Incessant game crashes since last major ver upload.

[pigface]

Hi I', using patch 4 now, but since the last major game update (the one with a realy big file) this game crashes almost every time I play, at least once a day. The crashing is not consistant with any length of time of play.

I need help determing if it is my computer o an update issue.

The symptom is during play, my video goes black, the last sound playing loops continuously. All computer function cease. I need to do a hard boot to get out of it. I cannot save any data when this happens.
When rejoining th egame the fisrt time out of the crash, abotu 50% of the time It crashes right away as soon as I launch the online game button.
When I launch game again, it works, but many times some of the settigns get changed like Auto Takeoff curns back to ON, and Sound Beeps when keys are pressed are turned back to ON.

Things i tried:
Thinking it was a Video card issue, I did a thorough cleaning for air cooling
Reinstalled Video drivers from scratch.

When that did nto help, I reinstalled the game from scratch.

Im using a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
EVGA Motherboard with 6 GB DDR3 RAM
Dual Quadcore i7
Win 7 ultimate - completely updated.

This symptom does not occur during any other computer operation.
What other data would you like me to supply?

Does anyone else experience this symptom? Its sorta frusterating when you go on a 1-2 hr strat bomb run and have the game crash as soon as you drop the bombs, or worse in mid of squad missions. Wouldnt want my squaddies to thing I'm wussin out!

Thanks for any assistance.

FBPIGGY

[The Fugitive]

What in game setting are you using? With the update we got ground clutter and this can use a lot of resources. Also what setting do you have your Anti-allison set to. The higher you go the resources it uses. The same goes for shadows. If you have everything turned up you may have pushed your video card over the edge with this update.

Post a list of your in game settings as well as the top third (up to and including the <SOUND DEVICES>) of the dxdiag report. This will help people figure a solution to your issues. Or you could turn down the extra stuff in the game and run it for a bit to see hoe it fares.

[Skuzzy]

It sounds like you are running out of resources.  Try this.  Remove the "video8.cfg" file, then run the game.  See if it stabilizes.  Make sure to have our video driver settings at thier defaults as well.

[pigface]

Thanks for the replies.

I will  list all game config settings as requested. They may be cranked up. Ill start by recording where they are at, then turn some of them down, or all down to a certain level. If it is stable, then Il crank em back up so see if I can reproduce it, and find where my limits are. I thought I had enough resources to cover anything, but I have been wrong before, i think once.

I have removed the video8.cfg file. I did not mention it for I had als completely uninstalled, and reinstalled game which would have also done that. I did both actually.

Thansk again.

[pigface]

Update:

Yesterday i played and it crashed, settigns were the same. I had the graphics all turned up, max details etc. Instead of boring you with all the details, I hit he DEFAULT button to start at a known place. Sice i did that yesterday, i played for a few more hours and no crashes. I will try again today and see what happens.

If that is the case, my question would be if the GTX 285 is running out odf resources, what card do you guys recomend to play with more detail? I would liek to go to three monitors later this year too.

Thanks, Pigface aka FBPIGGY

[Skuzzy]

Update:

Yesterday i played and it crashed, settigns were the same. I had the graphics all turned up, max details etc. Instead of boring you with all the details, I hit he DEFAULT button to start at a known place. Sice i did that yesterday, i played for a few more hours and no crashes. I will try again today and see what happens.

If that is the case, my question would be if the GTX 285 is running out odf resources, what card do you guys recomend to play with more detail? I would liek to go to three monitors later this year too.

Thanks, Pigface aka FBPIGGY

There is a lot more to resources, than just performance.  The physical amount of video RAM could be the issue.  The game can easily consume 1.5GB to 2GB of video RAM, depending on the anti-alias setting, along with the bump map settings.

A DXDIAG output would be most helpful.

[bustr]

So video resource exaustion accounts for why I've stopped getting lockups or CTD since I dialed back my 3D processes in windows to "quality" or "performance", bumpmaps to only terrain and other vehicals, shadows off, and funny grass all off. And I'm running a 6770 1G with 8G of RAM. Wow what a resource intensive game.

Guess I should look at the cost of a 2G or 3G video card if I want the full "Monti".

