MacOS Freezing- Force Restart Required

[Captain_Kev]

I made a helpdesk ticket about 2 weeks ago and spoke to AndrewT, he gave decent assistance on what to do but mentioned making a post about my situation here to see if I could get any more concrete advice:

Ive been playing on macOS for the past couple years with no problem, but all the sudden when 1.36 came around I started having this persistant issue where my Mac would freeze completely on the screen I was looking at and give me a pinwheel. The only way to shut down the game is to force restart my laptop. I used to like playing the game but the crashes every 5-10 years just kills any enjoyment I have or chance to get some momentum.

If theres an easy fix and Im just dumb (besides 'just play further on Windows') please let me know! This has been about a year this has been going on and I really hope the dev team is still working on the game to make the Mac experience playable.

 

[grotaclas]

The crash from your exception.txt is in the function CGameState::ChangeTags and happens in some cases on macOS and Linux when a country is formed. This is a common crash on macOS since version 1.36. The only general workarounds which I know would be to use the windows version of the game(you can run it on macOS with tools like whisky app) or to return to an older version(save game specific workarounds would be to switch to the AI country which does the formation and do it yourself or delay the formation in some way till the formation doesn't crash anymore). Some people have reported that it happened more often with certain eu4 versions and others don't seem to have these crashes, but I don't know if this is just random chance or if there are system specific factors.

But eu4 should not be able to freeze your system, no matter what it does. It might be that the crash triggers a bug in your graphics drivers, macOS or a hardware problem. Unfortunately I don't know enough about macOS to help with that. But you could try to switch the display mode of eu4 to borderless fullscreen in the launcher(it is called fullscreen(windowed) in the settings in eu4). This might prevent eu4 from freezing your screen. IIRC I have read somewhere that macOS has a keyboard shortcut which kills the current program. Maybe that gets rid of the frozen eu4 without restarting. Maybe it is also possible to start some kind of task manager via a shortcut

 

[Captain_Kev]

Ill try to fix the display mode, but as for the kill program options i've tried everything I could think of from Alt.f4 and the task manager. I tried Whisky but it refused to run Eu4 at all from steam. If it happens again after I try the fixes ill post a reply in here with whatever info you might want to see. If theres anything else I should do in the meantime i'm open to anything and appreciate the help.

 

[grotaclas]

I tried Whisky but it refused to run Eu4 at all from steam.

Did you install the windows version of steam in whisky? Which windows version did you use for the bottle? The paradox launcher needs at least windows 10, so it might not work if you selected an older version when creating the bottle. If there is the option to use 32-bit or 64-bit, you have to use 64-bit. Or did the launcher start for you? As a test you could also try to run eu4.exe in the bottle to bypass the launcher. But then achievements and DLC will probably not work, so this isn't a permanent solution.

i've tried everything I could think of from Alt.f4

Did you try a shortcut which kills the program? Alt+F4 just tells the program that it should exit, but a program can ignore that(e.g. to ask the user to save). And if it is really freezing(as opposed to exiting and leaving the screen in an unusable state) it won't react and just stay open. Windows would ask you if you want to force-close the program if it doesn't react for some time, but that dialog sometimes has problems showing up on fullscreen applications. And I don't know how it works on macOS.