Constant Crashing Causes Consternation

[Sailor Steve]

My problem has only cropped up recently. It doesn't crash on loading the game. It doesn't crash on loading a career. It only crashes in the middle of a convoy battle. it doesn't matter if I have extra smoke effects loaded or not; it doesn't matter if I'm looking at the ship I just sunk or I'm at 50 meters reloading torpedoes. I can play for hours just sailing around, or I can load a game I saved just before going into action. It doesn't matter. Somewhere in the middle of the battle it crashes, and I get the Windows Error Report.

I'm assuming it has something to do with my RAM. I supposedly have the required 512, but I don't have the recommended 1GIG. When I install the game (and I've reinstalled several times) the screen tells me that all my requirements are met except for memory. I didn't have this happen previously; it's only started in the past few weeks.

Any ideas?

[FesterShinetop]

Perhaps try loading the game with a program like FSAutostart activated which frees up as much RAM as possible by switching off programs and processes you don't need (you can choose yourself what to switch off BTW and the programs runs them again after exiting SHIII e.g.).
Try here:
http://www.kensalter.com/fsautostart

[Sailor Steve]

I've used EndItAll to shut things down for quite some time now, and it's not helping. As soon as my own computer is back on line and I can download things I'll try that one.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Of course when I have enough money again I'll get more memory as well.

[Iceberg]

It can be a bad memory chip. Things like that can happen. The best way of knowing if that's your problem is to replace your RAM. Well I know it's easier said then done but if you can find some RAM (from another computer maybe) just to try it out.
If you have one dimm of 512MB and were planning to buy another 512MB then you can try with only your new 512MB first and see if it fixes your problem.

Good luck,

Iceberg

[joea]

Talk about coincidence. Same problem here. Two crashes on my current patrol. The first was my fault as I was playing the grammophone at 64 TC while trying to move the map around too quickly. Oops. Second had just got some clean shots at a very large convoy and had hit a C2, C3 and sunk a T3 (fired all tubes) and was nseaking between the convoy. I heard a report from my SO about a warship closing on bearing 351 so was trying to look through my scope (it was just after dusk in sept. 42) to find it and whammo!

Yes I kicked my chair across the room. I don't have that uch time to play and had set up a nice semi-manual shots and all only to have it ruined. Not sure what the problem is. Sound like the gramophone it crashed just as the SO was updating me while I was looking thorugh the scope...yet I thiink as I has been on the net before playing and although I use fsautostart am not sure everything was shut down. Reason? After the CTD I rebooted and got a message firefox.exe will not shut down?WTF? :shifty:

Well will look into this.. I suppose my mission (last save was on patrol before convoy contact) is fubar now.

[CB..]

i don't suppose that old trick of turning down the sound card excelleration would apply here at all?

when i first installed the game i couldn't get thru a patrol without it crashing untill i turned down the sound hardware excell to low..(basic?)

since then i've had no crashes that couldnt be directly traced to a non stock file or alteration etc

middle of a battle-lots of sound files getting played same with gramophone...

[oRGy]

Go through all your sound files - I believe you have custom ones - and make sure they're all 44khz, 16bit, mono, PCM.

[KptnLt Eric Karle]

Sailor Steve, you might want to give this a try. Its a free program that runs off a floppy and checks your RAM quite thoroughly, it will tell you if you have a problem, but you should run it overnight so that it can check everything. Hope it helps


http://www.memtest86.com/

[oRGy]

I'll bet my monocle that its a soundfile related crash, though.

[KptnLt Eric Karle]

I'll bet my monocle that its a soundfile related crash, though.

It's weird how this sim works for different systems. I have experimented extensively with frequencies and bit rates and never had a crash at all. Bizarre huh.

[Sailor Steve]

CB: Will check the acceleration on the sound card when I get home. Thanks for the tip.

oRGy: You bet I have a lot of custom sound files...I made 'em myself! I discovered the 'stereo' problem in the .ogg speech files a long time ago. Doesn't mean I caught them all though. I'll have to have a look at each and every one of them when I get the chance.

KptnLt Eric Karle: As I can only get online at the local library I can't download anything right now. I'll try to look into that, though.

The thing really concerning me is this: I'm running three separate careers, and have been in firefights with all of them. As I said, the problem only started recently. Maybe some others are right, and it just won't work with more than one, or at most two careers. Too bad if that's true, because I did it that way with AOD and SHII, and I like it.

