[Fixed] 10.9 compatibility issues

[nil]

EDIT: An update is pushed that fixes HaloMD from crashing on certain systems (see below) when running on 10.9 Mavericks

With 10.9's release incoming, Halo may not run on certain systems with certain graphics cards (e.g, integrated cards likely, though not entirely sure) due to a bug. Now it is actually unclear if the bug is a memory-smasher in Halo that has gone long unnoticed, or if it's a bug in GPU drivers with the new release. Either is likely possible, although after looking into it a bit I'm convinced it's probably the former.

For the technical: the bug is that Halo crashes during its OpenGL context creation -- the function offset is at 0x002b45f2 in memory (and makes calls to relevant function offsets 0x002c3fba and 0x002b395a). It is possible to play around with swizzling functions at runtime (see halomd_overrides.m in HaloMD's source). You can also use Hopper to examine the disassembled code and get a pseudo-code C output to see exactly what it is doing. I have actually made a small test app calling some of the same deprecated functions Halo does with running into no obvious issues. Machines so far known to run into the crash: MBA with Intel HD 3000, MBA with Intel HD 4000, MBP with NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M and Intel HD Graphics 4000. Machines not known to be affected: some iMacs.

With mavericks becoming free to users from 10.6 - 10.8, and with it being a nice upgrade otherwise, unless we can try to resolve the issue in Halo, or unless it's a bug in the drivers in which apple releases a bug fix later, I anticipate this will be pretty detrimental to the Halo field. If I were to make a guess now, this will affect most laptops, and thus most Macs.

[HandofGod]

Guess I will stick with 10.8 for now and wait until Apple releases an update. I just don't want to take any chances, as I still recall blindly updating to Lion two years ago and being furious that Power PC applications were no longer supported. Now I am wiser (hopefully) and will be patient. I just hope that this update won't affect too many and drive people away from Halo MD. The community has made quite a bit of progress in the past year in my opinion.

[yourlife]

Apple released an update for my computer idk why it hasnt on yours (t=strange -_-)

[zapconquest]

My 2010 Macbook Air upgraded to 10.9 does not appear to be affected. I believe it has an NVIDIA GeForce 320M.

[Modzy]

Seems to mainly be focused on Integrated chips like Intels.

[nil]

A fix is out. The issue was that halo wanted to reserve memory usage starting from 0x40000000. However, the GPU drivers were already using that region - thus causing Halo to overwrite the GPU driver's code causing a crash. The fix is that we reserve the memory earlier on before the drivers are loaded into memory (via code injection). Special thanks for 002 assisting in pinpointing the bug.

[Mgalekgolo]

Guess I can upgrade to Mavericks now, hopefully my HD 3000 will work.

[Darth Vader]

The updated halo MD no longer runs on leopard.

[WaeV]

Snow Leopard, or just Leopard?

[Darth Vader]

Leopard

[nil]

Paste a crash log at https://gist.github.com and send me a URL to it.

The window that says halo quit unexpectedly should have a "Details" button or something you can expand, to get the log. If it doesn't, check Console.app for details, filter for Halo, and find the log file.

And is it the HaloMD app or the game that crashes? If you want to, you can roll back to b11 for time being.

[nil]

OK. I think it should be fixed for 10.5 users now, just download from http://halomd.net if you're on 10.5