Humble Bundle version issues

[vintrell]

I bought Soma today from Humble Bundle and am having difficulties. First, the downloaded zip decompresses into a "SOMA Mac" folder filled with data files and Soma.app/ModLauncher.app. Okay, a little nonstandard, but I went ahead and moved the entire folder to Applications.

Attempting to run Soma.app in the normal fashion fails with the following alert:



Nothing appears to be logged to Console.

Launching the game from Terminal (/Applications/SOMA\ Mac/Soma.app/Contents/MacOS/Soma) works, at least up to the point of getting to the main menu, but I quit the game for now since that must not be the official way to launch it.

ModLauncher.app is obviously also failing with references to a missing dylib, but that is apparently a known issue.

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Forgot the system specs: 2017 iMac running 10.12.6.

[kirakatve]

Hi, vintrell!

Thanks for letting us know! There seems to be an issue with Humble Bundle's SOMA version. We are currently looking into it and will hopefully have a fix for it ASAP!

/Kat, Community Manager

[vintrell]

Thanks for investigating. After posting this, I played a couple of hours by running it from the commandline as I described, and didn't notice any other issues (great game so far). The main problem seems to be that new players will almost certainly not think to try that workaround.

[vintrell]

I saw that there was a hotfix update posted to Humble Bundle, but I'm sorry to report that it has the same problem and error dialog box as before, and can still only be launched from the commandline.

I'd finished the game on the earlier build and started a new one on the hotfix release to see if Safe Mode had been added to the Humble Bundle version; it hasn't, and the game hung and could not be quit while trying and failing to create the first autosave in the apartment (hpl.log attached). The hotfix is also missing the "editor", "mods", and "viewer" top-level directories of the previous release, but to be fair I don't yet know what those are used for.

[vintrell]

I spotted the new v110 on Humble Bundle and downloaded it. At first, I was put off because it had the same behavior as before, but I caught the words "Translocated Process" in the crash report for ModLauncher and dug further.

I believe that the problem I have run into is App Translocation, an irritating security feature added to macOS 10.12 and later that randomizes execution paths in certain circumstances. Because Soma keeps resources outside of the app bundle, this meant that launching it through the GUI (which translocated it) caused the paths to those resources to break.

As per the article linked above, I removed the quarantine attribute by entering the following into Terminal:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/SOMA/Soma.app/

...and voila, the game runs when launched normally. Earlier HB releases also launch when treated in this fashion.

Best of all, v110 includes the Safe Mode update! Thank you for being so active and responsive.

To help with developing a wider fix (if one is necessary, it's unclear if others are having this issue), my installation process is simply to download the Humble Bundle .zip through Transmission/Safari, decompress it using Archive Utility, and drag the whole folder into Applications in Finder; a very standard flow. It may be that the quarantine bit is not getting flipped when dragging Soma into Applications because it is nested inside another folder, but that's unclear. Without needlessly reorganizing the resources, a workaround may be to use Humble Bundle's "Additional Content" field to describe the quarantine removal command; some other games in my library do this for additional installation information.

[Mudbill]

Awesome find vintrell! I'm sure this info will help the developers.
I use a Mac sometimes but this was new to me as well.

[kirakatve]

Hi! We sent an update to Humble Bundle last week, so they probably managed to patch it up quickly.

But thank you so much for the update, awesome to hear that it's working, so we can fix our other Mac releases! We'll definitely refer to your fix if people keep having issues. : )

Happy gaming!

/Kat