Oh well, tonight I'll try those suggestions, and hopefully soon I'll have an answer.

[joea]

Just a question, how do I check .ogg files to see if they are in the correct format??

[Sailor Steve]

You need a sound program like Goldwave: www.goldwave.com
This can convert sound files back and forth between different formats, and also you can convert from mono to stereo and change bit rates etc.

[Sailor Steve]

Well, I've tried everything. I've checked every sound file, and they're the way they should be. I've adjusted the sound acceleration, to no affect. The memory is fine with every other program I run.

I'm still thinking I don't have enough of that memory stuff for the game's requirements, and it will be some time before I can afford that. I'll report back in when I do.

[Gizzmoe]

Steve, set the swap file to 1-1.5GB fixed size, that could help.

[Shin]

I recently started having the same issue (ctd's while in large battles), tried all the normal things such as reducing sound acceleration (which helped... ish, but resulted in a different error, and caused lots of sounds to simply vanish or not play at all). Having a save with an intercept to a convoy created an opertunity for me to be able to repeat the error as many times as I wanted so I could slowly make changes to see if I could fix it. Ultimately I did get through the fight but it crashed several times.

Konvoi size : 20 merchants, 3x destroyers

CTD: SHIII.exe module Sound.act (no surprise there) 4x times with max accel.

CTD: SHIII.exe ntdll.act? 1x time no sound accel.

Usually it crashes when either a) I get pinged, b) sinking ship noises start in, c) Time compression hangs a sound (endless loop) followed by a crash within a few minutes.

*Sorta fix* installed new drivers for the realtek 97 onboard (beta drivers) sounds dont hang nearly as much. Save alot... of course saving in the middle of konvoi is risky as the ships headings may change on reload causing a massive log jam. (Checking sounds for propper compatibility)

Conclusion: modified sounds or not, the games sound playback software is rather a weak application to deal with numerous ships and myriad of overlaid noises and sounds (especially with onboard sound cards). The game also seems to deal with textures on high end nvidias (my guess is ati's too) rather poorly, creating seperated loads of textures for each ship rather then just linking to one module... so lots of memory loss for lots of ships.... c2a and c2b each load there own texture rather then c2a and c2b loading C2.texture

Sound playback vanilla or mod'ed has been poor from first install... winamp plays the ingame music in rich proportional sound with surround, in game... it is muffled, almost muted, and nearly mono.

Asside from springing on a new sound card (which aint happenin) I just avoid massive 20+ ship convoys, or attack em from a distance rather then the center. :zzz:

[OneTinSoldier]

Hello Sailor Steve et. al.,

You really need to try out the Memtest86+ at www.memtest.org that KptnLt Eric Karle suggested. Also, your video card could be starting to go on the fritz. I think that might be what's happening since you have a problem with SHIII and don't have problems with other programs. Or, of course it could be some other problem altogether. Maybe like you said SHIII can't handle more than a couple of careers, I don't know.

One way to test your RAM is to go into your BIOS and disable an option that will be named something like 'Fast Bootup'. Disabling Fast Bootup will cause your motherboard to go through a check on your RAM before loading your OS. But it's not nearly as thorough of a check as Memtest86+ does. If you disable the Fast Bootup option in your BIOS and it doesn't show any errors with your RAM, I would still recommend you get Memtest86+ and run it. You can be much more certain after running Memtest86+. It's free.

Have you considered running SHIII unmodded? lol, I know, an ugly thought.

When was the last time you opened up your computer and gave it a blow job? Blew it out with compressed air? Especially the heatsink/fan areas of the cpu and videocard. Computers like blow jobs too, hehe.

Here is a write-up I made that I will post in case it might be of any help... The first part is simply a reply I made to someone on another forum that got me started on making this troubleshooting guide.

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So, it sounds like what your computer did was 'reboot'? Right? Also known as a 'Spontaneous Reboot'. I say this because you say...

"When the computer restored, the message, 'Your computer has recovered from a serious problem'; appeared."

This means that the Game didn't crash, it means the Operating System(OS) crashed. So it is more serious than a bug in the game. The crashing of the OS was only prompted by the use of a resource intensive piece of software(the game). It was not caused by the game software alone and all by itself.

The System is made up of a lot of things, Software(the OS being a large part of that), some low-level software called Device Drivers, and Hardware.

