Mac user poll - Configuration and game appearance

Started by actiasluna

actiasluna Lv 1

Since August 2, 2016, all my foldit clients have displayed "game_dynamic" where "Foldit" used to appear.

  • The term appears on the finder bar when I am working in a game client.
  • (The game client bar displays "Foldit - [Puzzle name] - [Track name]").
  • "game_dynamic" also shows up in log files and mac crash window text where "foldit" should appear.

  • Some mac users report that they see "foldit" on the finder bar, others see "game_dynamic."

  • Other anomalies began occurring at the same time game_dynamic appeared - related to the game_dynamic issue? If something in the mac version of game code is not quite right, that could explain some of these issues.

I do quality and root cause analysis for a living, so I'm curious to learn whether there are commonalities with the Mac machines that experience this anomaly.

Please respond and answer the following:

1) What is your machine configuration? (From "About this Mac/System Information/Hardware Overview") - please do NOT include your machine serial number.

2) What OS are you running?

3) When you are in a foldit game window, what appears at the top left of your computer screen just right of the apple icon?

4) two bonus questions thanks to a thread on Veteran chat:
a) What folder do you run Foldit from?
b) Does the username you log on (to your Mac) with include administrator privileges?

5) What foldit build are you currently running? (Menu/General Options, hit copy button to grab & paste Build ID)

-> NEW question (thanks, spvincent):
6) Are you running Main or Devprev (main or beta)?

Thank you for your help - I hope this might eventually help Foldit developers figure out what's gone wonky!

actiasluna Lv 1

1) What is your machine configuration? (From "About this Mac/System Information/Hardware Overview") - please do NOT include your machine serial number)
Example (from my machine)
Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac17,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 4 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 32 GB
Boot ROM Version: IM171.0105.B09
SMC Version (system): 2.34f2

2) What OS are you running?
My machine's running Sierra version 10.12.1

3) When you are in a foldit game window, what appears at the top left of your computer screen just right of the apple icon?
My machine shows "game_dynamic"

4) two bonus questions thanks to a thread on Veteran chat today:
a) What folder do you run Foldit from?
I run it from the Applications folder but used to be able to run it from the downloads folder prior to the August 2 update)
b) Does the username you log on with include administrator privileges?
Mine does.

NinjaGreg Lv 1

1) What is your machine configuration? (From "About this Mac/System Information/Hardware Overview") - please do NOT include your machine serial number)
Example (from my machine)
Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac15,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 3.5 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 16 GB
Boot ROM Version: IM151.0207.B07
SMC Version (system): 2.22f16

2) What OS are you running?
My machine's running Sierra version 10.12.1

3) When you are in a foldit game window, what appears at the top left of your computer screen just right of the apple icon?
My machine shows "Foldit"

4) two bonus questions thanks to a thread on Veteran chat today:
a) What folder do you run Foldit from?
I run it from the Downloads folder

b) Does the username you log on with include administrator privileges?
Mine does.

spvincent Lv 1

Specs for my machine, on which FoldIt seems reasonably well behaved.

1) Model Name: Mac mini
Model Identifier: Macmini5,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.5 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Boot ROM Version: MM51.0077.B14
SMC Version (system): 1.75f0

2) Yosemite 10.10.5

3) FoldIt

4a) Applications folder
4b) Yes

HTH

phi16 Lv 1

OS X El Capitan
Version 10.11.6
Processor 3.7 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5

I read game_dynamic up in the apple menu bar

I'm running Main.
I'm running from the applications folder.
Yes, I ve admin privileges.
20161026-4422e3a127-osx_x86

LociOiling Lv 1

I'm on Windows, but after a chat with Frood in #veteran today, I did a little research.

I'm now convinced that "game_dynamic" refers to a Foldit source code file. Unfortunately, this probably means that its appearance in the Menu bar on Mac clients is just a random side-effect of a bug. The phrase "game_dynamic" doesn't have any meaning in this context, and it most likely doesn't provide a clue as to the source of the bug.

I found two key pieces of evidence.

On Windows, I captured the strings found in a running Foldit process. (The sysinternals Process Explorer utility available from Microsoft makes this easy.)

Looking at the captured strings, I found this one:

c:\cygwin64\home\folditbuilder\foldit\rosetta-interactive\source\visual_studio_2015\Release\game_dynamic.pdb

That's a reference to a file called "game_dynamic.pdb". The "pdb" part does not mean "Protein Data Bank", it's something like "program debug" when used by Microsoft. See Microsoft's description of PDB files for a complete explanation. The Foldit release on windows includes a number of Protein Data Bank .pdb files, but no Microsoft Visual Studio .pdb files. Microsoft's .pdb files can be quite large, and they're normally not included in a production release. It's not clear to me why a running Foldit client would contain a reference to a particular .pdb file.

Another clue was this 2009 posting (in Chinese), which includes this:

/usr/bin/c++ -m elf_i386 CMakeFiles/foldit.dir/home/xxx/foldit/mini-
interactive-rna/mini/demo/interactive/game_dynamic.cc.o CMakeFiles/foldit.
dir/home/xxx/foldit/mini-interactive-rna/mini/demo/interactive/util.cc.o
CMakeFiles/foldit.dir/home/xxx/foldit/mini-interactive-rna/mini/src/
interactive/util/cwd.cc.o CMakeFiles/foldit.dir/home/xxx/foldit/mini-
interactive-rna/mini/src/interactive/util/local_version.cc.o -o foldit 
[and so on, long lines removed to make the posting here readable]

This appears to be a command line for building Foldit. I've added some highlighting to show the game_dynamic reference.

Google searches for game_dynamic returned limited results outside of fold.it. So I'm pretty confident that game_dynamic is just a random chunk of Foldit text which happens to show up in the Menu bar due to an unrelated bug. If the Foldit team changed the file name to "game_fred" and built a release, I suspect some Mac users would be seeing "game_fred" in their Menu bars.

Bruno Kestemont Lv 1

Because my battery with nearly to explode, I had to change it in the office. I never updated my OS (it was Lion I think). They installed me the latest El Capitain version. This dramatically slowed down my computer for Foldit !!!

Almost 60 times slower !!

See
Intel Core i7 CPU @ 2.9 GHz, 2 cores