Serious lockup in Exult on a Mac

[Shawn Smith]

I've been running Exult on a Mac for a while now with no problems. (Playing Serpent Isle, if that matters). A day or two ago while working through the Silver Seed expansion, Exult just crashed. I didn't take this as a big deal and just thought I'd pick up at the last save game some other time.

This afternoon, I tried starting Exult. I got a grey box, no Exult menu screen, no nothing. Exult locked up so hard that Force Quit wasn't working. Telling the computer to restart wasn't working either. I ended up having to literally pull the plug. I plugged in my computer again and started up, tried again, same result.

I'll post the nearest saved game if someone can tell me where those files are located on a Mac. (I tried browsing the Exult Application Data files, but couldn't locate them).

I'm guessing my best option right now is removing Exult and reinstalling it, which means I want to move those saved games and put them back when I'm done.

Has anyone else seen this?

My Mac is on OS 10.6.7 and I'm (failing at) running Exult 1.4.9rc1

[Dominus]

That's odd. Since this happens even before Exult even touches the savegames it's very odd. Was there anything in the console.app written about this crash?

Try running the exult.app from the disk image, just close every other app before so you don't lose any unsaved data.
Also set exult to windowed mode (by editing exult.cfg in ~/library/preferences/).

[Shawn Smith]

It worked just fine from the disk image. I suppose during the previous crash (whatever happened) the installed program must have become corrupted.

So, if I want to use a fresh install of Exult without losing previous data, what do I do? I'm not well versed on the OS functions on such things, but I assume that removing the existing application would get rid of the application data as well. Am I wrong?

Could I simply copy the DMG version over the version in the applications file?

(BTW, would you like me to save the (badly) broken version to send to the Exult team to figure out what went wrong? Because this is pretty badly wrong. I have never seen my Mac lock up like that.)

[Shawn Smith]

Oh, and since I forgot, thank you Dominus. I appreciate all of the work that the Exult team (and any volunteer tech support people) put in here.

[Dominus]

Yes, can you zip the exult.app and send it to me? It's still pretty odd. Since this is not an expected behavior look out for hard drive or memory problems. Back up your data - the problem could be in your system and it could get worse.

After that you can just delete the app and put the one from the dmg there (or better yet, grab a snapshot - it's already much improved over the rc1).
Your savegames are kept elsewhere (see the documentation) so you won't lose anything).