And the point I want to drive at is that a Spontaneous Reboot is almost always the symptom of a more deeply rooted problem in your System than just some bug in a game's software/code. It could be a Device Driver problem, a problem with poor RAM in your system, or possibly a loose connection somewhere. OR, most likely a Heating problem. The problem you have described is usually the sign of too much heat building up in a system.

Note: Device drivers are just software too, but they are given access to a lower level privilege, called kernel... or system level privilege, within the OS than normal programs/games are(user level). Device drivers interact closely with the OS and have no restriction on where they can go or what they can do.

Computer Systems are one of the most complex devices made by humankind. Anyway, without futher ado...


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I thought I'd list some possible reasons behind the cause of system problems/instability.

1) chkdsk - A simple 'chkdsk' on a command prompt to make sure there are no filesystem problems that need fixing. WinXP usually handles this automatically when you reboot after it has detected an error in the filesystem. But ya never know, so just to be sure you might want to run a chkdsk.

2) DxDiag - You could run DxDiag, run through all the tests and then see if it's reporting any problems. You can also try turning down the 'Hardware Acceleration' slider on the Sound tab and see if that cures your problem. Click the 'Save All Information' button(on the very first 'Tab' that DxDiag displays when you start it) and save the text file somewhere. Open up the text file and then copy and paste it's contents on the forum here for people to look at. You'd be surprised the number of times problems have been solved by doing this.

3) If you have Dr. Watson enabled(enabled by default on WinXP) then look at it's log file and open it up with Wordpad. First, click [ Start --> Run --> drwtsn32 --> press Enter --> look at 'Log File Path' at the very top ]. Go to where that log file is stored on your hard drive and then open it up with Wordpad. It might be helpful if you post the details contained in it concerning the crash. Although, this suggestion does not lead to a cure for problems as often as posting the 'DxDiag' information and is usually only helpful to a Developer.

4) Mods - Some Unofficial modifications to an application can sometimes causes instability. Make sure you are running an unmodified installation of the software before seeking help with problems.

5) PSU. A cheap or faulty PSU(Power Supply Unit, or just 'Power Supply'). Or, one that is not neccessarily faulty, but does not supply the system with enough Power(juice, hehe). Your PSU must have a high enough power rating to supply all your components with enough juice. If you have quite a number of PCI addon cards, hard drives, optical drives and other types of hardware attached that draw power then the PSU must be up to the task. Newer Video Cards require quite a bit of power compared to ones from the old days. The Power Supply is one of the more underrated components in a PC. The Power Supply is actually pretty darned important.

6) Loose PCI Cards - PCI Cards that are not firmly in their slot. If a PCI card is even just slightly loose it can cause problems. You might want to turn off your computer and then open up your case and pull each card out and then stick it back in. Sometimes you can't tell just by looking.

7) Overheating - If your system's CPU or Northbridge chip is getting too hot then you will have system instablities that rear their ugly head when you run resource intensive applications(such as games). You might be able to determine this by taking off the side cover of your PC, and then get a fan and point it so that it is blowing right into the inside of your system.

8) IRQ Sharing conflicts - Some PCI slots share IRQ's(Interrupt Requests) with each other. You can usually find this information in the manual for your motherboard. Some PCI addon cards are capable of handling this. Some are not. For instance, IIRC one of the PCI slots in my machine shares an IRQ with the AGP slot(which is where my video card is). SO, I made sure that my Sound Card is not in the PCI slot that shares the IRQ with the AGP slot. In fact, I made sure to not put anything in the PCI slot that shares the IRQ with the AGP slot. Also, if you have an addon (PCI Slot) sound card and also have a sound card built into your motherboard(onboard sound), it is possible the two are conflicting. You may need to go into your BIOS and disable the onboard sound.

9) Drivers - You should make sure you have the latest BIOS for your motherboard, the latest Chipset drivers for you motherboard, the latest Sound Card driver, the latest driver for your Network Interface Card(NIC), the latest driver for your Mouse, the latest driver for your Monitor. If there is a driver for your mouse and/or monitor that is. My monitor has a driver that came as a .inf file. There's probably other hardware you have that require device drivers too. Make sure you have the lastest device drivers installed for all your hardware. Note: When it comes to Video Card drivers the latest one is not neccessarily the best one.

10) Motherboard - Hopefully this is not the problem, but, there is the possibility that you have a defective motherboard.

