Computer freezes!

J_gorinac · June 2010

Since the first couple of weeks of having GameSalad I had problems with it. I will try to run a game and it will freeze and I'll get the kernal panic. For those who don't know who that is.....

I have done everything from reinstalling it to updating to even other attempts to fix it...

This is a brand new iMac (purchased it on February 07, 2010) running Mac OS 10.5.6...... I love this program but this is really annoying at times. Before it does the kernel panic it will go very slow in between each transitions of menu's (The behavior menu, preview, scenes, etc...). The only close solution to this problem has been me quiting the application then restarting it....

PLEASE HELP!

someone else posted an exact complaint 12 months ago but I didnt find a solution from it:

J_gorinac · June 2010

Really? No help at all guys?

Corella · June 2010

Nothing to add, aside from I get frequently get the issue too. Have posted about it before, but no real solution was forthcoming. I always seem to get the kernel panic just as GS is "taking the screenshot" to add to the scene select window during the preview. Game runs for about a second, and then when the new image would usually appear... Hello reboot.

See attached image.

AfterBurnett · June 2010

Unfortunately the usual response doesn't really work here... which is "Get a Mac".

AfterBurnett · June 2010

One thing, though... what kind of RAM are you using? Just the standard RAM as installed by Apple? May not matter these days but back in the days of the G4s and G5s I had many issues with cheap RAM causing this kind of problem. I think the Intel machines are a little more lenient though...

ORBZ · June 2010

A few things..

GameSalad has memory leaks. It has slowdown for everyone. Eventually when it starts to get slow we all have to restart GameSalad.

However, you shouldn't be getting kernel panics. They are usually a symptom of faulty hardware.

The only time i've ever had kernel panics is on an old MacBook where the motherboard fried and Apple replaced it for free.

The other time i saw a kernel panic is when my machine got too hot.

Apple runs their hardware really close to the wire in terms of heat dissipation. I think the factory defaults on the fan sensor are too low personally. I run a program called smcFanControl on all my Macs and I set the default fan speed to a few hundred rpms over the Apple factory default. This generally keeps the Mac pretty cool. Another nice benifit of smcFanControl is that it puts the temperature on the menu bar. A mac should never go over 100C. Mine operates regularly around 58C. Sometimes when doing heavy loads it will spike to 80C and then fall back down to around 60C for normal usage. Even then, Macs have a hardware fail safe in them that is supposed to shut down your mac if it gets too hot so as not to damage anything. I don't want to get auto-shutdown so I run my macs with a slightly louder fan just in case. Also, i live in florida and it's hot here.

Additionally. Bad ram can cause kernel panics. It's easy to get a bad ram chip. Most likely this is your problem. Since GameSalad has a memory leak it's eventually going to use up all your system memory if you don't restart it. This will inevitably cause any faulty memory to display itself. Try a memory diagnostic tool to check your system memory for errors.

Also bad hard drives can cause faults as well.

Also, do you have any weird 3rd party kernel extensions installed? One program i've seen kernel panic my mac more often than any other program is CrossOver Games. It installs extensions to the kernel that reach down into kernelspace and do some bad bad voodoo.

I think GameSalad doesn't require any kernel extensions (No installer). So it's not really possible for it to segfault your machine on it's own. Something more sinister is happening with your hardware itself and GameSalad's leaks are just causing the problem to manifest more visibly.

I bet if you opened a massive image in Photoshop you would also experiance a kernel panic. One of those mega huge Hubble space images from NASA 500000x500000.

Also, more ram is good as it takes longer for the slowdown to hit. But if you've got a bad chip, adding more ram is not going to help you.

Corella · June 2010

Perhaps, this is a pre-unibody 17" Macbook Pro I'm working on, a few years old. But I have never ever had any kernel panics in any other application- and then very frequently with GS- in the circumstances described above.
The machine does get pretty hot at times, but I've had the crash when its running fresh and cool.

Was hoping it might somehow be fixed along with the drivers and stuff in the last GS iteration, as it has only been in the last few updates that problems started.. but alas it wasn't.

adent42 · June 2010

First off, please make sure your OS has been upgraded to 10.6.3. There are a few bug fixes that make things better. We've also noticed that the kernel panics happen most often to systems with the newer ATI cards. We've done our best to fix the issue.

So please upgrade to 10.6.3 and the latest version of GameSalad and see if that helps.

design219 · June 2010

I've just gotten in the habit of quitting and restarting GS every little bit, usually when I see the slightest hint of slowing when switching between the different edit screens. The good thing is, GS starts up really quick even on slower machines. (I'm using a new iMac with 8 gig ram)

I've also started saving new versions of my projects every little bit. That way, if something gets screwed (which happened to me once) I can just open a previous version and not have lost much. I'm on version 33 of the game I'm working on now.

Computer freezes!

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