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Crashing with no Cryptic error LOOK HERE

Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
edited May 2013 in PC & Technical Issues
This is a walk through for sending Cryptic Studios crash reports for these situations:
• Game lock ups, where Windows can still be navigated, but the game may have crashed or closed with the Task Manager
• System or driver crashes such as the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) or when your system resets without warning and no BSOD
• Hard-locks where the system must be restarted by holding the power button.

Game preferences file
The steps below are instructions on how to retrieve your game preferences file for diagnosis.
1. Open My Computer and navigate to the drive your install of Champions Online is installed to (this is C: by default).
2. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Cryptic Studios\Champions Online\Live\localdata
a. Windows Vista and Win 7 Users will see this. C:\Program Files (x86)\Cryptic Studios\Champions Online\Live\localdata

3. In this folder you will see a file gameprefs.pref make a copy of this file to send with your dxdiag and crash dump.
Creating a DXDIAG text file

How to create a dxdiag report

1. Windows Vista/7 users open the start menu and in the search field type “DXDIAG”.
a. Windows XP users open the start menu and select run then type “DXDIAG” and click ok
2. If this is your first time running dxdiag, click *Yes* to launch the DirectX Diagnostic Tool.
3. Click *Save All Information* to create a dxdiag report.
4. Choose a name, file type (.txt please), location for the dump file (recommend desktop) and click *Save*.
Forcing Crash Reports for Locked Game Application to appear
If the OS is still responsive, but the game is locked, please use Cryptic Error to trigger a crash report/dump. It may be several hundred megabytes in size, and it may take a long time to produce or send in to us.

Follow these steps:
1. If the game is running full-screen, press Ctrl+Alt+Delete simultaneously.
a. On Windows XP Home, this will open Task Manager
b. On Vista and XP Professional, this will bring up the login/lock workstation screen.
c. Hit escape to exit the login screen or Task Manager.
d. Windows should return you to the desktop or an application.
2. Double-click the Cryptic Error icon in the System Tray.
a. If the Cryptic Error application doesn’t show up in your system tray, navigate to the folder where Champions is installed and run CrypticError.exe
i. In the Processes window find and select Champions Online.exe and click the Send button. This will gather the appropriate data and submit the crash dump to us. Please copy down the Error Ticket ID number and reply back with that ID number.

3. Enter a description of what you were doing at the time of the crash or instructions for reproducing the lock up, if it appears to happen in a consistent way.
4. Click the Send Button.

Reporting System Crashes
If you are experiencing system crashes, use the following steps to send us a Windows kernel crash dump:
1. Enable full kernel crash dumps, and configure your system to restart automatically after writing the crash dump as follows:
a. Open the Control Panel.
b. In Vista/Windows 7 only, click classic view on the left hand side of the window.
c. Double click on System.
d. Click the Advanced tab (Vista/Windows 7 click on “Advanced system settings” on the left side of the window).
e. Click the Settings button in "Startup and Recovery" towards the bottom of the window.
f. In the section, "Write debugging information" choose "Kernel memory dump" in the drop down menu.
g. Note the location where the crash dumps are written. The default is %SYSTEMROOT%\MEMORY.DMP, which will probably be located at C:\WINDOWS\MEMORY.DMP.
h. Close the open windows.

2. Make sure your system has enough page file memory to store the crash dump. If it's not large enough, Windows cannot write the crash dump. If you have multiple hard drives, the page file on the volume containing C:\WINDOWS needs to have a very large page file.
a. The available storage must be greater than the potential size of the crash dump. This may be anywhere from 300MB to 1GB depending on the version of Windows you are running, and how much memory is installed on the computer.
b. To view or change the page file size:
c. Open the Control Panel.
d. In Vista/Windows 7 only, click classic view on the left hand side of the window.
e. Double click on System.
f. Click the Advanced tab (Vista/Windows 7 click on Advanced System settings on the left side of the window).
g. Click the Settings button in "Performance" section.
h. Click the Advanced tab.
i. In the section, "Virtual memory" click the Change button.
j. If the page file size is lower than 500MB check the information for, Paging file, on this Microsoft site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969028 for instructions in changing the page file size.

