DoW crashing to the desktop, freeze etc.

[tester]

Hi everyone,

Been playing the game for the past days in my netcafe.

Lots of crashing to the desktop, with or without error report.
Most of the games have been LAN multiplayer, with or without AI, some of them were single player or skirmish.

Now we been trying all the suggestions here in the forum, AGP aperture, LOW details, No Shadows etc.
Computers configuration: AMD Athlon 2600+, 333MHz, 512MB DDram, Gforce TI4200, Via MB. Nothing is overclocked.

Important: the game runs virtually without any lag, even with large armies, in 2, 4, 6, 8 players, with or without AI. Settings are High, with or without shadows.
Time to time, after 10 to 60 minutes players are dropping to desktop.

Now because this happens in Skirmish mode as in single(thou very rare in the last one) and the game runs smooth and fine with the settings to the max (in 1024X 768, 32 bit) I think the system is powerfull enough, so the problem lays somewhere else.

The game version is the Uk one.

Now if anyone has any suggestions plese post them here.


Thank you.

[Dominar]

http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread.php?t=40302

This is probably your problem.

Relic/THQ needs to look into this for a patch to fix this.

[tester]

Thanks for the link,
if its down to the router than the game is useless in multiplayer so whats the fun?

As I mentioned the single player works fine in most of the cases, more testing need to be done in the following days, but skirmish games will crash as well as multiplayers.

On the other issue, I see people rushing for the Gforce 6800 GT, to run the game "properly", and even if that`s an amazing card you should be able tu run the game smooth with a Gforce TI4200, talking about myself.

[ÜberJumper]

I doubt it's the router causing your problems, likely something else.

Try this link, as Relic's looking for more information.

http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread.php?t=40054

Tester, post your warnings.log and dxdiag.txt from that workstation if you could please.

[tester]

Thanks UberJumper.

Will start posting info and email them to relic.

Now I would like to ask anyone who`s posting a "quick fix" to take his time and play the game for a few days. Sometime i could play for hours and hours and sometimes after 15 minutes will crash.

It doesn`t seems to make to much of a difference if you play with low or high settings.

Now the crash, mostly to desktop with an error report will happen in LAN multiplayers games. In a game of 4 players 1 or even 2 will crash randomly, sometimes even the server. Tried the game on 1024 MB Crucial DDram, didn`t made any difference.

Skirmish will crash, ususally to desktop, but at lower rate.

Singleplayer is ussualy freezing, with a sound loop and the screen stopped at the last image on the screen, in need of a hard reboot. No Ctrl+Alt+Del working.

This are the most common symptoms on our network, they will occur `randomly`, could be after 10 minutes or 3 hours of play.
another note, having huge armies and AI in lets say a 6 Humans vs 2 AI will lag the game a bit, but still easy playable, but will not automaticaly result in a crash.

[Pride]

Same here.

I agree with the crash / freeze occurancies.

Though I also freeze-crash (with soundloop) on multiplayer...

[tester]

Well it seems like its a common problem, how about if the Admin would join all the threads with a similar topic?

Just a quick update, disable all antivirus software, same result, crash to desktop.

Now, after a few games of 4 multiplayer vs AI, at least one will crash to desktop, in one case 3 VS 2 AI, after one crashed, the other two could play for a while, 30 minutes, and then they crash again to desktop almost in the same time. Could be something buggy with the AI?

Don`t think so, `cos a few FREE FOR ALL games later, without AI, the disconnect rate for at least one was in the region of 75%. (3 out of 4).


To Relic team, this is an amazing game, we wouldn`t care about crash/freeze/disconnects ..., if the game was crap, but please fix it or people will start returning the frisbees.

[ÜberJumper]

Tester:

Sadly there's no one common cause to the lockups. Best so far is to troubleshoot individual issues as there have been several solutions. I'm going to attempt to compile a list of fixes for various situations this long-weekend.

Hopefully, if Relic can provide workarounds/fixes in their code, they will... but they need recreatable situations in order to even begin attempting to fix them.

[tester]

I think this is one of the problems, the crash seems to occur randomly, it`s pretty hard to pinpoint what exactly is causing the crash or to recreate the situation.

At the moment we are playing the game on 14 Pc`s, will keep updated.

I was looking for an error log in Administrative tools, there wasn`t any in most of the crashes.

[ÜberJumper]

tester, I've added a list of some potential fixes to the Bug Forum Guidelines docked thread, if you don't mind, check those out for me please (especially the ATI+AMD(Via) one, yes I know you have an nVidia card).

[tester]

Still cannot replicate the crash, could anyone tell me how to set the sound hardware acceleration to none? I remember seeing a post somewhere.

[ÜberJumper]

Start>Run... DXDIAG, enter.... Sound Card tab, lower the slider.

[tester]

Thanks, will try that. In the meanwhile I did the following:

1) Uninstalled the AGP driver, reboot, windows is installing his own AGP driver.

2)Installed the VIA 4in1 drivers, 4.53, normal installation, untick the box for AGP drivers.
Reboot

3)Installed the latest Nvidia drivers 61.77

4)Installed the patch v1.01 for DoW

5)Increased the AGP aperture to 256 MB and 128 MB, in some cases, with only 64 MB video memory and with 512 MB system memory.

Played a few games, 2 Vs 2, 4 Humans Vs 2 AI, one of us crashed every time, on a random PC, then the game was fine. Memory cap maybe?

While we were playing and crashing, another 2 Vs 2 game was running, took 2 hours, no problems. They were still using 1.00 DoW, with old drivers video drivers, all settings to the max, including shadows, in 1024X768, in 75% of cases, and low settings, low everything on 1 case(25%).
Also the random sounds are off, low quality sounds on all workstations.

No point to repeat that the workstations are all the same, will test more tomorrow, will keep posted, will try no hardware acceleration.

[ÜberJumper]

1.01 English simply increased the version number, so I doubt that would be part of the problem

[tester]

Yeah me too, upgraded today to 1.01 on all workstations.

In the meanwhile, 1 Vs 1 or 2 Vs 2 (AI) games are slightly more stable, no one got disconnected today yet, after more that 1 hour of play.

Will try a few more multiplayer games today, increasing the number of Humans players,
a post will follow later.

[ÜberJumper]

Oh, tester, someone posted that dx9.0b and dx9.0c seem to be having incompatibilities with each other... another thing to check.

[tester]

Could be, but here I`m running SP2 on all, so Dx 9.0c

I got a large collection of *.dmp and error log files, as I cannot post here so many and cannot attach, they`r going to Relic together with pstats and dx diag files.

[tester]

Just a quick update.

On one workstation someone manage to finish the singleplayer game, in rounds of 2 up to 4 hours, without a single crash, in normal mode, all the graphic setting to the MAX, including shadows, randomize sounds off, low quality sounds, blood on.

Will try to replicate the performance in multiplayer and skirmish and post an update.

If manage to play with no crashes will try to monitor temperatures, etc.

[Moe]

Hi Tester, thank you for following up. Please do keep us posted.

[tester]

After comparing one workstation which seems to be more stable with another one, which was crashing more often, I found the temperature of the CPU was a few degree lower, in the first case.

I cleared the old paste on the cooler and applied some high performance thermal compound from cooler master, also open the case, and obtain about 7-8 degrees temperature drop.

So far, (a few hours now) the system looks stable, but will continue testing as the surrounding temperature will rise.

If anyone could confirm these would help, as is quite difficult to spend hours and hours testing each and every Pc in here.

I do know about a post when someone used his PC in a cold cabin.