Game Breaking Soviet Crash

[Stewox]

Reffer to the crash report here: http://easternfront.org/forums/index.php?topic=5954.msg81014#msg81014 [nofollow]
---------------------------------------------------------------

Both systems use win7x64

No such thing happens, the error report is created and i even sent the error to Relic , but i have found no DMP files.

This bug is breaking the game, if this mod wasn't one of the best mods for a best RTS and overall best PC game ever made,  i would long stopped playing.

The number of games me and my friend played together and actually finished (with no error) i can count on my hands. And he likes Soviets so much so ... obviously it wouldn't crash with

You have to realize that these are good PC settings, and the only thing i can see a point to try is to:

- temporarily enable virtual memory (this might make DMP work)
- create test environiment (closing relicdownloader, disabling unnecessary programs,

My friend has a default OEM PC afaik , so is the system customization, i have realized when navigating him to fetch these files.

My system is customized from the registery up , total transformation of win7 that it doesn't even "feel" like win7 ( i hate default) , but more like XP on steroids, mostly are performance tweaks, so security/recovery/backup/useless stuff/needless services/ is all sacrificed for performance (if you don't do stupid things on the web you don't need security :p , i have no spam, trojans very rarely)

These are the full specs:


Win7 x64 ultimate
NOD 32 Antivirus 4.0
CPU: Intel Q9300 2.5ghz stock
GPU: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4870 512MB
PSU: Enermax 620W Liberty DXX
APU: Asus Xonar D1 PCI
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black 1000GB 64MB cache SATA3 (WD1002FAEX)
RAM: 6GB - Corsair Dominator 1066mhz DDR2 CL5
MOBO: Gigabyte P35-DS4 rev2.1 Bios-F14
KEY: MS SideWinder X4
MAU: MS SideWinderTM (latest, similar to X5)
SND: Logitech X-540 5.1 Sorround System

Settings Tweaks:
- No Pagefile (HDD virtual memory disabled)
- No Readyboot (not readyboost) - a kind of prefetcher working at boot*
- No Superfetch
- UAC disabled

Registery Tweaks:
-optimized memory management
-Prefetcher disabled

Service Tweaks:
- Homegroup Disabled
- Win Defender disabled
- Win Firewall disabled
- Win Search disabled (all indexing)
- Win Update disabled (manual updates every month)



There is absolutely no other issue with EF mod or COH at all , i have been playing COH and it's expansion for 3 years.  I have been playing COH with many hardware configs, with many different GPUs , with many different RAM/virtual memory settings/ratios , with many different versions of bios, and different OS.

Those general/popular errors mostly happen on crappy broken PCs with severly screwd up settings, also it takes experience to come up with a good custom hardware setup, it's not just throwing random parts that fit together and call it ok.

[Blackbishop]

Why you disable windows' page file?

32 bits OS crashes and doesn't return a dump file because they don't have enough virtual memory to pull it out. If you have a 64 bits OS but you disable the page file imo looks like will behave the same.

[Stewox]

Why you disable windows' page file?

32 bits OS crashes and doesn't return a dump file because they don't have enough virtual memory to pull it out. If you have a 64 bits OS but you disable the page file imo looks like will behave the same.

I don't think that bit depth matters here, i have 6GB RAM which is enough for any game to run perfectly

I don't use pagefile because is don't need those recovery features is provides, plus, a major slowdown of the system's responsiveness and lag in games is the pagefile. Many games have poor memory managements and they lag a lot with pagefile enabled.

Pagefile is used for windows dumps when a BSOD happens, i think COH also uses it for it's own dumps apparently, i don't know the technicals why it's like that but it may have sense, i will enable 6GB pagefile , recreate the soviet crash and then see if the dump happens.

But i don't think it's connected in any way since my friend also didn't find any dumps. (and he has default win7 pagefile settings)





PS: many games take virtual memory out of context, what they mean is logical memory, (total memory) if the error report would really know i have 0 virtual memory it would say so.