3. Launch the game and play until the computer to crash BSOD (Microsoft Blue Screen of Death).
4. If you can see the Blue Screen message, make a note of what item Windows thinks caused the problem.
5. Wait for Windows to write the crash dump to your hard drive. This may take a long time.
6. When the crash dump is complete, if the system does not automatically restart, manually restart it.
7. Log in to Windows.
8. Windows will display a system error recovery dialog. We recommend you allow your system send the crash information to Microsoft.
9. If the computer appears locked up and the blue screen does not appear, please see instructions in the section, Manually Triggering Crash Dump.
10. Locate the crash dump file noted in step 1-f.
11. Compress the Dump file, your dxdiag, and the gameprefs.pref file, and set the ZIP file name to your account name.
12. Upload the crash dump to Cryptic using an FTP client

Compressing files for uploading to the FTP

These steps below will instruct you how to use a compression tool to take multiple files and turn them into one single file.
1. First you need a compression client, and there are many out there but here are the two most commonly used. The first one is Winzip which is the most user friendly but not the most advanced compression tool. The second one is 7-zip and this one is much more complicated. 7-Zip provides many options for advance users, but I wouldn’t recommend this one unless you have a good understanding of file compression tools.
http://www.winzip.com/index.htm
http://www.7-zip.org/
2. Once you have a compression tool select the files you plan to send to Cryptic (gameprefs, dxdiag, crash dump). Compress these files and use your account name to label the zip file so we can sort through them easier.

How to FTP the collected information to Cryptic

If you do not have an FTP client please download one, FileZilla is a good free FTP program. http://filezilla-project.org
1. Open your FTP client, Start a new connection
2. In the Host dialog enter the ftp server address: ftpcorp.crypticstudios.com
3. For the Username dialog use: dumps
4. For the Password dialog use: cryptic
5. For the Port dialog use: 21
Connect to the server with these setting and upload the compressed file containing your crash dump file, your dxdiag and the game prefs file. The transfer may take up two hours depending on your internet connection speed.

Manually Triggering Crash Dump
WARNING! Please use caution when following these instructions from Microsoft. We are not including our own summarized version of these instructions due to their complexity. We do not recommend these procedures for non-technical users.

If your system hard-locks, such that Ctrl+Alt+Delete does not do anything, and the mouse cursor does not move, but does not display a BSOD, these instructions may allow you to generate a crash dump report to send us.

The following two support topics explain how to configure your system to generate a kernel crash dump using a keyboard shortcut.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244139

See the section; How to generate a manual memory dump file using the keyboard, on the following page:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969028
Microsoft References on Kernel Dumps
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316450
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/130536
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307973
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/254649
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/282421
Post edited by Archived Post on
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Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    What is a System Crash, or Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)
    First, this is an explanation of system crashes. When Windows detects certain kinds of errors, it stops your system immediately to prevent corruption of any additional data (like corrupting your file system on disk), which is generally considered worse than losing whatever data is unsaved in running applications.

    Only a few things can trigger a system crash: Programming errors (bugs) inside a driver, the operating system itself, or faulty hardware. Applications cannot directly cause a BSOD, though they can install drivers or misuse existing drivers and therefore cause crashes. We explain later how applications like our game might indirectly trigger a system crash.

    Windows takes extensive measure to prevent an application from crashing the system or accessing parts of the computer for which it doesn't have privileges. This includes accessing other application's memory, certain protected files, and all the data inside the Windows kernel, like driver memory, and other communication to drivers. This is to keep the computer stable against accidental corruption by buggy apps, and to prevent malicious programs from doing things like stealing private information (like passwords) from other programs or the operating system.

    This is very different than a program crashing. If Windows detects these kind of bugs in a running application, it will terminate just that program. Similarly, our application will sometimes terminate itself if it internally detects these kinds of bugs.

    Why does my computer crash when playing Champions Online?
    So why do our users experience BSODs when running our game, when only drivers can crash the system? Especially when other games or applications run without problems?

    We know of two things our application is doing which we believe may stress operating system resources enough to trigger problems in drivers that have certain kinds of bugs. These bugs would not be exposed under lower memory use conditions. Also, as of 10-1-2009, we know of at least one existing bug in Nvidia drivers. This is in versions up to 190.62, but according to Nvidia may already be fixed in an upcoming release. Note this is not to point the finger at Nvidia, as they have been good at working with us to resolve any driver problems we bring to them. It may be that some unique part of the way our application uses Direct3D that triggers the problems inside their driver, but they have not explained in much more detail what is going wrong.