Bentnail just built a new system I7 processor, with 12G RAM and a 2G video card. Has everything set to manual and turned on and up in Win7 and the game except for that funny grass. Solid 60 FPS, no stutters, no CTD. He swears Aces High is one beutiful world to behold running at the full monti. He also got a commercial internet connection to improve his up\down load, connection times and connection quality along with anything else that much money a month will buy him in game performance. Now his varyance and host queue are as flat line as a corpse. Seems when he pulls the trigger, now things go boom.

[Skuzzy]

So video resource exaustion accounts for why I've stopped getting lockups or CTD since I dialed back my 3D processes in windows to "quality" or "performance", bumpmaps to only terrain and other vehicals, shadows off, and funny grass all off. And I'm running a 6770 1G with 8G of RAM. Wow what a resource intensive game.

Guess I should look at the cost of a 2G or 3G video card if I want the full "Monti".

Bentnail just built a new system I7 processor, with 12G RAM and a 2G video card. Has everything set to manual and turned on and up in Win7 and the game except for that funny grass. Solid 60 FPS, no stutters, no CTD. He swears Aces High is one beutiful world to behold running at the full monti. He also got a commercial internet connection to improve his up\down load, connection times and connection quality along with anything else that much money a month will buy him in game performance. Now his varyance and host queue are as flat line as a corpse. Seems when he pulls the trigger, now things go boom.

What is really killing the performance is the anti-aliasing settings people insist on using.  When you are running 1920x1080 on a 23 or 24 inch monitor, you really do not need much anti-aliasing, if any, in Aces High.

Every sampling for anti-alaising requires another copy of the textures to be made in video RAM.  Bump mapping adds several more texture samples to make.  All of a sudden it is easy to have one texture copied 64 times in video RAM.  Now add skins to the mix.  All of a sudden, instead of 256 copies of textures for 3 P51D's, you have 768 copies.

Every graphic option has a cost.  Nothing is free.  Bump mapping is very video memory intensive.

[bustr]

Is that the static holding common expected to be reused shapes or the dynamic being pushed by the demands of the current environmental situation? Bentnail and I both experienced CDT after being in a heavily populated localised situation then moving off to essentualy open space with one or two other players in the area. Each of at a different time and place last night.

One would think the CTD via resource exaustion would take place during the heavily populated situation and not afterwards in boonies basicly alone. Or does the static ram continue to fill with common expected to be reused shapes and not purge very frequently from every experience you pass through? 

[Skuzzy]

Loading video RAM is simpler than unloading it.  The latest version of the game makes every attempt to remove elements from video RAM that are not immediately needed.

That said, testing for resource issues is simple.  Reduce the settings (AA first is the best place to start, as we have no control over how the video card is going to hang on to thinsg when AA is on) and see if the problem goes away.  If it does, then you know what the problem is.

Get rid of any custom sounds and see if that is the problem as well.  Custom sounds have been problematic for quite some time.

There are so many things that can interfere with the which we have no control over.  Anti-virus programs, file security programs, anything from Apple, Roxio, or Intuit.  Basically, applications which mess with system files are a problem for us.

[bustr]

You sound like my old boss at BofA. He always complained that our core programs ran fine if it wasen't for the dozen or so apps that pre-loaded to keep our business programs safe, inventory the system, backend to the SAN, backup to the smart silos, connect to the GIGABit or Fiber segment, and deliver software updates. Super Tuesdays eventualy lost someone their job when a patch affected the ATM transaction servers. Testing in the Lab is never like going live even with a contract MS VAR living inhouse 24/7. MS always took my bosses position that we had too many filters in the way to garuntee 99.99.

I pretty much have everything OS side for my video card turned down to performance or application controlled(6770 1G). Only bump map terrain and detailed terrains on. Turning off those gives me back my AW 16 color terrain with "No Depth Perception". I run a service stop batch file that reduces my OS to 28 processes and my current antivirus version has an option to detect full screen games and completely turn itself off other than the "Listener" that waits for the game to be minimised or exited. My CPU is at 0 percent by this time.

I even have every last vestiage of NetBios over TCP and LMHOSTS Lookup disabled in the IPv4 advanced WINS tab to stop that rediculous legacy enumeration of the network stack. Wish there was an option to diable IPv6 to. That removes a few blips from the "Varyence and Delay Line". Wonder how many players even know they can get rid of that along with disabling the Browser service and NetBios Helper service? Get rid of those Browser Master elections becasue you are the only PC sitting on your home router or connected to your broadband modem. Oh and I have a simple SB OEM castrated to basic sound and the default game sounds. The HiRes Pac is the correct version. Sound and Video drivers are fine.