11) RAM - You could possibly have a bad stick of RAM. Or your RAM could be just plain unstable due to improper settings in the BIOS. Settings such as CAS/RAS and/or other RAM timing settings that are set to aggressively, or an incorrect vDimm setting. That is, if your BIOS allows you to adjust these settings. You can download and run 'memtest86+'(www.memtest.org) to check your RAM. You need to let it run for a considerable amount of time though to see if it encounters any errors. The following is a little story I have about a situation I had with some RAM.


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I put my system together and purchased some Mushkin Low Latency RAM(Special 2-2-2) made from Winbond BH-6 chips. You had to bump up the vDimm voltage(amount of voltage supplied to the ram modules) in your BIOS to 2.65v in order to use this memory. I had two 512 MB sticks of this RAM so I could run in Dual Channel mode. Well, one of those first two sticks was bad right off the bat. Fortunately for me, Muskin's main office is in the city I live in. So I took it down there and they exchanged it for me. They had run 'memtest86+' on the new stick and said it checked out ok. When I put it in my system I had 'Fast Boot' disabled in my BIOS and it checked out fine. Disabling the 'Fast Boot' option in your BIOS causes your system to run a check on the RAM, not as thorough of a check as a utlity such as memtest86+ does on it though.

Everything was fine, it seemed. Well, the problem for me was I would be playing a BF1942 mod called 'Forgotten Hope' and eventually my game would either crash with an error(this would happen a number of times throughout the day), or I would get a loud digital screeching sound, the screen would go black, my hard drive would go thunk, and then my system would spontaneously reboot(happened once or twice a day). This is not the only game that would crash after some time with an error message either. Also, on a somewhat rare occasion I would have a subtle error occur when I booted up WinXP. I would get a message that said, 'One of the system registry files is corrupt and had to be recovered from a backup copy. The recovery was successful.'

It took some months before I really started having these problems. But they did happen and started to happen more and more frequently over time. And I lived with them for some time after they started happening(because I could use my computer for hours until the problem occured). I finally got fed up enough to where I started trying to think about what the problem could be. Eventually, for reasons hard to explain, I came to the conclusion that something was getting hosed up in memory. So I went into my BIOS and disabled the 'Fast Bootup' option. Again, when this is disabled it runs a test on your RAM. The test of my RAM got as far as 470 MB's at which point it encountered a R/W(read/write) error.

Well, my Mushkin RAM had a lifetime warranty on it. So I called them up and the fellow explained that the Winbond BH-6 stuff I had was a hit or miss proposition(yeah, pretty much miss I thought to myself, lol). He told me that they now had some modules that are made from a different process than the old BH-6 stuff, is very stable, doesn't require a bump in the vDimm voltage, and it has the Low-Latency memory timing capability(CAS/RAS 2-2-2). And that they would give me the newer stuff in exchange for the old Winbond BH-6 modules I currently had, since they were bad. After the exchange for the newer and better stuff, I have had 100 percent rock solid stability.

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12) Some piece of hardware in your system, your video card for instance, may not have fully failed yet but may be starting to go on the fritz.

13) A somewhat remote possibility but nevertheless a possibility is the your CPU is not quite seated properly in it's socket and needs to be reseated.

14) You have 'Fast Writes' enabled for your video card and it is causing system instabilities.



It's hard to know if your problem is a driver problem or any of the things I mention above at all. It could be something else altogether, like a BIOS setting or some other configuration problem. But other folks might be able to try and help you out better if you could list your System Specifications similar to the following example....

System Specs:

Intel 3.4C(C = Northwood Core) on Asus P4C800-E Deluxe(Intel 875P + ICH5R Chipset), Zalman 7000a-Cu HS/Fan, Enermax RG651P-VE 550W PSU, 2 GB Mushkin eXtreme Performance(2-2-2) Dual Channel PC3200 RAM, NEC MultiSync FE2111SB 21" CRT Monitor, Sapphire Radeon X800 XT PE Videocard with v5.8 Catalyst Drivers, DirectX 9.0c, Creative Audigy2 Platinum Soundcard with Creative OpenAL Beta Driver, 250 GB w/8 MB Cache Western Digital HDD, Comcast Cable Internet Connection, WinXP Pro SP2, Nortons Anti-Virus and Personal Firewall 2005

Listing system specs alone usually does not lead to a cure for system problems. Nevertheless, at the very least it gives people a starting point to helping troubleshoot problems.


Hope that helps,

OneTinSoldier