    We ask Direct3D to put texture images and models, and other graphics data, into your video card, and perform rendering to show our game's graphics. This indirectly consumes a critical operating system resource called paged pool kernel memory. This resource is located in system RAM, not video memory. Regardless of how much total RAM is installed in a computer, this pool typically has a much smaller limit, especially under Windows XP. There are a couple other important memory pools that also have similarly small limits regardless of total RAM.

    As our game consumes more of this resource, Windows must write other drivers' paged pool memory to disk, so the graphics card and Direct3D drivers can use that memory for our application. Windows restricts drivers to accessing this paged memory only at times when the operating system will be able to read the driver's data back from disk, if it has been written out. When a driver attempts to use memory it expects is still loaded in RAM, but is not, Windows will trigger an immediate system crash. This means this bug is only exposed in conditions where other drivers have consumed lots of memory, but also when the timing is right such that a driver accesses the memory when the operating system is unable to handle it being paged out. The error you will see on the BSOD in this case is the DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL stop code. According to Microsoft experts, this is a very common driver bug. For detailed information, see the following Webcast:

    http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032298076&CountryCode=US

    Other potential problems are that a driver may overwrite memory in the graphics driver, or any another driver, causing a several different kinds of BSODs. Unfortunately, these kinds of problems are somewhat complex to diagnose. And, they may corrupt an infrequently used driver or part of the system, which means the problem may not show up until long after the bug occurs. Even worse, Windows may not be able to properly identify the source of the error on the BSOD.

    However, Windows includes various tools to help users track down problematic drivers. One important on is Driver Verifier, see the following link for more information:

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617

    We are trying to throttle our use, indirectly, of all kernel resources to make it less likely that we expose such errors in either the graphics drivers or any other driver. Nvidia has already made one driver change for us to help throttle use of kernel memory. We now have some reason to believe this is causing more extensive problems, and we are adding diagnostic tools, and restructuring other parts of our games to reduce use of this resource.

    Finally, we are using new features in Nvidia and ATI drivers that were exposed for us and other developers, to work around limitations in DirectX 9 related to multi-sample antialiasing. We are not sure that this is related, but it is using a relatively new driver feature.

    Suggestions
    • Check out forum posts by other users, some of whom have diagnosed and fixed their own crash problems.
    • Many users are recommending diagnostic tools for testing for hardware problems. Run system burn-in or stress tests.
    • Get up-to-date drivers for all system devices: motherboards & chipsets, disks, network cards, video cards. Any driver may be a source of your crashes.
    • Try various versions of graphics drivers. We have reports from users that one driver version works for some people, but not for others.
    • Try disabling any overclocking. Check your BIOS to ensure that your system was not shipped overclocked.
    • As a temporary workaround, lowering some graphics settings might help reduce our resource consumption.
    • If you are experiencing system crashes interacting with NPCs, try adding this option in the Advanced command line field in the Launcher Options dialog: -SetTestingMode -headshotMaxPerFrame 0
    • For further explanation of BSOD error codes see: http://support.microsoft.com/servicedesks/webcasts/en/wc072001/wct072001.asp or http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms789516.aspx
    • Use Windows Driver Verifier to enable additional tests on drivers indicated by the BSOD: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    This post was very helpful in not only my issues but my general understanding of how things must work for you guys! Thanks a ton ^_^

    -C.A.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    yall just need to roll back.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    My son's game (@iron-pheonix) is crashing, the screen goes to black and the computer is completely unresponsive. I have to push and hold the start button on the laptop to restart the machine. I have followed many of the steps listed above to the point where it does not recommend going further into the Manual Memory Dump for those that are not technical. I'm pretty comfortable with computers but have no wish to reformat or recover this machine again if I do something incorrect. hehe

    He has a Gateway laptop with 1GB of memory
    Windows XP operating system - fully updated
    ATI mobility Radeon X600 Video card with 256MB of dedicated video memory
    Drivers are up to date as indicated by the Gateway site where I am forced to go to update drivers since this is a "mobility" card.

