Is anyone else still getting occasional crashes when saving....

[MarkQuinn]

In version 1.113?

 

[Tietovallu]

Fix here: http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,113029.0.html.

I had the same problem, it was for me that the game had its ram usage limited and when the usage was enough then the game crashed while saving.

 

[MarkQuinn]

Tietovallu, I've seen your post before but never read very far because my problems don't deal with large battle sizes.  Although my system could handle the kind of numbers you mentioned in that thread, I keep my graphics settings pretty conservative because smooth gameplay and high framerate is the most important thing to me, more so than large battles or great graphics.  I have just about every bit of eyecandy turned off that I can handle.  Battle sizes at 100.  No HDR.  No depth effects.  No anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering.  Grass density at 0.  Tree degrade at 40%.  No shadows anywhere.  And still I'm getting random crashes when saving and Runtime errors, described here along with my system specs:

http://bugs.taleworlds.com/edit_bug.aspx?id=2389

All drivers updated, BTW.

I'm at my wit's end, really.  And the messed up thing is that I can play for an hour before something happens, while other times it crashes after five minutes.

Anyway, with all due respect Tietovallu, I didn't actually see a fix in that thread you mentioned.  I saw possible causes, but no fix.  Reading your post, it doesn't seem to me that investing in more RAM would help either, and at 2 gigs, which is very modest by today's standards but still more than enough to play most games (especially Warband) I really shouldn't have to.

Any ideas?

EDIT: BTW, I'm feeling pretty discouraged because when I search this forum using the terms "crash" or "appcrash" or "runtime", there really aren't very many posts, and many of the ones that are there either don't have much to do with my issue, or if they do, they don't have many replies.  This tells me the vast majority of people are enjoying a crash-free Warband experience.  That, in turn, tells me TaleWorlds won't fix anything because there's nothing to fix.  And finally, that tells me the problem is on my end.  But like you, I run many other high-end games with few or no problems.  Mount&Blade 1.011, incidentally, never crashes on me.  Not once.

 

[Tietovallu]

If you actually spent time reading you would notice that having higher settings just increases the speed at which the game crashes. Warband has a memory leak which in short causes it to use more and more memory over time. If the occasional crashes when saving happen after some time of playing then I am guessing it might be the same problem with memory. You should try the 2GB tweak if it would work.

tl:dr specs only increase the crash rate

 

[Archonsod]

Have you tried turning off UAC? Vista writes to a buffer and then to the hard drive if it's active, could be what's causing the issues.

 

[MarkQuinn]

@Tietovallu: Thanks for helping and answering.  Yes, I did read it all, but not as carefully as I should've because it didn't seem relevant to my issue.  I'll read again and try the tweak.

@Archonsod: I never keep UAC on.  Never ever.  Probably not too smart of me, but, as an avid gamer with Vitsa, I learned two things right away: 1) Always install games to the root directory, never your Programs folder, 2) always keep UAC off.

A more general question, really directed at you Tietovallu, but also whoever else can answer this.  As I said previously, I see very few crashing posts on this forum.  Much less than other game forums.  Overall, the game seems pretty stable, judging by the tech forum content alone.  But if the game crashes at one and a half gigs, if there's a memory leak, or if the problems you or I have experienced are indicative of the software, not our machines, why isn't this forum filled with every other post being about crashing?

 

[Yozzer]

Mine crashes sometimes when I save, I also get a freeze that requires a hard reboot, only in Warband. I have put the fix in the .exe and though it has not fixed my problem, they seem to be less frequent.
I am slowly going through the settings in the config for Warband, having reduced the ragdolls to 5, which did not seem to help, and kept all the settings around medium, showing now 122% as the performance.
I suspect the trouble may be caused by multiple things, the exe helping, not loading textures on demand seems to have helped, no idea why, and hopefully I will get a complete evening without a crash. (They always seem to happen at the wrong time).
I did post a bug report and the RGL, but now I cannot find the bug entry?
I use Windows 7 x64, though I also have VISTA x64 but it crashed in that, and my specs are Q6600, 6gb ram, GTX 260, P35C-DS3R m/b
Perhaps a voting post to show who is having problems and there spec so we could find a common denominator?
UAC is off by the way, and various Video drivers have been tried, sound off, no overclock, and apart from Warband, everything else runs fine.

 

[MarkQuinn]

Over at the bug tracker forum I was asked to log my memory usage when the game crashed.  The post I made was about an APPCRASH Runtime error, which is a seperate kind of crash from what I reported here.  But if the problem stems from the same thing, great.  Here's what I wrote there.

http://bugs.taleworlds.com/edit_bug.aspx?id=2389

Wasn't able to duplicate crash today, but also wasn't able to play for very long.  I did make these findings:

PC Idle (WB not running):
CPU Usage - 0%
Memory - 823 MB
Page File - 1007M / 4311M

Warband main menu:
CPU Usage - 54%
Memory - 1.80 GB
Page File - 2254M / 4311M

Small battle with looters
CPU Usage - 54%
Memory - 1.79GB
Page File - 2539M / 4311M

This memory usage seemed exceptionally high to me, especially in light of this post (http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,113029.0.html) about WB crashing after 1.5gb of memory used.  I downloaded and installed a hotfix from Microsoft which was supposed to improve memory allocation, but that only seemed to save me about .05 gigs overall.  Next time I play an extended session I'll keep task manager open and log more findings.

Is any of the above helpful though?

 

[MarkQuinn]

The numbers I listed above are total CPU usage, not Warband usage.  I guess when we refer to WB crashing after 1.5gb of use, we're talking about the ap itelf.  Stupid of me not to think about that.

But shouldn't I be worried that I have a total of 2 gigs memory and WB bring total system memory up to 1.7-1.8 while playing?

 

[MarkQuinn]

Perhaps a voting post to show who is having problems and there spec so we could find a common denominator?

By the looks of the few responses to this post, it looks like a poll would be very one-sided in favor of people not having too many problems.  I'd figured as much, as I said above, because of the relatively few topics about crashing on this forum (especially lately).

Though my negativist attitude tells me with 100% certainty that my crash problem isn't solved, will never be solved, and is merely hiding for the time being, I will say I haven't had a crash since my last post in this thread.  I've done three things since then:

1) Fine tuned Vista's Superfetch for better memory management.  Vista users can read about it here:

http://dotnetwizard.net/hacks/fine-tune-superfetch/

2) Turned ON Load Textures On Demand.  Contrary to almost unanimous opposition to this feature here on the forums, along with advice for turning it off being about as standard and basic as "look both ways before crossing the street," despite some slower transitions between scenes, this feature seems to have made my overall game more stable.

3) Playing in Windowed mode.

I don't experience too many games that crash, but when I do, I can never fix the issue, short of getting a brand new system (and even then some crash-prone games like Oblivion persist with their crashiness).  What I'm saying is that I have every confidence that I'll be back on this forum within an hour of posting this message, announcing that I have, in fact, crashed, and that the three imaginary "fixes" listed above have been nothing more than a placebo, giving me the illusion of game stability until that climactic moment when I'm rudely dumped to the desktop with an APPCRASH notification whose description might as well be written in Greek.

My reason for even bothering to post these three worthless tips is because someone else, whose luck isn't as atrocious as mine, might actually find one or two of them useful.