If you have like 1 GB of ram , and 8 GB of virtual memory, it'll work in theory , but the game might then DETECT the amount of physical RAM and then give an error about that, but if you take the artificial error out and test the game, i'll work , but laggy as hell, probably unplayable.

What they are pointing into is that pagefile is always has space for those dumps to write and in many many machines around the world people don't have enough RAM , even if the "recommended" specs are OK , gaming industry totaly has a outdated look on how much RAM you actually need, they always count the stupid pagefile in.
I think the game just detectes low overall memory, and just says you have low virtual memory, totally misleading. I had 0 virtual memory and i got no errors.

I have a good PC , i just never care a lot what specs a game needs , i know everything* will run and it does, it's just a matter of how many fps i'll get , no problem.
Post Merge: July 21, 2011, 04:17:06 AMNew Crash. Full report.

Tested with 6GB pagefile:
- 3 times longer launch time , HDD was visibly in crunch, it was loading assets and swaping in the same time.

There was no other normally visible issue, no PC lag, and it was an offline skirmish game.

Map name: Some official COH Maps and EF Pokhorovka (3v3)

ENEMY:
1 Easy CPU: WE
2 Normal CPU: WE

Allies:
Me - Soviets
Hard Ally - America

High Resources
Fixed points
Annihilation No popcap

Relic Downloader was not running, i didn't saw it in icons, didn't notice in processes either.

Happened late game, but 2hrs into the game, randomly , doing just normal stuff, no upgrading, no training, just attacking with 2 guys one tack , defending base etc , over and over and it just crashes out of nothing.

The pagefile is not needed for the crash DUMP as i suspected, the DUMP file gets deleted from TEMP folder after you send crash report to Relic.
(but i have not tested again without pagefile yet, i will play more games later, and this is not an issue of importance at all, but i'll confirm it anyways btw)

The game crashed in my first attempt, just like the last time i tested with soviets, currently with these 2 games, the crash occurance rate is ... drum roll ....  100%. This is a severe bug and i don't know how this is going on unfixed for months.

From what i played with my friend, the soviet crash chance is likely 60-70%, this means only 30-40% of all games we played for months were the ones that actually finished with a score screen.

But it does not crash for everyone, it crashes only for the soviet player,  NO DESYNCS AT ALL, NEVER.

I also have to notify that me and my friend have totally different PCs , totally different hardware brands, but we live in the same country, may it have to do with localizations something , or with windows locale setup ? Because this crash doesn't seem to be popular at all.
Maybe keyboard locale, anyways i don't remember pressing keys except mouse, when it crashes.

As far as i can tell, pagefile has nothing to do with it, my firend has default setup, he obviously has pagefile set to "system managed", i know win7 in and out so , i surely know. 

http://www.mediafire.com/?dfrmhz2ldcjstt5 [nofollow]

[Blackbishop]

I thought the page file was needed for creating the dump file, don't misunderstand me.

In extreme conditions on 32 bits OS your game will crash and won't create dump file and won't tell you why but just will throw you to the desktop, and that happens because you were run out of memory.

When you get an "Unable to create report. Please verify there's enough space in your TEMP folder" message, means that the virtual memory runs out, but it can be fixed increasing it's size.

Of course, both are errrors from 32 bits OS and perhaps doesn't have to do with your case, but don't expect the game is going to tell you if crashes due to memory exhaustion (even Cope have checked some dump files and concluded that were caused by that and their respective owners didn't suspect it). It will never say that runs out of memory like the examples mentioned above.

I have a good PC , i just never care a lot what specs a game needs , i know everything* will run and it does, it's just a matter of how many fps i'll get , no problem.

Now, I really hope you didn't apply that to Eastern Front. You cannot run Eastern Front in Ultra settings, perhaps you don't have it but otherwise reduce your graphics to high and tell your buddy to do the same. Company of Heroes isn't optimized to use Ultra Settings in mods.

[Stewox]

You're telling me now , that this is is a mod's or game's technical limitation rather than a computer-specific issue right ?

So even if i have super duper server hardware i shouldn't be running on ultra ?


