internal LCD, and I have my monitor resolution at 1024x768, color depth set to Thousands of Colors. I haven't tried limiting the number of extensions/control panels loaded. The problem occurs on almost every scenario -- very rarely will it start on the first attempt, so rarely in fact that I can't remember what scenario it last did that on...I think CM may want to run at 640x480, because the desktop is messed up sometimes when CM is running. For example, if the game is on but idle and the computer goes to sleep, the desktop appears in 640x480 resolution. So is CM trying to tell me it wants to run at a lower resolution? I'm trying to use the SwitchRes app to make CM run at a higher resolution, but maybe I should just set the monitor to 640x480 and see if it runs smoother?

[Schrullenhaft]

I would suggest running at a lower resolution to see if that addresses your problem or not (if very well may not). Is your desktop resolution set to 1024 x 768 or is that just in CM ?

It sounds strange that your screen saver would switch to 640 x 480 while CM is running (and 640 x 480 isn't your Finder resolution). I seem to recall some people haveing problems with power saving on laptops and CM, but I don't think that they were related to first run "drop to the desktop" CM problem.