Official forums for BZFlag.org

Setting up a new system and BZFlag Mac is freezing.

System: MacOS Monterey, Intel 13900k, AMD 6600xt

Symptoms of the freeze:
Playing as normal, map doesn't change anything.
Will play fine for 10-30secs, then freeze
Every 20-30sec, it will "refresh" with the attached screen images.
When it refreshes, it will take a key command like F12. While frozen, there is no input.

Thanks,

Cj

I'm assuming this is a hackintosh, correct?

It is a modified machine, yes. mostly looking to track down if there is an issue or if it is an incompatibility. So far, all openGL and Metal tests I have performed have been fine, this is the first item I have run into with an issue.

Cj

Does it work differently if windowed? (Press F1 to toggle)

Yes, I was able to play longer, like 1-3mins, but it did happen when windowed.

Cj

I wonder if it's some issue with thermals. What if you set the Energy Saver option to Limit FPS?

I ran it under energy saver which was 27fps, lasted about 1min until it had issues.

Interesting note, it buffered the option screen and 2 other play frames and cycled between the 3. Odd to see the option screen frame cached.

I have run it through stress testing without issues. Geekbench and other GPU tests.

Ok, ran temp monitoring in the GPU and CPU while running BZ, and they barely budged from idle.

I have tried to recreate this issue with other software and games and have been unable to see anything fail. Is there a similar game you can think of I can test with?

It looks like a driver issue to me. Apple is known to have poor support for old APIs like OpenGL with their drivers. The hackintosh factor adds many unknowns. You could try playing with various graphics options in the game to see if anything makes a difference.

The problem is I can't recreate it anywhere but in BZFlag. Every test and use I have done the only app that has any issues is BZFlag. Since I work in 3D, I would have thought when throwing multi million polys at it that there would be some failure if it were a driver issue.

Are the other 3D applications you're trying using the old OpenGL 1.5 API? We don't yet use any shaders, so we're unlike the majority of other 3D software.

Thanks Blast, I dont know the different graphics systems on the other software whether it is Metal or which version of OpenGL. I think Im resolved that it won't work on this system.