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Silly Problem With Resume And A Game

bushido

bushido

Suspended
Original poster
Mar 26, 2008
8,070
2,755
Germany
Hi,

i tried to play Plants VS Zombies on my Lion yesterday which obvs starts in full screen but the game seems to be unsupported by Lion so far, it froze and i can move my mouse but i cant seem to be able to quit the game. i even forced my mac book to restart but the game is opening at the same spot because of the stupid resume feature. what can i do? theres no task manager on mac right?
 
bushido said:
Hi,

i tried to play Plants VS Zombies on my Lion yesterday which obvs starts in full screen but the game seems to be unsupported by Lion so far, it froze and i can move my mouse but i cant seem to be able to quit the game. i even forced my mac book to restart but the game is opening at the same spot because of the stupid resume feature. what can i do? theres no task manager on mac right?
Click to expand...

I think Apple didn't think this Resume thing through enough...

Bus of course there is a task manager, it's: Alt + Command + Escape

Hope it works!
 
bushido said:
Hi,

i tried to play Plants VS Zombies on my Lion yesterday which obvs starts in full screen but the game seems to be unsupported by Lion so far, it froze and i can move my mouse but i cant seem to be able to quit the game. i even forced my mac book to restart but the game is opening at the same spot because of the stupid resume feature. what can i do? theres no task manager on mac right?
Click to expand...

It is not actually opening your game at the same point. That's just the screen shot that resume saves and shows you while it is trying to load the game. What is (likely) happening is that the game freezes at load and all you get is a screen shot of the last time froze.

Resume doesn't work automatically like that. For unsupported apps it does try to load last opened documents (for an app that uses them), but for things like games it can't actually freeze the last state unless it the developer specifically makes use of the resume API (nor do I know if that is actually possible with things like games).
 
ErikGrim said:
It is not actually opening your game at the same point. That's just the screen shot that resume saves and shows you while it is trying to load the game. What is (likely) happening is that the game freezes at load and all you get is a screen shot of the last time froze.

Resume doesn't work automatically like that. For unsupported apps it does try to load last opened documents (for an app that uses them), but for things like games it can't actually freeze the last state unless it the developer specifically makes use of the resume API (nor do I know if that is actually possible with things like games).
Click to expand...

I thought Resume uses a memory image like hibernation, doesn't it?
 
resume could work for game but would require a long wait will the hole thing is saved to disk and a massive load when it resumes so i dont think it dose could it wouldn't be worth it but i think it can be done.
 
smoge said:
resume could work for game but would require a long wait will the hole thing is saved to disk and a massive load when it resumes so i dont think it dose could it wouldn't be worth it but i think it can be done.
Click to expand...
Most games are fairly quick to save these-days, to facilitate auto-saving on checkpoints and such, so there's no reason a game can't auto-save the current state and use that to resume automatically. The problem is that it can be slow to reload all of a high-end game's assets but for simpler games it's perfectly do-able.

I was kind of hoping that resume would function like hibernating; by dumping some or all of the contents of RAM to disk so you can restore a system to its exact running state; otherwise resume is just something that developers could already be doing trivially.

API's could then allow developers to provide light-weight pause and resume if their programs are suitable for such a feature, or tell Lion specifically to not resume the application if it's something that might not work well or had a heavy-weight file open.
 
I was really disappointed with resume too...

It doesn't dump RAM to disk like I anticipated it would. It just provides an API for an application to pass some state data to the operating system, and for the operating system to pass that state data back to the program when it runs again. Only a handful of apps properly support it. It is nice that windows restore to their original spaces and positions, but it is not nice that if an app interrupts a restart or a log off, the apps quit previous to that interruption can no longer be resumed (hope apple resolves this!)

My plants vs. zombies freezes on Lion too. I wrote popcap about it, and they responded that they'd get to a fix when Lion is officially released. Poo. Puzzle mode, zen garden, I zombie, and a few other modes don't crash, oddly enough.

If you start the game in window mode, you can quit it when it freezes. Otherwise you may be SOL & have to reboot. And it freezes quite predictably.

Tim
 
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