Half Life 2 crashes the VBox GUI, both Win7 and Linux host

[Aquous]

Host: Windows 7 Home Premium x64 and Gentoo Linux x64 (problem occurs independent of host, both run VBox 4.0.8 without the extpack.) Guest: Windows XP x86

When I launch the game Half-Life 2 and attempt to start a game, the VBox GUI crashes and the VM status shows "Aborted". On Windows I get "VirtualBox has stopped working", on Linux dmesg informs me of a segfault.

I've attached a gdb backtrace of the problem under Linux. Contrary to what the backtrace would suggest, I'm pretty sure this is a VBox problem and not a driver problem, since on Windows I use AMD's closed-source driver and on Linux I use the open-source Gallium3D driver. It would be very unlikely for both these drivers to have the exact same bug.

[twipley]

I am also experiencing this issue.

Changing the -dxlevel (Portal here) did not bring any "good" to the package.

[twipley]

VirtualBox 4.2.6 (latest), using corresponding drivers (relating to Half-Life 2 -engine-based games such as Portal). XP-x86 guest, Ubuntu host. Here are the different scenarios:

using the -dxlevel 70 command-line parameter, it does not start (error message says it requires 8.0 or above);

using the -dxlevel 80 or 81 command-line parameter makes the whole virtual machine crash on game-menu loading;

using the -dxlevel 90 (default) command-line parameter, the game crashes and one is dropped back to guest desktop.

[twipley]

Just for the information, problem is still current under latest version (4.2.8).

Furthermore, default dxlevel (90) also crashes the whole virtual machine, sometimes.

[twipley]

Works for the first time in years using default settings, since 4.2.14 (in combination with Linux Mint Olivia -- based on Ubuntu 13.04).

Great job, VirtualBox team. o/

[Frank Mehnert]

Thanks for letting us know!