"Go to Sea" Crash on Crossover/Wine (MacBook Pro)

[Jackal Korrie]

Hi All,

I recently installed PoTC New Horizons (Build Beta 4) on top of the fresh PoTC installation. I'm running it with Crossover on MacBook Pro 2018, with the following specs:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro15,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2,6 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 6
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 9 MB
Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled
Memory: 32 GB

Graphics:
Chipset Model: Intel UHD Graphics 630
Type: GPU
Bus: Built-In
Automatic Graphics Switching: Supported
gMux Version: 5.0.0
Metal: Supported, feature set macOS GPUFamily2 v1

The game actually runs great, at least up to the point where I finish the tutorial and decide to "Go to the Sea". That's where it always crashes. I can hear the ambient sound once I pick the option to leave the harbour, but before I can see the boat, the game crashes.

This is what I did or tried so far:

1. Installed the game outside Program Files
2. Using Windows XP bottle with all dependencies preinstalled
3. Tried fullscreen or windowed mode
4. Installed Intel patch
5. Enabled error logging, see files attached
6. Tried different resolution/texture quality combinations

Any ideas or suggestions are more than welcome!


Thanks!

 

[The Nameless Pirate]

Welcome aboard @Jackal Korrie!!!

Are you using the Intel fix or DgVoodoo?
Probably yes, since you got to the tutorial. But it doesn't hurt to ask, does it?

 

[Cerez]

Unfortunately you have two things working against you:

• First, your graphics card -- the game is known to have rendering issues with Intel HD graphics and the flora on islands (in sailing mode), which will cause this crash.
• Secondly, Wine has a persistent, known DirectX graphics memory handling bug that causes any of the Sea Dogs games to crash when entering the sea (sailing mode): WineHQ Bugzilla – Bug 27439

You would need to patch the Wine source code and recompile Wine, or you could try a more recent version of Wine. But there's still no guarantee the game will work. You may need to apply the Intel patch as well or DgVoodoo, as @The Nameless Pirate has said, and even then there is still no guarantee the game will fully work, without graphics problems (because of it being incompatible with your particular graphics card).

Since you've paid for the product and dedicated technical/customer support that comes with it, you could also try contacting the CrossOver folks and sending them the link to the bug report, to see if they can compile the custom version of Wine for you.

 

[ChezJfrey]

Unfortunately you have two things working against you:

• Secondly, Wine has a persistent, known DirectX graphics memory handling bug that causes any of the Sea Dogs games to crash when entering the sea (sailing mode): WineHQ Bugzilla – Bug 27439

The bug is not Wine, but rather the game engine.

Someone in that thread speculates what causes the problem, ""The game most likely writes past the boundary of a mapped buffer memory. Please try the attached patch."

Their speculation is correct, and was actually correctly diagnosed quite some time ago here in this forum: Solved - Heap Corruption, Random Crashes

Heap corruption connected to the usage of DX8Render ReleaseVertexBuffer() eventually leads to the game crashing.

Writing past boundary = Heap corruption.

That battle interface heap corruption referred in the PA! thread resides in the sea-specific, "navigator" part of battle interface. There are actually several more heap corruption problems in the game, within the sea.dll. Apparently, that Wine patch just allows more leniency for a problem program, like the Storm engine, to violate without crashing. But the fault for this specific problem does not lie with Wine itself.