Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Enhanced Edition Can't run game on disk image

Hi,
I'm trying to run the game on the latest macOS version.

Since I'm a software developer, I prefer my file system to be case sensitive.

I get that case-sensitive file system is not properly supported by this game, and also by other applications.

What I usually do in this case is to create a disk image, format it with HFS+ case insensitive file system, install the application on the disk image, do some symlinking etc.
I got everything I need working this way.

I just did the same with the game but I'm getting the error message "Divinity: Original Sin cannot run from disk image. [...]".
Is there any particular reason for that? I guess I have to desist on playing the game on this machine (which is the only one I have)?

Thanks

I'm just a normal user but I also prefer my file system(s) to be case sensitive, because it's normal on unixoid operating systems (in my case Linux).

It seems strange that Larian should've managed to miss such a central feature of HFS+, especially since the Linux version doesn't seem to have this problem, at least not on my system with the also case sensitive filesystem ext4.

How does D:OS react if you install it directly on your HFS+ partition without any disk image?

It starts, but with a clear warning that HFS+ case sensitive file system is not supported and that I could experience "game-breaking issues".

Honestly I could try to play anyway (I created the characters and played for 4-5 minutes just to test... no issues yet), but it would be frustrating to become stuck mid-game with no solution to go on.

The only thing I can think of is to repartition the HD and create a new partition, formatted with case insensitive file system... But then again, what would be the difference vs a case insensitive disk image?
Disk images are so handy, I don't really understand the need of "not being in a disk image".

I'm also a developer and sysadmin and case-sensitive filesystems drive me nuts! Case-preserving is good, but case sensitivity is something I've always hated. Maybe because I grew up on VMS which would let you talk to it in lower case but ALLCAPS is what you got. 30 years of Unix and its filesystems still irritate me.

But other than that random bit of pontification, I'm afraid I've no idea about the Mac problems; I guess some inconsistent configuration within D:OS might be the culprit but honestly haven't a clue.

I personally wouldn't go that length for a game, even such a great one like D:OS.

In your place, I would just risk those vague "game-breaking issues" and hope that that's only a precaution to avoid warranty claims for case-related problems. (If I'm wrong, maybe Raze or someone else from Larian could name some of those "issues" here.)

In short, I wouldn't let potential problems get in the way of playing the game. In case that you'll actually face a game-breaking problem, you could still either a) try to find the file(s) in question and rename them accordingly or b) migrate your game and save files to another OS or FS.

Point taken!
I will try to play and resort to the disk partitioning only if I encounter one of those possible game breaking issues...

An "official" statement on those game breaking issues and/or on why the game is not allowed to run from a (case insensitive!) disk image would be very welcome though

Glad I could help. And as always, save often and in new save slots, so you can return to an earlier save state if something goes wrong that isn't noticeable at first.

Conveniently, D:OS quick save creates new slots. But I do "real" saves too from time to time just to be sure and for long-term storage.

Just out of curiosity, can you create a virtual drive image rather than going to the trouble of repartitioning? Again, I'm not familiar with MacOS but as a lot of its userland comes from FreeBSD I figured it might be a possibility. Obviously there would be a bit of a performance penalty but hopefully nothing too significant.


Oh, yeah, I've learnt the hard way to make at least a few permanent saves. And still need to remind myself to press F5 more often than I do as the autosaves can be much less often than I assume...

I think mcerina did that already:

Yes exactly, Raban is correct, creating a case insensitive disk image is the first thing I tried and the thing I usually do when I have applications that have trouble working with case-sensitive file system.

That was the reason I was curious about the need to check if the game is running from within a disk image (I get a very specific error message about that!)... what difference would it do compared to a "lower level" partition?

Thanks for the help anyway, vometia.

Oh, yes, sorry: should've re-read your OP. How quite embarrassing.

In terms of how much difference it would make, a contiguous area of space would minimise overheads to be pretty much CPU-bound rather than IO-bound (in theory at least...) which should be negligible but as Unixes don't really offer much in the way of guarantees of drive allocation it's anyone's guess what you might get. That said, neither do modern hard drives so it may make very little difference overall.

