Silent Hunter 3 Blue Screen Crash
 

Hey guys I'm new to the forums and to sub sims in general so I apologize if this isn't the right place for this question.

I bought Silent Hunter 3 during the latest Steam sale and I've been getting blue screen crashes about 15 to 45 minutes into gameplay.

I'm completely stumped because I have a pretty powerful laptop and all of my graphics/audio drivers are up to date.

Here are my system specs:
Windows 10
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3740QM CPU @ 2.70 GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M
8 GBs of RAM
64-bit

I've done some searching on the internet and I seem to be the only one with this problem so can anybody help me out? I also have the dump files of all of the crashes.

Thanks for the help.

Welcome aboard!
 

hey Timman,

Is this stock SH3, or have you added anything to it? If it's stock, what version of it are you running? Not sure I know what ails you, but that info may help anyone that may have any ideas.

Hi there, what graphics chipset has your laptop got? Blue screens are almost always driver related and you may have an unsupported chipset.

Adrian

Yep stock SH3, no mods. I believe it's also updated to version 1.4.

The chipset in my laptop is the Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000.


I've also tried running SH3 in compatibility mode with Windows XP (Service Pack 3) but that didn't work.

Very strange. Almost sounds like a heat issue. Is your laptop running very hot while playing the game? Do you play any other games on it? I know in the past I've run into items on laptops that peg the CPU or GFX cards and without good heat dissipation could result in bluescreens, but I'm not sure that's your problem. I haven't run into anything like that in years.

Don't think it's a heat issue because I play more graphically intensive games that cause the computer fan to really crank and my computer never crashes when I play those games.

I do have the dump files of you guys want to analysis them.

I can take a look at the dump files if you want to post them, but usually dumps have function calls and a bunch of other things that wouldn't give us actionable information unless I was actually developing the software and had access to the codebase and/or knew the base functions within the OS.

What may be happening is that the graphics, the way they were written to take advantage of hardware at the time, are over-stressing the current system. It can happen anytime older games are run on newer equipment since it's using legacy calls. At least that MAY be the problem.

You can always try modding it and see what happens, like trying to use a new UI (like Ahnenerbe's: http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=215433) just to see what happens. Do you know how to use JSGME to manage your addons?

I don't know that this will help, but maybe the updated dll along with a more modern resolution may make a difference.

I'll go and give that a try and report back.

Also I can't seem to post the zip file containing all of the dump files, would you know how I can post em?

Oh and thanks for helping me thus far siege00!

My pleasure. Hope to help you get running. :) You may have to post it to a public site like a shared dropbox file, or something like that. I think the forums have a limit on attachments otherwise the storage requirements for the site would be insane based on the years it's been up and running. Not sure if we'll figure this out, but it won't be for lack of trying.

So I tried using Ahnenerbe's 1920x1080 resolution mod you directed to me just to see if it would help but I still bluescreened and this time it crashed within minutes..

Here are those dump files if you want to take a look.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?...Wc&usp=sharing

Will take a look tomorrow. I'm downloading a MS tool to open the files and it's going to take a little while. The tool to open the file is within the Windows Driver Toolkit, so it's most likely going to be some sort of driver issue. Hopefully it'll shed some light on it, but too early to tell. I still think it's a call that the software has made that isn't fully supported anymore. I don't know if it's the Intel chipset as Adrians69 inquired, or the GTX.

Just out of curiosity at this point, are you using Nvidia drivers for your card or the OEM drivers that your laptop manufacturer published? What about the Intel drivers?

I'm using the GeForce drivers since the Nvidia card does all the heavy lifting for all my games. It's funny because I've had trouble with older Ubisoft games before (like Splinter Cell) where it wasn't playing nicely with the Nvidia card and would blue screen every once in a while.

So I just tried an experiment. I disabled the nvidia card and just used the Intel HD Graphics 4000 and this time the game just crashed instead of blue screen so that's a slightly different result lol.

I was still using that 1920x1080 res mod also.