Bug - Crash to Desktop

i too have this issue. Visual C++ runtime error but it happens 1/2-1hr into the game. may depend on how complex/large the level is. the first game i played i did not encounter this issue, and my friend has not either yet. i even tried uninstalling and reinstalling the 2010 C++ redist's (both x86 and x64) and it still happens.

it is making the game unplayable.

system:

Core i7 920 3.8GHz. 12GB DDR3 Ram. AMD Radeon HD 7970. windows 7 ultimate 64x

Thanks for the feedback, and sorry to hear you're running into this issue (glad to hear you like it before the crashes though!).  If you're able to provide the following information, it would help us a great deal in tracking this down:

1) Map, Game options, Victory conditions, AI options, AI factions, and player factions you're playing with.  Which one's you're playing with every time, and which ones you have varied between games (but still crashed)

2) Are you playing singleplayer or multiplayer?

3) When the game crashes, can you load an auto-save from before the crash?  If so, does the game crash quickly again, or can you continue playing for a much longer time before crashing after a load.

Depending on your answers, I might follow up and ask for one of your pre-crash auto-saves to help us reproduce this issue internally.

Thanks again!

So, I sent a crash report this morning for the same issue to the email address provided for crash reports. 

My computer did not have a sins dump on crash though - Thus, I assume that this is actually not the game crashing, but rather interference with some other process?

i7 Vaio (laptop), 16G DDR3, Nvidia 330M, Win7 64bit.  (system information was provided via the stardock system analyzer tool thingy) you can cross-ref my forum account with the email I sent the crash report from to get full system information.

This crash has only happened once, although I've only played 0.80 for about 4 hours.

Large map, single player, 8 players (myself as TEC Rebels, 7 random "hard" AI (not sure what all they were as I wasn't necessarily paying attention), all default victory conditions (all "off"?), all other game options are 'default' except for video resolution which IIRC 2000x1024, and I probably cranked some of the texturing/effects up a bit, probably about 2 hours into the game.

I don't think I saved the game, and there were no autosaves to resurrect the game with (are autosaves not showing up for some reason?  my game would autosave every so often during play). 

If I encounter this again, I'll be sure to update on this thread and of course email what I've got.

Cheers, and great game thus far,

-tid242

Okay, I just completed a several hour game that eventually crashed to desktop and I recorded several things.

 Singleplayer Game

1. Map Information - crash happens on all sizes: small, medium, and large - For this game I used the Gateway map
2. Victory Options - crash happens regardless of these options - For this game I used Diplomacy off, Flagship off, Capital on, Research on, Occupation on, Allied on
3. AI - easy, x2 TEC Rebels, x2 Advent Loyal, x2 Advent Rebels = 6 players - I normally play TEC however the crash happens when I play Advent as well.
4. Game Options - Unlocked Teams, Pirates On, All options set to Normal

Game was started at 3:57 am and crashed at 5:22 am.  Restarted game and it crashed again at 6:12 am.

The first crash I got an interesting new STEAM message stating "STEAM Error - Please exit any running game or tools before attempting to verify your game cache."

The second crash was the Runtime Error with C++.

I hope this helps, let me know if you need my saves for this.

Kosten

Forums have been down all weekend for me, bumping for cbray to review.

kosten

Thanks for the info!  We've got a TON of internal crash fixes that will be coming out with our next patch.  Can't say for certain they will cover your issue, so next time there is a patch please bump this thread if you're still getting it.

Also, tid242, on the "Load Game" screen you should be able to hit the "Change Save Type" button until the title changes to "Single-Player Auto-Saved Games" and see the list of auto-saved games.

I tried on medium and large maps, still crashed about 30-45minutes into the game regardless

i tried playing the game on singleplayer after having this issue in multiplayer, still crashed.

i was never able to see where to load the sp-auto save but for multiplayer the host was able to load his autosave. the game still crashed about 30 minutes after restarting the match from the save.

 

here are some things i tried:

Erased and re-downloaded the game through steam.

Registry scan and clean by 2 reputable programs (auslogics registry cleaner and piriform ccleaner)

Uninstalled and reinstalled the Visual C++ redists (both 32bit and 64bit)

system specs (again):

Core i7 920 @ 3.8GHz

12GB DDR3 1600MHz

AMD Radeon HD 7970

i am able to run the game flawlessly at max graphics settings, but this issue is making it so i just cant play the game at all. hope you guys can find a fix for it.

To load from an autosave, click Load on the left, then at the bottom of the empty list you will see a button labelled "Change type" or something of that nature.  It's the only button below the save list.  Click it, and you will see the autosaves.

I saw that there was an update today so i tried again. I got much further into the game (about 2 hours) before it crashed this time, instead of only about 30 minutes before. the game crashed right after i started building a titan factory.

