Wihl

Join Date 02/2008

[MP] Chance of crash approaching 1 the longer a game progresses.

Hello everyone!

It's sad to say but me and the players I play with have decided to stop playing this game.

The problem:
6 to 10 players (no AI) with unlocked teams, all settings on fast (usually).

We play for a few hours and it works perfectly. After around 2-3 hours one or more people will crash. We then save the game, send the save to the guy(s) that crashed and we remake the game.

Now, one of two things will happen:

A) The game will work for a while and then the crashes become more common (it's always the same people that crash). After remaking the game they start crashing at the exact same point in the game over and over.

The game will for a few minutes, and then crash. We reload the game, it works for a few minutes, crash. *repeat*

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It seems like if A, B, C, D and E are playing the game, and A and B start crashing, C and D won't crash. A and B may both crash at the same time or separately - however, C and D won't crash. In the next game C and D might crash while A and B get no crashes.

We all use different hardware. We have different operating systems, video cards, processors, drivers, in-game graphics and sound settings, SLI or not and so on.

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I hope this gets fixed in a patch or that someone has come up with a solution.

Questions? Solutions?

//Wihl

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Well, I am sorry to say that your unfortunate experience is not the norm.

I have been playing Sins since the June beta.

I did have some freeze-crash issues then, but the game has not crashed once, for me, since mid-July.

Recently, I have played about ELEVEN solid hours on ICO : no lag, no freeze, nobody disconnected, nobody crashed.

What can I say more ? Your experience, even if it is valid, does not correspond in any way to the experience I (and other of my team8s) have had.

You could perhaps experiment with less human players, on less complex maps : for starters.

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the_Monk

Join Date 01/2008

+222

dare I say it? hehe are all of your copies legit?

the Devil's advocate here...

I just find it hard to believe that 6-10 people who just bought a game are willing to "drop" their investment into the bucket.....

just my 2 cents!

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Internet play or LAN play? We're at a LAN playing right now and we're having a very similar crash experience towards our 4th hour. We're on 5v5, unlocked teams, 5 Humies vs. 5 CPUs. I know for a fact that we're all using legit copies.

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Large games take more memory. The longer the game goes the more memory is required. It could be that people in your group have insufficient memory to play after awhile. Thus they crash. I had a 16 star Large map with 10 players that took @1900mb of memory to run by mid game. Got rid of that map because I knew it would eventually run out of memory. Try running a 10 player game on a smaller map or try with fewer players. It will be more stable. The bigger the map and the more players and the longer it goes the more memory is required.

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Agreed, Octavius VIII.

Might the speed of the game also be a cause of crashes ?

If the game is on "fast" for hours on end, might some machines* be incapable of keeping the pace, especially when hundreds of fighting units would become involved in complex battles ?

* CPU speed, GPU speed, RAM speed, and even Net-connection speed might then be an issue for certain participants : even if everybody has a legit copy of the game, I doubt that everybody engaged in a MP game has a top-of-the-line machine and Net-connection.

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We're playing on LAN.

I doubt it's a computer issue since we run so different computers, for example - I crashed (C2D 2.0 Ghz, 8600 GT, 3 gb ram) while another guy with a very bad PC just continues playing as usual.

Also, we thought about the ram issue and we all rebooted our computers, same thing kept happening.

We've had crashes with a medium sized map with 6 players and 10 players.

So in short:
We're playing on LAN
We're usually more than 6 people
Who it is that crashes seems rather random
Map-size doesn't seem to matter
Various configurations, both in-game settings and hardware

I've never experience this kind of crash in singleplayer.

to "the Monk" - We have a, pretty much, game of the week/month

Seems to be Audiosurf right now (awesome game btw, you should check it out, you load your own music into the game and it automatically builds a racing track from it. Think Wipeout mixed with Guitar Hero ^^).

Usually I'm pretty good at troubleshooting stuff like this myself but with this.. i simply can't figure out what could be wrong. First I thought it had something to do with Vista (since I was the host) but it kept happening with Windows XP hosts.. the list goes on :< We sent in our mini-dumps and savefiles but didn't recieve a response.

EDIT:
Also, since the game can get stuck crashing at a certain point, I don't think it's peoples computers.

Thanks for the replies, appreciate it!

//Wihl

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try reinstalling the game....might be running into a certain part of code in the game that might just be bad and might just need to be reinstalled on your machines..i know i used to get crashes back in the beta whenever the game tried to do just one thing which for us though...was easily fixed with a patch...ours was a gun effect that didnt pop up till mid to late game through research

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Email a few replays from reload to crash to support@ironcladgames.com.

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I believe IronClad and stardock are on vacation/taking a break right now so they may not get to your email and save files for a bit. But yeah your dumps and saves/replays will help them a lot.

I haven't had any crashes in single player (yet). Haven't played multi-player yet, but I recall people mentioning that in mp in general that crashes do seem to happen after awhile. So you may be on to something. Perhaps a desyncing issue? But I guess that would just disconnect the player and not crash his system. Does this happen on Lan only or with internet matches as well?

If you check your memory usage after a game where someone crashes what is your peak memory usage? I've noticed a lot of my SoaSE game use between 1700-1900 megs in ram.

When you say crash do you mean disconnect or application crash or OS crash (needing to reboot)?

Also there has been mention that certain video drivers for nvidia don't play nice with the highest graphics settings particularly the bloom setting. You may want to test and see if that's part of the issue as well.

