Freezing not fixed after patch

Icaobus · Post by **Icaobus** » Wed, 4. Jan 06, 13:22

no i only have 2 ST running
can't remember if the freezes started after i gave them their trade command MK3 or before
i could restart a game to check it out if it freezes without ST but much exploring and visa versa..
don't feel like contineuing my current one while freezing all the time anyway

Natan Magus · Post by **Natan Magus** » Wed, 4. Jan 06, 13:27

Well then you mot likely just found the Problem... disable your UTs/STs...

Icaobus · Post by **Icaobus** » Wed, 4. Jan 06, 13:44

would be sad if thats the solllution...
cause those STs are my moneymakers..
and if i remember correctly moneymaking is an important thing in the game..
so what would be left for me if i disable them and i'm left with almost no cash and no way to make cash except from trading everything yourself(very boring)

anyway i'll try if it fix the problem..

Natan Magus · Post by **Natan Magus** » Wed, 4. Jan 06, 13:51

Well, for me UTs/Sts are allmost spoilers. There have been none in the original release of X2, let alone X-BTF.

I was abel to make money without the use of those helping cheaters. Try to trade a little to get enough money for your first station. this can be achieved within a few hours. Then make money by building more stations, doing missions, fighting. that's the original spirit of X.

X is not an arcade game. It is not meant to reach the "final level" within 2 days of gameplay. It is a long term game.

spitfire · Post by **spitfire** » Wed, 4. Jan 06, 15:48

OK - been playing this game since day 1 , patched to 1.2.0.1 and she ran perfectly ok on my rig for 2 weeks then

- freezes. They started after about 2 hours and then became much more frequent as time went on (got so I couldn't play for more than 5 mins without freeze and sound loop).

These freezes only started after I explored beyond Home of Light.
Anyhow, along comes patch 1.3 and I decide to install a fresh game on a different rig (new mobo, athlon 64 3500+, old SB live 5.1, new HD, old DVD player (not R/W) , XFX 6600 vanilla).

All drivers were kept to originals supplied on disk with the relevant graphics and sound cards, but I did install Media player 10 and dx9c from the microsoft site.

I installed the game and patched to 1.3. Ran for 2 hours (just me and my mamba) without any problems. At this point I decided to install LV's cheat script and start experimenting.

First I scripted in a mammoth and then built just one wheat farm in The Hole. I was careful to just explore the Argon sectors around Argon Prime.

Played another 3 hours without any problems at all then gave the mammoth 4 novas set on protect and told it to attack all enemies.
Again no problems.

I then decided to open up all sectors using the cheat script by deploying 1 advanced satellite in each - and guess what

FREEZE! after 5 mins.

Now, I had only :-
1xmammoth
4xnovas
1xwheat farm

NO ut's
NO st's
NO complex's
NO station freighters
NO sectors other than Argon explored prior to opening up the universe.

This suggests that this game is either:-

1) too memory intensive
2) too cpu intensive (still)
3) bad coding somewhere in revealed universe
4) a combination of all ??

If I keep to the Argon, Boron and Split sectors (old sectors) and don't open up the others, I don't have any problems (so far at least) and my game is still running ok.

I guess I'll have to wait until Egosoft can track down the problems, and in the mean time play a microcosm of the game

Maybe someone else can try the same little experiment and see if they get the same results ?

Thats my spot over
cheers

The_Heretic · Post by **The_Heretic** » Wed, 4. Jan 06, 16:31

Heres an idea, can we upload the "game time" of a save where the freezes start acting up. That is, the time used to identify a savegame when you go to load it.

Perhaps this could be used to correlate some meaningfull data.

@ Icaobus -
couple of questions :
1. what sectors were you in when the freezing started ?
2. did you notice it first during SETA ?
3. what period of "gametime" did you start to notice the freezes ?
4. have you tried going back to a save BEFORE the freezes and avoid those systems / period of gametime for a few days ?

Thanks,
Heretic.

Icaobus · Post by **Icaobus** » Wed, 4. Jan 06, 16:43

1. i don't remember the sector since it first happend more then a week ago, and i recently found this thread. I first thought it had something to do with my comp untill i tested it on my laptop..
2. yes it happens in SETA most of the time for me.. but also had it without using seta a few times
3. again i don't remember the gametime exacly.. but i do know for sure it happend after 1day(after the economy balance itself)
4. i know i spended alot of time in that first day in the universe.. i restarted once cause i screwed up.. so in those few IRL days i played in that first gameday i never had the freezes..
but avoiding sectors i didn't really do.. if you could give me a list of possible "bad sectors" i could test them out if you want

The_Heretic · Post by **The_Heretic** » Wed, 4. Jan 06, 19:20

@ Icaubus -
well, for ME, I started getting the freezes around the Light of Heart and Akeelas Beacon sectors during gameday 19-07:16(thats the last save I had prior to freezing). I got around this by going to a previous save a few sectors away, and just avoided LoH and Akeela for a couple of days, and after that I havent had a single freeze.
Thats not to say it wont start freezing at some point - in fact it almost certainly will as I have done nothing to "fix" it, but simply "avoided" it.

No idea what or why, but it seemed to work for me.

By all means load up an old save and put this to the test - if it works for you then so much the better

Heretic.

Icaobus · Post by **Icaobus** » Wed, 4. Jan 06, 22:58

so what i should do is explore the universe and see when i start freezing and step back on my track untill i know the sectors where i can't enter in if i don't want freezes, if your crashes have the same cause as mine at least..

k i'll start testing the game with my soundtracks converted, if i still freeze i'll stop my sector traders, and if i still freeze then i'll restart completely to explore and test for "bad sectors"

Atkara · Post by **Atkara** » Thu, 5. Jan 06, 02:06

It's freezing with sound looping, that should be a hint or something...

