Game freezes on character selection screen since Season 13 release

johnnyray14

UPDATE 6/12/2017: STO now works on my 2013 MacBook Pro running Windows in VMWare Fusion! Just like the 6/8/2017 patch notes say. Well done, Cryptic .

Update May 2017: Tech support replied that they don't support STO when it's running in a virtual machine . Any suggestions?

On a 2013 MacBook Pro with Windows 10 Pro running in the current version of VMWare Fusion with 8GB RAM and 2GB video RAM dedicated to the virtual machine, STO freezes just before the character models are rendered on the character selection screen.

All graphics settings are already set to minimum values, and I also choose "lower to minimum settings" after logging in.

The same problem happens on a 2014 MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM and 2GB video RAM dedicated to the VM.

Both machines were able to run the game just fine, with the same settings, through Monday evening prior to the Season 13 release.

johnnyray14

UPDATE: Tech support replied that they don't support STO when it's running in a virtual machine . Any suggestions?

mtnubie5

Yes, I have a suggestion:

PWE changed STO's System Requirements earlier this year due to them discontinuing DX9.

They have been stating the following:

"As of March 1, 2017, Star Trek Online will no longer be supporting Windows XP and Direct3D 9, or Video Cards with a Direct3D Hardware Feature Level less than 10.0."

Funnily enough, they do NOT state which cards are guaranteed to be supported, and they also state that anything LESS then DX10.0 is no longer supported.

Guess what? Latest VMWare versions simply have fully fledged DX10 support.
The hardware used in VMWare is of no concern to the game, as every proper build game should simply communicate through the DirectX layer, exactly which it was made of, to support a wide variety, if not ANY card that supports a said DX version level.

So whats the concensus? I'm pretty sure Cryptic/PWE screwed up on some code, possibly adding a functionality to the game which is ONLY working on DX11 cards. So basically they have been TRIBBLE up customers once again. I can tell anyone right here and now, any hardware or GPU's that have hardware based DX10.x support are NO longer guaranteed to work with STO, even if Cryptic stated otherwise.

I hope that helped. I'm surprised not to see more complaints from Mac users, but since they have already said they dropped support for Mac, and in that context they ment they dropped support for the custom Mac client (Based on Wine, which has nothing to do with any virtual machine) most Mac players have probabably already given up on the game anyway.

johnnyray14

Ah, I see! Thank you for explaining. I guess we can hope that VMWare gets around to supporting DX11 sometime soon.

johnnyray14

Update: As the 6/8 patch notes say, STO really does work now in a VMWare virtual machine! Rejoice!