Wonder if it's video or sound that dosen't give back resources when it should...We always joked with our Live-In MS guys that if their product was not the problem, why did MS release so many updates month after month after month.....Their answer in private was that there was no end to the ingenious ways "You" guys come up with to screw a perfictly good program. As long as you didn't get fired over it, that was great job security on both sides.>

[Skuzzy]

Give me more details about the CTD.  Does it do it cleanly?  In other words, one minute you are flying the next you are at the desktop, like someone pressed ALT-F4. 

Or does it have an error panel associated with the crash?

[bustr]

Yes an error panel, I had to use Task Manager to gain access to my desktop.

Pretty normal faulting info for Aces High. No WATCHDOG mini dump to debug on my end. And then only in the past with NVIDIA cards and their drivers. 0xc0000005 could be video, RAM, sound, USB controllers even my CPU getting old. I have a 750W PS and excellent cooling. The PC passes health checks other wise. Or resource exaustion related to a peice of hardware.

Pretty normal situation. A very loud high population area, then the CTD after moving away. From what I can determin by talking to my squad this is an expected occurence with all of them from time to time. Some worse than others for number of times in a month or even in a session. This dosen't happen as much since I moved to an ATI card. Once or twice a month opposed to 3 times a week with NVIDIA. But, this has been an expected occurence on every PC and 2 OS that I've played this game with since 2002. Frankly my current PC with Win7 and an ATI 6770 has CTD the least of all of my PC running Aces High since 2002.

I'm not sure what good it would do to setup a video memory logger for my game sessions to see if there is any kind of pattern in this. With the Miles sound and Win7 should we be setting our source to Windows (Primary Sound Driver) and (Microsoft Sound Mapper) rather than the specific hardware function? Are there any simple sound resource loggers out there? I could run sound and video memory loggin each session for awhile to see what it looks like when I CTD like this. I've got the HD space for the logs. Catch-22 though with the added background activity.....

Hitech ever consider sending out an executable that will trigger a full memory dump off a CTD? I'll volunteer to run it as a guinie pig. Not sure you want to look through a 4-8G debug file, though you can search on known tags, or Hitech could create debug symbols for the game unless they are already there. Can't be as bad as crashing an 8-way SQL server on a tagged event line for a full memory dump to catch a DB2 gateway driver causing processor (7) to peg at 100 performing Gbyte file transfers during live business production. Seems the DB2 gateway driver hadn't been updated in in the last year by the Sr. DB Engineer. You might say that was some mondo resource exaustion when it hung the file transfer needing a reboot a couple of times a week. MS pointed fingers at IBM and vice versa while HP pointed fingers at both of them after testing the hardware.

Techs ultimatly get all the fingers pointed at them and very littel thanks.

Thank you Skuzzy.......

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Faulting application name: aceshigh.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4f5f6c43
Faulting module name: aceshigh.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4f5f6c43
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000112b8
Faulting process id: 0x670
Faulting application start time: 0x01cd0d49f0872e5e
Faulting application path: C:\Hitech Creations\Aces High\aceshigh.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Hitech Creations\Aces High\aceshigh.exe
Report Id: ef54232f-7943-11e1-893c-002215f3e00f

[Skuzzy]

The big problem with NVidia these days are people who insist on running the latest drivers on older video cards (older being more than 1 year old).  ATI has the same problem, to a lesser degree.

That said, if you are getting the crash panel, then HiTech will want some specific information.  I'll get that to you Monday.

In the meantime.  Here is a test.  Rename the "video8.cfg" file in the "settings" folder.  Then in the "Options->Graphic Detail" panel, uncheck "Enable Ground Clutter".  In the "Advanced" panel, make sure the only options checked are "Detailed Water" and "Detailed Terrain".  Leave everything else at defaults.

See what that does.

[bustr]

windows 7 crash panel is when the CTD is to a black screen with the GUI stating AcesHigh.exe has encounterd a problem do you want to debug or quit and the mouse is not available? To which I have to keyboard start Taskmanger

I'll delete the video8.cfg. I'll uncheck bumpmap terrain. The terrain looks like a fine wire grid after that with no depth perception. I only run detailed terrain, water and bump maped terrain in the advanced settings.

Do locations on maps cause this?