I extracted 03.cat-dat (it has every sound effect in there), re-encoded all sound effects to standard WAV format/bitrate and assembled it back. Atm, I'm re-encoding the whole soundtrack to MP3 CBR (Constant BitRate) 128Kbps...

Let's see how deep this hole goes...

bulletstop · Post by **bulletstop** » Thu, 5. Jan 06, 02:28

I am freezing to and it is very random. I did the codec fix and nothing was red and I have tried all the solutions suggested and nothing works. I too hope they can fix this issue. I have 4 ut's and one st in training.
This is a very wierd and I hope they do reproduce it.
Bullet

Atkara · Post by **Atkara** » Thu, 5. Jan 06, 04:29

ok, re-encoding the sound effects is a no-go, game crashes upon loading any savegame, while in main ingame menu no sound is present besides the soundtrack. Anyways, I brought back the original sounds and it's all normal (with the usual freezing ofcourse).

Re-encoding the soundtrack didn't give me any additional problems.

Back to the field...

Deleted User · Post by **Deleted User** » Thu, 5. Jan 06, 07:40

I wonder... If the freezes are not related to UT's and the codecs are okay, WMP 10 is reinstalled and the latest drivers too...

That would only leave one possible cause. Especially because it happens to a lot of people in certain sectors. I think it's related to Graphic rendering... If the detail switches a lot. This looks random and cannot reallly be reproduced easily.

But that's just my guess. Have you tried switching off AQC and AA/AF?

Since I did that, my game has not frozen. I left all other graphic setting at high.

Oh, and I have explored almost the entire universe except the upper right.
My system 3.1 P4, 2 gig ram DDR333, NVidia 6800Ultra 256.
Had a LOT of freezes before. Now, none (yet).

Atkara · Post by **Atkara** » Thu, 5. Jan 06, 09:34

No matter what graphics settings I'm using, the freezing will occur, unless I un-dock, re-dock, re-save. Sometimes it will follow me even if I jump out of the sector it occurs.

After measuring the game with FRAPS, I found that while the game freezes, the framerate stays right where it was before freezing. It's like time stopping around you... It could be a driver problem, DirectX coding bug, or even scripting bug... Whatever it is, it's becoming very annoying sometimes.

Vordrak · Post by **Vordrak** » Thu, 5. Jan 06, 14:22

Hi,

I feel this problem may be related to any owned ships.

I have noted the 'freeze bug with soundloop' happens to me, when: -

I have any owned ship of any kind jump, especially into or out of the sector I am in. This could be a remote controlled freighter, a factory resource ship, a factory sales ship or a captured ship en-route to a shipyard.

The freeze bug does not always happen when the ships jump though.

The freeze bug was very irregular when I started playing, but got worse and worse as I got into the game.

Now I own four ships, my Buster, a freighter and two ships associated with a silicon mine.

The freeze bug has got worse and worse as I acquired property.

I am wondering if this is a game engine error associated with remote controlled ships - or an error in the AI script for some types of ships.

Icaobus · Post by **Icaobus** » Thu, 5. Jan 06, 20:34

i doubt it has somethign to do with when some remote controlled ship jumps into another sector...
since all my other properties are ST so they stay in same sector except the falcon who protects my nova.. and i haven't freezed yet when me and my falcon went through a gate..

but like you said it could be something about remote controlled property.. cause if i remember right the freezes started when i let my freighter become a ST.. or when i sended a ship somewhere..

ow and for me re-encoding the soundtracks didn't help..
still checking if it freezes with my ST disabled.. it didn't freeze for an hour this noon but will try again now..

taronas · Post by **taronas** » Thu, 5. Jan 06, 21:52

taronas wrote:
I have now startet a new game as humble trader. Playing since three days without any issues so far. I will report back in two weeks when I developed far enough into the game to unlock those freezes again ... <sigh/>

In my humble opinion it's something in the game code. You can start a new game and play for days without issues but once you reach a certain point the trouble starts.

Question is: what is happening at this point?

Since I don't get payed to figure that out I will stop at this point. Too much time spend rebooting and messing around ...

But I trust Egosoft will deliver in 1.4

Phew, didn't take two weeks, just 6 days until the first freeze in the newly startet game

For the record:

in-game time: 1-19:03

- started as humble trader
- have just 5 ships, 3 of them docked most of the time.
- the mercury is on trade mission, manually remotely controlled
- the Mako is flown by me, some exploring, pirate, xenon hunting. have explored just about 1/4 of the universe
- no ST/UT
- no factories

my config is posted here http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... 20#1353120

Icaobus · Post by **Icaobus** » Fri, 6. Jan 06, 12:14

it seems to freeze for most people after day 1.. when the economy balance itself.. could it have to do something with that?
like something that happends in the universe that makes the game crash sometimes?

mbelcher25 · Post by **mbelcher25** » Fri, 6. Jan 06, 15:38

At least two different things were causing freezing on my system, UT's and Graphics.

With no ut's or st's and graphics at the lowest possible setting, I have now been playing for a week with no freezes.

Before I made these changes my game would freeze every few hours.

So, it is a bit dissapointing to have a GFX7800 512 and have to run with the graphics options at lowest possible settings, and still end up with a poor frame rate in Ore Belt (after all the extra asteroids showed up in 1.3).

But still, at least it's not freezing up any more.

Dell XPS Gen3
3.2 Ghz CPU
1 Gig RAM
nVidia GFX7800 512
SB Audigy 2

Domage · Post by **Domage** » Fri, 6. Jan 06, 17:48

I get a freeze sound loop crash at exactly 4-13:37 on two different saves.

Freezing not fixed after patch

Re: Complex construct Freeze/Chrash (and incorrect cockpit mesh alignment).

Freezing