Black screen when quitting

JNight · May 2015

I've noticed this problem recently, where when i quit the game, i get a black screen for about a minute with the in game mouse cursor. It feels like a crash but i get no error report afterwards, and if i had the game on full screen before quitting, i wouldn't be able to do anything with mac keyboard shortcuts to force quit.

At first, it was a non-issue, but after upgrading from mavericks to yosemite it got really bad. The black screen would stay indefinately and i'm forced to shut down my imac with the power button.

Is there a fix for this other than going into windowed mode before quitting in case this happens so i can force quit? Feels really stupid to have to do that.

KhajitFurTrader · May 2015

I see this, too, sometimes. Best solution is to login via ssh from a second machine and kill the client process, as cutting power to a running system might have bad effects, e.g. inconsistencies in the file system. If you've done this a few times by now, I recommend that you boot up into the recovery partition a check the HDD volume(s) consistency with Disk Utility.

On your Mac, you'll have to allow ssh access via System Preferences > Sharing > Remote Login. You can determine which users are allowed to login via ssh, and if you're uncomfortable to allow direct remote access to an administrative account, create a new, non-admin account and switch to your usual one using su(1), entering your usual password when asked for it. You can use any OS X, Linux, or Windows (with a program like PUTTY) machine to remotely login to your Mac.

Once logged in, do a

ps aux | grep eso

(the | is [Alt]-[7])

The first number is the PID (process ID) of the running ESO client. Then use

kill -TERM <pid>

or even

kill -KILL <pid>

to cancel the client and unblock the screen.

Use [Ctrl]-[D] to logout from your ssh session.

JNight · May 2015

Thanks for the reply.

I've only had to shut down my imac once like this, so it shouldn't have done any damage. The whole process you provided seems tedious though, so i'll just stick to going into windowed mode and force quitting the game if it jams up again. Let's hope this gets fixed soon.

chris.dillman · May 2015

JNight wrote: »

Thanks for the reply.

I've only had to shut down my imac once like this, so it shouldn't have done any damage. The whole process you provided seems tedious though, so i'll just stick to going into windowed mode and force quitting the game if it jams up again. Let's hope this gets fixed soon.

JNight What happens if you leave it at the black screen for 5 minutes?

It never exists?

Does this happen more often when running the game for long periods of time?

KhajitFurTrader · May 2015

I had this happen maybe two or three times tops when I quit the game. It's very rare. The viewport goes black, there's a movable mouse cursor, but nothing else happens. Since I usually play in true fullscreen mode, the usual OS X task-switching or -killing hotkeys don't work.

So far, when I just let it sit for a few minutes, it eventually terminated and I was back on the desktop. But more often than not, I'm impatient and use ssh to kill the process as I've described above. Sorry.

I had this happen once while exiting the game in windowed mode, but then it's really easy to terminate it from the Dock.

It may have been happening after particularly long playing sessions, but I'm not sure. If it happens again, I'll take note.

JNight · May 2015

chris.dillman wrote: »

JNight wrote: »

Thanks for the reply.

I've only had to shut down my imac once like this, so it shouldn't have done any damage. The whole process you provided seems tedious though, so i'll just stick to going into windowed mode and force quitting the game if it jams up again. Let's hope this gets fixed soon.

JNight What happens if you leave it at the black screen for 5 minutes?

It never exists?

Does this happen more often when running the game for long periods of time?

Just stays a black screen indefinately until i powered the whole system down. And no, it happened last night again even when i logged in for 5 minutes tops, just to research more traits for crafting. I wouldn't say it's a rare occurance for me too. Used to happen every other gaming session or two, but now with yosemite it got worse with the black screen staying on indefinately.