Somehow the crashes are getting more and more frequent and are not limited to S7 any more. Often my machine freezes after just a few seconds. Why are the devs ignoring this problem for month?

/me is totally frustrated

Ok, we're not 'ignoring' the problem. We just can't figure out why it's happening to you and not everyone else.
Is Vendetta crashing or just freezing or your computer rebooting or?

To help find the problem, make sure your graphics settings are set to their minimum values, and that there are no other apps running on your mac. Does it happen only when you're in fullscreen mode or does it happen when you're in windowmode too? Try switching to windowmode and check if you haven't already.

If Vendetta crashes and doesn't come up with the bugreporter program, can you check the Console log (I think that's what it is called) and see if there is any useful information in there.

Do you have any joysticks plugged in?

Do you have the latest version of macosx? (10.2.6) I assume you do.

If you are in sector 7 and then it crashes, do you start out back in sector 7 when you log back on? Does it just crash a few seconds later or does it only happen if you leave the sector and then come back?

That's just a few things to check for me to help figure out what is going on.

First of all, I am really happy to get some feedback about this problem. I don't think its just me, pretty much everybody with a mac seems to have this problem. I tried windowed-mode, no difference. The machines freezes. The sound continues for a second and then loops. I have to cold reboot the machine, which doesn't make fsck too happy. I have no joysticks, just a USB mouse. Latest Mac OS X version. Escape pod doesn't work (it can kill vendetta as long it doesn't freeze). This is a 15" PowerBook 800 MHz DVI 1GB. Usually the crash happens when I am close to the station in S7. I don't think its connected to warping. It seems to happen more often with other ships around. Most the times a roid is visible on the screen and I am about to turn somewhere. But I also had freezes while staring out into empty space (rare). I encountered freezes also in S4, but those are rare (I was flying through the central roid area). I am more then happy to do anything possible to identify the problem, but having this for month now is really frustrating. I had today crashes every 3 minutes or so in S7. Next time I will take a picture of the crashed screen (camera, screenshots don't work) if that helps. Let me know how I can get it to you.

Btw: speaker/brightness controls stop working. Those are handled pretty much directly in the kernel. The system must be dead for good.

I tried to reproduce the problem at it works fairly consistently. I have to be close to the station (between the three big roids in S7). I took pictures of 3 freezes. Every time the orange/yellow asteroid belt is visible and some big roids. No other ships are visible, at least not close by. I tried the same thing first flying out a little and pointing towards the sun. No freeze. Then I looked back at the station and the roids around it and circled the mouse. No problem. Even getting closer everything works fine. I really have to be fairly close to the station (near the little roid to the left of the station). Then it freezes after 5-10s mouse circling. I hope this helps.

I am going to add a post to this thread with every freeze :-). This time in a bus I left the station and immediatly pulled up sharply. On the last screen parts of the station are visible (one docking bay, close by), towards the center the sun and one big roid. Picture available.

Note, that Suicidal Lemming has the same problem with an iBook (ATI Radeon). NVidia and ATI drivers exposing exactly the same bug is highly unlikly. The cause has to be higher up in the rendering pipeline, if its really not vendetta itself.

Do you have an ati chip too? (your user profile said radeon 7500) Just making sure that's correct.

I tried on our g4 733 mac with an ATI Radeon 8500 and hung around sector 7 for a while and didn't have any problems. I didn't warp out or into the sector though.

If you have Drive 10, try running it. I play this game a lot and I've never ran into this problem, I've had kernel panics every now and then but those are fixed. If you don't have drive 10, then insert your Mac OS X cd into the the rom and hold down "c" while the computer is starting up, it will boot from the CD, then you can check and repair your hd from there. You might have a bad Btree or something, those seem to screw up Vendetta quite a bit. Also, simply restarting your computer before you play Vendetta, you know, giving it a fresh, crash free restart, might help. You don't have to do it every time you restart Vendetta, just try to restart OS X before it has a chance to crash.

I had freezes with both, the ATI and a desktop mac with NVidia. Try to be close to the station and wobble/circle the mouse around quickly. That kills my machine in 10s.

Go to the location and type /displayshippos and post the numbers here. I will try to go to the same coordinates and see what happens.

I give it a try.

First of all, I scaled down to 800x600 and disabled all graphics gismos, but it still crashes. I left the station (right docking bay) but didn't move any further:

displayshippos results:
-285.59 215.98 -825.38
0.0423 0.9626 0.0846: 0.2539

I circled the mouse as quickly as I could for 5s and boom. This time the sun is pretty much in the middle of the picture, the top part of the station docking bay is visible and a big roid to the right. I took a picture again. The only commonality seems to be, that everytime a major orange area is visible (docking bay or distant orange roid belt). The way the sound starts looping, but progresses over the next 30s slightly (other parts of the sound repeat every 10s or so) I would bet the kernel is stuck in an endless loop (interrupt comes, bottom half is triggered, but top half never gets executed either because a lock is held or all resources are eaten up somewhere inside the kernel). As no other application is triggering this problem, you guys must be doing something nasty the 3D subsystem really dislikes :-(.

Yeah, it's gotta be the drivers not working properly with the data I send it. I'll test it at that position. Sector 7 right? WHat is the 'distant orange roid belt' you see? Ohh I think you mean the planet ring.

Is there a command to print the position and viewpoint with every rendered frame instead of just once? (if there is none, could you add one?).

Ok listen, this has got to be fixed, i now have some obscure data file in safari that is curropt so safari locks down my computer for a minute then quits.
I think thats because of the number of times safari went from running to not running with no warning.
Vendetta crashing my entire computer lately, backlight adjust buttons don't work when crashed, along with sound buttons, apple option esc doesn't work, apple q doesn't work, sound loops progresses some, everything freezes on screen. Also, it always seems to happen near the s7 station.

I hate Internet Explorer.

Video card um, ermm
ATI Mobility Radeon 7500
32 mb o memory (on the card)

I usually have safari running, but that takes up 0% of the processor if i leave it alone for awhile.

Yah, i checked the crash.logs for vendettaclient but there were only 2 of them, if it logged the crashes you are trying to fix there would be a lot more.

Also, sometimes i have folding running, but that only uses cpu power that nothing else is using. (terminal version of folding)

Hm, so you had other apps running at the same time as Vendetta, Lemming? What video card do you have again?
I really wish I could easily fix the crashes, but it's not an easy thing to track down. I tried the radeon 8500 with no problems, but I still need to try the gf2mx. This is on a G4. On the G3 we have a rage128. I haven't tried it on that either.

Any additional info from your Console may be helpful but if your computer locks up, I think there won't be anything in there.

My video card is ATY:RageM7 (==Rage Mobility 7500), 32MB too. Sounds like the Rage 7500 driver is buggy.

hot spots for these crashes are near the stations in s7 and s13. (i am assuming s17 would be a hot spot too, but i can't test it efficiently.)