- or perhaps it's me!
Elemental Forums
I have only started half-a-dozen games since downloading the Beta (0.86), but so far have not been able to play any of them for longer than 40 minutes before it crashes. I am a first-time Beta user and would like to know whether this is fairly common. Many thanks.
According to the developers and folks posting here, Xin XP 32 bit users are experiencing a lot more crashes than Vista/Win 7 users, and especially compared to Win 7 64 users. What are your machine, OS, and video specs?
That seems like a lot to me. It is common for beta's to crash, that is the reason we are given betas, to report crashes, but the amount you are talking about seems like a lot more than normal to me.
Hi Publius,
Many thanks for your quick response. My spec is as follows:
CPU : AMD Phenom II X3 Tri Core 720 Black Edition 2.8GHz (overclocked to 3.3GHz)
Motherboard : Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P (Socket AM3) PCI Express DDR3
Ram : Corsair 4GB DDR3 DHX 1600C9DHX Twin3X (2x2GB)
GPU : Radeon HD5770 x2 (Crossfire)
Hard Drives : 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - using one drive for Programme files and one for data.
I am running Windows 7 64-bit OS.
I would have thought this is still reasonably high-end, wouldn't you?
Your computer makes mine look like an Apple II. I would think that it would play better. I know WoM had difficulties with high end machines though, maybe it's carried over?
Yes, except for the CPU (I have an Intel I7) your specs aren't that much different from mine, and I've had very few crashes. Your crashes are supposed to be automatically sent to Stardock via their Smart Exception software, but Brad (Frogboy) has also asked for us to post them in the support forum. Please refer to this post for what files they want to see and where you can find them:
Thank you both for your help. I have been posting crashes including links to the requested files and so-far have been able to also include Save files which duplicate the crashes. I shall persevere and see how things develop. I was interested to hear that WoM (which I do not have) had difficulties with high-end machines though. Do you know what caused them, M'lord?
Have you tried without overclocking?
It may be that your overclock is normally stable, but that FE loads it in a different way than what you normally do.
One such difference could be that FE is much more multithreaded than most other common software, using all your cores at the same time and needing to coordinate them.
No, I haven't yet as it is normally so stable, but intend to do so if problem persists.
WOM used Pixel shader 2. This was meant to allow older laptops to run the game. Unfortunately it caused unforseen memory problems with newer video cards.
New cards actually ran out of memory faster than old cards.
FE uses Pixel shader 3 which fixed this issue.
See here for Frogboy's explanation.
That's an interesting link, and having read it it doesn't sound as though that is the cause of my problem. However, it never ceases to amaze me how wrong I can sometimes be . . . .
Could running the video cards in Crossfire be doing it? What have others been seeing while running in Crossfire mode?
I've got dual Radeon HD 5870s in Crossfire, and haven't seen any problems from them, as far as I know. I've had a few crashes, but not very many compared to some.
I have a similar issue, but I noticed something odd. I had been playing mostly on Novice while i acclimated to the game. it seems in 0.86 if I play on Novice, I get a crash within the first few dozen turns, without fail. I've uploaded about a dozen crash logs for this issue already. It's also a repeatable crash, in that I can load the last save and it's always the exact same number of turns before the crash.
Just for giggles, I tried setting the world difficulty to Ridiculous and then setting the individual AI difficulties to Novice and haven't had a problem since.
I'm running Windows 7 64-bit on a quad-core i7 with 12 GB of RAM and a Radeon 5870.
It very well could be a locking thread issue based around AI difficulty. Since the AI plays differently and AI threads have caused crashes before, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a cause. It would be strange of the correlation was:
Lower AI difficulty = More crashes
Something else you could check regarding the crashes would be memory usage. Alt + Tab out of the game as you play and see how memory consumption is doing. You're on 64-bit, so I would hope over 2 gigs is sufficient, but you never know.
Also, what about map size? How big of maps are you playing on? I could see larger ones being more crashy.
Oh yea well my Commadore 64 makes your Apple II look like a ...umm Apple II......I got nothing 
I play on large maps with everything on normal difficulty. I don't get crashes until late game, but none that I can't reload around. Pretty sluggish for me late game as well.
Core2Duo 3.0 GHz, 4GB Ram, Win 7 64 bit, GeForce 250 GTS
Greg_B, that's exactly what I have been doing so-far. I'm going to try what you did.
Lord Reliant, thanks for the tip - I didn't know that I could Alt+Tab out. I shal certainly check that.
Just right-click the task bar, choose Start Task Manager, and then click on the Performance tab. If you want even more details, you can click on the button for Resource Monitor right there and choose the Memory tab. Pretty handy!
Well, it does seem as though it was Novice causing the problem somehow. Not having played WoM, I decided to use Novice for a while just to have a look around, but the game crashed so quickly that I didn't get the chance to see much! I tried this 6 or 7 times with same result as Greg_B - then I read his reply to my post and tried again using Normal difficulty. Since then I have been playing at least six times as long as I was able to before and it hasn't crashed yet. This is rather strange - I wonder what might be causing it? Thanks to all those who replied to my post. I checked Task Manager on Normal and everything was fine; haven't checked it at Novice level though - not sure I will, either. I want to play a bit now!
While previous beta was quite stable on my machine the 0.86 crashes every few turns. The fault may be the certain map setting or the faction combination but I don't have the heart to start another game and check that out. Waiting for next build.
Win7_64, Q9650, 8GBRAM, GTX560Ti
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