Hopefully they'll get it figured out by patch 1.04

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i have to agree with the OP here. I have a high end rig - plenty of memory and grunt to handle the game and i to also have this issue with a couple of mates where the longer games go the chances of people crashing out approaches 1. Now i understand all software crashes on occasion, the problem is the regularity with which it can occur - after that first hour or 2 its a real pandoras box as to what you get with stability! note - its only just started happening since the new patch... didnt have problems before this (may have been due to lack of play testing previous patch)

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Yeah, the crash problems are numerous and affecting a lot of people. Try some other threads that suggest rolling back vid drivers or turning off the bloom effect. These may not be your particular crashes, but check out those threads and see.

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I haven't had any crashes in single player (yet). Haven't played multi-player yet, but I recall people mentioning that in mp in general that crashes do seem to happen after awhile. So you may be on to something. Perhaps a desyncing issue? But I guess that would just disconnect the player and not crash his system. Does this happen on Lan only or with internet matches as well?

If you check your memory usage after a game where someone crashes what is your peak memory usage? I've noticed a lot of my SoaSE game use between 1700-1900 megs in ram.

When you say crash do you mean disconnect or application crash or OS crash (needing to reboot)?
...

We haven't tried playing on the internet yet so I don't know. I'll check my memory usage next time I play, we've noticed that everyone in the game that's left after 1 guy crashed have low fps though.

When I say crash I mean application crash. The game locks up, you tab out and there's the "created a mini-dump blabla" error, you click ok and the game closes down. That's all. Should have been more specific, sorry.

Thanks for the replies guys!

//Wihl

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I feel your pain...I experience the same crash behavior. Once a game reaches a certain point, a crash is unavoidable. I have two different saves that will crash one player in 30-60 seconds, without fail. Different sized maps, with different numbers of players.

It's really frustrating, and it's killing a game I'd like to be playing.

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Is this a memory leak problem? Why does the memory usage continue to grow so rapidly - roughly 1gig of memory per hour?

32bit versions of windows can only handle 3.6gig of ram, regardless of how much is installed.

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Yarlen

Join Date 01/2005

+369

Gang, if your game is crashing we need details.

For every person that is crashing, please zip up the following and email it to support@ironcladgames.com with a description of the problem:

+ A dxdiag of your PC (Start -> Run -> type "dxdiag" and hit Enter -> Save all information).

+ Any mini-dump files that were generated from the locations below (note that these directories are Hidden by default):

XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp\Sins Dump

Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp\Sins Dump

+ For multiplayer games, please include your save games from each person who crashed.

It should go without saying that if you haven't done it already, make certain you have the latest video and sound drivers for your systems.

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Thanks Yarlen.

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Indeed, I have done so.

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Yarlen

Join Date 01/2005

+369

Ironclad's looked at the various crash reports that have come in and 90%+ of them are caused by some players running Mods that other's aren't. This is a problem because the longer you play, the greater the chance the game will crash when the data fails to sync.

It's important to make sure that all the people you're playing with are either using the same Mods or none of them. We're going to work on adding in some Mod-checking to help automate this process as well.

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We are having the EXACT same problem. I got one of my friends to come over to try this great game. We played a 1v1 via Lan on a small random map. He was really starting to like the game, when the crashes came. Luckily, I was saving the game every 15 minutes or so, so we just reloaded. But, each time we reloaded the game, one or the other of us would lock-up; and I when I say lock-up, I mean that we had to restart both computers. I read almost identical posts in other threads.

So we finally gave up, started a new game, and the exact same thing happened after several hours of play. And sadly, my friend is VERY against spending another several hours of play only to have it happen again.

And before someone asks/tells; we run mega-clean systems: Nothing on the task bars; no firewall; and great systems (which we play SC, CoH, and Civ4 via Lan all the time). And yes, we have a retail copy. Add to that my friend is a total computer/tech freak, and you've got a recipie for some dispointed/frusterated people who I'm trying to get to buy this game (

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Im having the same problems as everyone else, ive reinstalled the game and everything. My system requirements are way above anyone the recommended settings. Ive spent 4 plus hours on a game only to have repeated crashes. Its very frustrating.

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Yarlen

Join Date 01/2005

+369

See Reply #15 above.

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Ill provide insight into the crashes: I find the freezing always happens during the autosave process. The freezing I am talking about here is when someone basically DC's and the game wont continue until they actually leave, you can operate the UI just fine but the simulation itself is frozen.

For those that are having issues try disabling the autosave.

Its not a crash per say (the program itself is running 'fine') but it stops the game from continueing.

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Same here....
There are 3 of us in our dorm that have bought the download copies of Sins.
It seems to be that not matter the map size, ever since after the patch we have been crashing after about an hour or so of gameplay.

We have played 1v1 no pirates up to 3v2v2 with AI, and in very instance it crash. In addition, we sometimes run xfire while playing, and it seem that xfire catches the crash, but it still crashes, regardless if we are running xfire.

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im definately not using any mods. as a matter of fact, ive reinstalled/repatched 3 times and still get the desynchs. see how much i love sins? i wolnt even reinstall/repatch SupCom ONCE.

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Haha SkyHauss... nobody should ever try to reinstall SupCom... anyways I thought I would drop my insight into the fourm!

I noticed that it is always at the exact same spot on a certian map, a few buddies and myself were checking to make sure and watching times and it might have something to do with a type of enviornmental effect somewhere in the game reloop's itself until it grows to eat all memory from the computer... might be on the spot OR might be totally out in space... look at the game we are playing

but I love it and this little problem will not keep me from loving this game!!! Well done!!!

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