Surrender!

[Wasserman]

Hi all. I take it that this forum is the place to lodge technical comments. I posted some gameplay issues and suggestions in the Make WWI Better thread. It is the technical issues that have driven me to surrender.

I have downloaded the demo version, and patches 1.05f and 1.06. I have tested all versions many times, trying to play as far as I can in the Grand Campaign. I never made it past early 1915 before ctd caught me.

Downloaded version 1.06 today, loaded a saved game (September 1914) and it crashed during execution of moves. That was the last straw.

Some technical comments.

1. You must fix the screen saver ctd issue, or provide a warning at least that it must be disabled. I know about this bug (it IS a bug) but I kept forgetting to disable the screen saver. This caused a crash (technically, a freeze) every single time. I have never had this worry with any other game.

2. Scrolling around the map still causes jerkyness and lags. If this is to be the main way of managing your nations, this should work as smoothly as a baby's backside.

3. Why does the cursor (in all versions) freeze for 1-5 seconds, even when it is my "turn" (no AI active). Sometimes I have to wait to move the curser from the map to a menu, around the map, between units. It seems unrelated to any specific action.

4. I have now experienced in-game (non-screen saver) ctd's during the course of every game at least once. I would suspect something about my rig (which is pretty good, and not running Vista) but for the fact that I am far from alone. The MP3s are great, but I really couldn't control the sound using the in-game settings until this last version, which should have tipped me off there were sound issues. I also believe there are graphics card interface issues that crop up sporadically. (for what it is worth, I have a NVidiaGeForce 6600GT). I won't be able to justify buying this game until I see these forums showing me that ctd is at least a rare event and not how a session typically ends.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[calvinus]

1. You must fix the screen saver ctd issue, or provide a warning at least that it must be disabled. I know about this bug (it IS a bug) but I kept forgetting to disable the screen saver. This caused a crash (technically, a freeze) every single time. I have never had this worry with any other game.

For technical reasons related to the graphic engine of the game, this cannot be fixed for the time being.

2. Scrolling around the map still causes jerkyness and lags. If this is to be the main way of managing your nations, this should work as smoothly as a baby's backside.

When you scroll the map, area bitmaps are to be loaded (only the first time, of course). If the loading time is so annoying, activate the "Load all map at start" check-box in the WW1 Configurator (Configure Game).

3. Why does the cursor (in all versions) freeze for 1-5 seconds, even when it is my "turn" (no AI active). Sometimes I have to wait to move the curser from the map to a menu, around the map, between units. It seems unrelated to any specific action.

Commonly it's the loading time of window bitmaps, refresh of the map, etc. etc.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Wasserman]

Before you "surrender", you might read this thread first:

http://www.ageod-forum.com/showthread.php?t=13197

I read it. Seemed encouraging. I tried the demo version 1.06 twice more, once on the Serbia scenario, once in the 1914 campaign. Both times I received a runtime error immediately upon asking the computer to execute planned moves. At least the computer didn't lock up, but windows forced the program to close. Gah.

Just to close the loop here, I run on an AMD Athelon 64 processor, 3200+; I have 1.25 G or RAM, and 2.0 Ghz speed. Plenty of room on hard drive. I have an NVidea GForce 6600GT with extra memory.

[patrat]

is that 1.25gigs of ram?

2 gigs is the minimum recommened isnt it?

im running a amd 3000xp, 2 gigs ram and a ati x800pro 256 card.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Wasserman]

2 gig! OMG. I did not go back to the manual to check that. My bad. My apologies to all who have replied on this thread about the crashes! This is like not plugging in your computer and wondering what happened.

Particular apologies to Calvanus. I withhold further technical comments until I get myself to the store and upgrade. Thanks!

[calvinus]

Wasserman, I suggest you to do the following in order to play the game even with low ram:

1) Disable sounds & musics (Configure Game)
2) Use "Low Color Depth" option (Configure Game) - you will have a lot of RAM, but the quality of graphics will be halved down

Using these config I play on a 512MB RAM laptop! It's a Intel Core Duo2.
But beware of antivirus programs... The latest patch 1.06A contains several tricks "to win my personal war agains the antivirus programs" , but every day I discover a new antivir application with new nasty behaviours... Personally, I can tell you that the sources of crashes are nowadays:

1) antivir interference with I/O operations (I added security checks in 1.06a, see forum threads discussions)
2) Sound Engine that interferes with the game threads by creating memory leaks (the sound wrapper has been totally refactored since 1.05F, plus I refactored also the map tooltips engine by adding geometric algorythms inside the check of area-pointed-by-mouse-cursor: I personally suffered one single related crash in 100+ hours of gameplay, but some players complain very very frequent crashes... every CPU chipset is different! Anyway I hope this refactorings will fix this issue, even though the problems caused by the sound engine could be others too)
2-bis) A couple of customers discovered that the codec drivers of their sound cards (both Realtek, the same as mine where I have zero crashes), are very outdated (5.01 instead of the current version 6.01): they are suffering extremely frequent crashes.
1/2-ter) I suspect that an unfortunate combination of antivir and sound engine (for instance working in buffered/streaming mode) can generate crashes. A customer reported yesterday such problems even with version 1.06 (he uses McAfee), so I'm going to investigate on this issue by downloading and installing a trial version of McAfee.

Thanks,
Calvinus.

[vonRocko]

I have mcafee,and it never caused a problem with my game.

[Motley]

I have mcafee,and it never caused a problem with my game.

I have it too but the game is conflicting with something else. Says "windows has encountered an error and is shutting down"