Also what do these ULTRA settings apply to , to which specifc settings, i have no anti aliasing turned on, nor forced, i can't get this how GFX would affect game stability.




Also, i am running Asus Xonar D1 audio card. No problem with sound with COH ever.
And i know the other guy doesn't have dedicated audio, he prolly has realtek integrated.

[Blackbishop]

This is the limit of CoH's engine and applies for all it's mods not only for Eastern Front.

With "Ultra" I mean everything that can be selected as "Ultra", no matters if you have everything in High and have full AA, the game will work fine, but you shall not run Eastern Front with Ultra Settings.

As for the sound, as I have never used other than integrated sound devices, don't know how much about it... but you could try lowering it's settings if the graphics settings change alone doesn't work.

[Stewox]

This is the limit of CoH's engine and applies for all it's mods not only for Eastern Front.

With "Ultra" I mean everything that can be selected as "Ultra", no matters if you have everything in High and have full AA, the game will work fine, but you shall not run Eastern Front with Ultra Settings.

As for the sound, as I have never used other than integrated sound devices, don't know how much about it... but you could try lowering it's settings if the graphics settings change alone doesn't work.

Aha

Now that's a totally different situation there.


That's really not a problem for me to test , if it works, it's an acceptable sacrifice right away.

[Blackbishop]

This is the limit of CoH's engine and applies for all it's mods not only for Eastern Front.

With "Ultra" I mean everything that can be selected as "Ultra", no matters if you have everything in High and have full AA, the game will work fine, but you shall not run Eastern Front with Ultra Settings.

As for the sound, as I have never used other than integrated sound devices, don't know how much about it... but you could try lowering it's settings if the graphics settings change alone doesn't work.

Aha

Now that's a totally different situation there.


That's really not a problem for me to test , if it works, it's an acceptable sacrifice right away.

I didn't notice any difference between ultra and high setting .

[Stewox]

We'll try and report back , in the mean time i guess you guys seriousy look at those error reports. thank you.

EDIT: Added map name to the long post with crash report.

[Copernicus]

Hello Stewox,

thanks for you sophisticated error report. We do read every single one of them and we appreciate the effort spent on reporting problems. Unfortunately there's no useful information in your logs about what actually causes the crash, which leaves us with empty hands.
The dump file you provided leads to a crash many people report which occurs because the game fails to allocate memory. A setup with 6GB really shouldn't ever run out of memory and the fact that CoH is a 32 bit application limits the game's memory to far less than 6GB. If that limit was the reason for the crash, I would also have experienced it by now (and countless other users would have, too), but I haven't.
The fact that we don't have any access to any information about the technical features of the game is probably the biggest problem.
Nonetheless we - of course - still try to figure out what ultimately makes the game crash but up until now there is no clue, no pattern, nothing at all.

Regards,
-cope.

[Stewox]

Thanks for response.


The next 2 games i played alone were going fine, the map was some i don't remember and the second one was EF Seelow

These are 4 games , so the Crash rate is 50% currently.


Then when i got playing with friend again, we were both russian , and one other online guy joined soviet too , 3 against 3 AIs , the map was again EF Seelow , and the game crashed first for my friend, and then in some minutes when we're about to lose it also crashed for me.

[cephalos]

1. DON"T use SU-122. Model is bugged and causes crashes.
2. Set HIGH, ULTRA causes crashes.

... I've read whole discussion here, maybe that's the problem. Often simple answers are the best ones. 
Cheers

[Stewox]

The CRASHES happened when using HIGH and RelicDownloader Fix

I haven't experienced any other crashes before, only the soviet random crash bug.

[Tico_1990]

What cephalos means is the following: their is a bug in a certain unit (the Su122), if it is hit by shells it crashes, so try to see if that is what causing your problem (aka: don't have anyone use those units for an entire match).

[Stewox]

I forgot about the Su122 unit, where exactly it is ?

I didn't play a lot of Axis if it's there.


The point is , i wasn't getting crashes with ULTRA , except soviets , and HIGH doesn't help the soviet crash either.