Apologies if that's slightly rambling and pontificatory. D:

The specific error message is bothersome but I can't speculate as to whether or not it's significant; but speaking as one who's had her forays into sysadmin misadventure any advice I offer may be not entirely convincing!

I don't know MacOS at all, but since it's a unixoid system under the hood, there should be some parallels to Linux which I know for ten years now. On Linux, a mounted disk image is transparent to most applications and indistinguishable from any other mount, say, another disk partition. An application may make deeper checks for the nature of a mount, though. Considering that the actual mount point can be many directory levels higher than the application's installation folder, that seems to me like an over-the-top measure for most uses (see last paragraph for a possible exception).

That said, mcerina, how exactly do you mount the image? With a graphical tool from Apple or a third-party? Or directly with HFS' command line tools? Depending on how the tools work, there may be a more or less obvious difference and D:OS may not be able to detect an image mounted by all of the possible methods. This consideration doesn't change my suggestion to just playing the game from your HFS+ partition until actual problems, though.

As for why D:OS refuses to work from an image instead just warn the user like it does about the case sensitivity; may that be a relict from some physical copy protection? Back in the dark ages of copy protection, some games would do that to prevent being run from images instead from the original CD/DVD. Since D:OS is sold nowadays completely DRM free on gog.com, I find this explanation far fetched, but nevertheless worth noting. Without a clarification from Larian staff though, we are left to mere speculation about the reasons for the image blocking.

edit: I wonder if D:OS runs from a network mount.

All these things should be completely invisible to an application, which is what I find slightly confusing. Of course there's little to stop an application looking at mounted filesystems or running tests for case sensitivity but it seems a rather extraneous measure unless it has a specific reason to do so: I mean in 30 years of Unix programming the only time I've ever done it was for a program whose specific job was to give details of the current filesystems!

It's a pity Apple decided not to use ZFS, it saves an awful lot of faffing about with stuff like this.

I'm using Apple's command line utility "hdiutil" (man page)

In this particular case it's hdiutil attach <image>
I didn't fiddle too much with the options to be honest, it's the first time that something complains that it's running from inside a disk image and to a superficial analysis seems like a redundant check, but that's it...

I couldn't find any other method than hdiutil on the web to mount disk images in MacOS. Its mount command seems to lack the loop option Linux' mount has to mount disk images directly.

Also, MacOS' mount lacks the bind option to mount a directory in another directory, so the option to mount the disk image in directory A and then mount that in directory B to (maybe) hide the nature of the mount from D:OS also seems to be unavailable.

I'm out of ideas now. Since neither vometia nor I know MacOS, you may want to ask in a MacOS forum or the like, if you really want to dive deeper into this.

Just out of curiosity, which non-case-sensitive file system did you format the image with?

Another web search unearthed three candidates for that:

• diskutil
• NFS
• bindfs (second answer)

Maybe (?) D:OS won't detect the image if you mount its mountpoint in another directory. Use at your own risk.

edit: The forum's [ list ] tag doesn't work properly. In the preview, the bullets are too far to the left and thus ~80% obscured by the left text border. In the sent post they're completely gone.

Before I shifted all my stuff onto a ZFS-managed array I think I used mdconfig on FreeBSD to create a pseudo-device mapped to the file and could then use the mount command with no special options. Arguably a bit clunky but both approaches have their pros and cons. As a lot of the FreeBSD stuff found its way into OS/X it may use a similar approach. I don't know offhand if it does overlays similar to Linux where only changes are written to the other device: I thought it could be I may be misremembering.

And yeah, the crusty old forum software has a few examples of, er, "personality". On the plus side, it's not the same as the new Bethesda forums.

I used HFS+ case-insensitive which is the default file system used in every Mac today.

Thanks for the inputs to you both, I'll see how it goes in the next days as unfortunately I don't have the time to play for now