Thanks. That's good(ish) news.  We're certainly continuing to look into more crash bugs.  If you manage to come up with steps to reproduce that crash, or a save file that reproduces it we'd be eternally grateful

^ Having the same issue about 3+ hours into a multi-player game on max graphics with bloom enabled.

i re-loaded the game from the latest auto save and was able to finish the game (3-4 more hours)

i made sure i was saving every now and then just in case it did crash.

My guess would be that this crash is more likely related to a memory issue (32 bit programs can only use 2gb)

I also had this CTD-without-dump several times in previous betas.

I just had one with beta 2c and once I loaded the game from the autosave, I was able to play for several hours later on.

I'd do a shotgun approach on looking for some memory mismanagement which puts the program in an inconsistent state, which crops up depending on how objects are created and destroyed along the program operation, but not (or hardly) a bug which can be reproduced consistently solely from a saved game state. One of those pesky corner cases which depend on a set of conditions which mostly work, unless they are put together in the excact wrong way...

Still a pertinent topic for 0.90. I've had 2 crashes to desktop both without coredumps.  The first without any sort of notice, the second with the same C++ "application quite unexpected way" message.  two different maps/games.

Both single player, w/ 7 "hard' random AI, 1920x1024, all default conditions, everything else default, large map.

The second game crashed while trying to build squads from the left side-bar menu..

Hope this is at least somewhat informative, as it seems to me like it won't be without any coredumps.

cheers,

-tid242

Hmmm, have you guys (at least the ones having super frequent crashes) tried lowering texture settings? If it's memory related that should help, and if that's the case then we have a good starting place.

I'll also be sure to mess with creating squads by selecting on the empire tree as I test, and see if that can repro something.

I'll bump up my textures to obscene levels to see if it crashes more frequently. Even if my frame rate suffers. Then I will tone down to the minimum and see if it gets less frequent.

Hehe, didn't read these forums today and the same thing after about 2.5h of continuous play.  It's a MS Visual C++ "quitting in an unexpected way" that leaves no dump.

Tomorrow I'll crank down some of my texture settings and see if I run into this again.  As I said before, I did turn one of them up a little bit from default, so we'll see.

In any event, crashing is always a good incentive to go to bed. 

Keep up the good work, loving the beta, played 20+ hours since getting it about 2 weeks ago.  0.90 seems much more stable than 0.80 as I've had no crashes other than the VC++ thing that leaves no dump (and did have fairly regular beta-type crashes with 0.80).

Does Visual C++ leave a crash dump somewhere (windows 7) that I could dropbox/email to you guys???

Cheers & thx,

-tid242

btw, this latest crash happened while placing a hangar or something (autoplace "off"), or moving a ship or something, so I don't think that squad creation caused it.  As far as I can tell it's completely random.  Also, if it's a video issue, it might be useful to know that I usually play zoomed out enough that all of the ships/structures are just the map icons (instead of the cool looking floating assets in space).

Will keep you guys informed if turning down the textures or anything else I do can consistently seem to be tied with this crash.  It would be handy if I didn't have to play for 2-4 hours before it would crash on me.  ;\

-tid242

I was hoping this latest patch would fix the CTD but alas is didn't.

I'm not sure on exactly how to recreate the crash, the only consistent thing is that it always happens, regardless of game settings. 

Going to take my time and go through the video settings and see if anything in particular changes.

Kosten

Question at you guys:

with those crashes, without C++ error, just straight to the desktop, did it not happen to you with bit more ships on the screen, while zooming in and out? Because it seems, it usually happens to me in such situations. I recall it happened as i was zooming in and out and in again on the group of dogfighting advent bombers firing lots of those small laser beams at some TEC capship and lately while zooming it on Vasari Marauder doing the ability, which lets it move quicker... everytime as i zoomed in, i had a feeling, it was choppy for a moment before crashing, so i am led to believe its some graphical issue. 

it is possible that it may be graphics related in your case, but im fairly certain its not in mine. I have an HD 7970 (3GB of VRAM) that can handle almost anything you could throw at it.

I have geforce gtx590    not too shabby either.  Obviously though, it has only 1,5 GB of videoRAM per GPU, so if its related to the lack of videoRAM, you may be right.

I have maxed my graphics - everything on highest, all graphic options on, FSAA 4x, 1920x1200.

It didn't seem to hasten the CTD in any way.

My system is not RAM constrained (8GB), but my video memory is 'just' 512MB.

What seemed to do the trick though, was alt-tabbing to the desktop and getting back to the game.

Playing on a huge multi-star game, already on a late game, alt-tabbed once and browsed a bit.

Going back to the game started lagging the input. Clicking on any button or confirming some structure placement took some time between the mouse click and the action actually happen, sometimes several seconds. After the input lag started, the game crashed in ~5 minutes.

Could make it crash a few times with alt-tabbing.

tried to host a multiplayer game. after about an hour it started lagging a whole bunch, then crashed.