    The game worked fine before the recent patch (he played it last weekend without incident), albeit with lowered video settings to accomodate his older card.

    Thank you for your time and effort in this matter.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    I am seeing same - i.e. game only started giving BSODs this week after recent patches.

    I have had same video drivers etc now since game launched so the variable here seems to be the game engine itself.

    I am running 2 X Nvidia 8800 cards in SLI mode

    Downloading latest drivers relased on October 5th now to see if that helps
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Starlinis,

    Does your computer produce a crash dump? Are you certain that it is actually crashing and that you cannot get back from the game to the Windows desktop? That is, Ctrl+Alt+Delete does not return you to the login screen or Task Manager?

    I would try running the game in Windowed mode, so that you can still see the desktop. Then, if the game locks up, attempt to activate the desktop. If the desktop is responsive, then follow the instructions to manually trigger a crash dump of the game - not the manual OS crash dump steps - just the locked game. Let me know whether or not everything becomes locked, such that the mouse cursor no longer moves. If that happens, I'll list some additional diagnostic steps to try.

    Dave
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    I did not see the game producing a crash dump. I was unable to get back to the login screen or task manager with a Ctrl-Alt-Del. The laptop was completely unresponsive.

    So.... Had my son try things out again when he got home from school. Thank you for the windowed mode, suggestion. I was able to see what is going on now. The game is completely frozen and it is taking a very long time to submit/write the full dump file. Very odd occurrance though is that his Spore application seemed to have started without being initiated by him. Don't know if that ties in at all. There was an open app "button" on the task bar for it and it too was not responding. The crash window has now prompted and it is in the process of writing the dump. Current ETA on the dump finish is now 30 minutes. The first crash which was not windowed at the time (he maximized the window and I was unable to see anything and ended up hard killing the machine) occurred while he was playing and in battle, the second crash occurred as the computer was logging into his character screen, this is the current crash file that is being dumped for you.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Starlinis wrote:
    The game is completely frozen and it is taking a very long time to submit/write the full dump file. Very odd occurrance though is that his Spore application seemed to have started without being initiated by him. Don't know if that ties in at all.

    Isn't Spore a 3D game? If so and it's running at the same time as Champions, it sounds like half the problem is right there. If you have two intensive programs running at the same time, you will need more than 1gb of memory to really pull it off. Try making sure Spore is completely closed before launching Champions and see if that makes a difference.

    Of course, if I'm thinking of a different Spore this idea won't do much good...
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Thank you, Seamer. I know it's never good to run both such very intensive games at once. As I stated, the game was not started by myself or my son. I have no idea how it was running on the machine. All I know is that there was an incident of it appearing to run on the task bar after the Champion's game crashed. The Champions game was the only application started after the computer had been restarted. Nothing else was running at the time of CO being started. Then when the game crashed, there was Spore listed below. I hesitated to even post that it was seen, since I was sure someone would assume that I had started it. But wished to be thorough with what I observed on the screen.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    0k i have been crashing since about 6am yesterday and im still crashing. i can get on anywhere from 10mins to 3 hours then bam kicked to desktop with a cryptic error where i would put what i was doing when the error happened.
    would just like some answers it is making me mad that i can play straight for a long time.

    thank you Dommin
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    I have an Invidia 7800, I'm running Windows 7, my PC doesn't get the blue screen , but once in a while the screen just freezes including what ever sound it was making during the freeze and I have to hard reset it to get out of it. I've also experienced this problem a few times while running video from Youtube or Hulu.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Implausible wrote:
    We ask Direct3D to put texture images and models, and other graphics data, into your video card, and perform rendering to show our game's graphics. This indirectly consumes a critical operating system resource called paged pool kernel memory. This resource is located in system RAM, not video memory. Regardless of how much total RAM is installed in a computer, this pool typically has a much smaller limit, especially under Windows XP. There are a couple other important memory pools that also have similarly small limits regardless of total RAM

    Why would you do this? Knowing that this is a very limited resource and your game is resource intensive game, what advantage does pulling from the paged pool kernel memory give you over the traditional methods?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    i downloaded filezip and i entered in the information given but i get an error message saying possibly wrong port number. also there is no where to enter in a user name.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    i downloaded the wrong thing. oops.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Starlinis,

    I have to agree with prior posters that having Spore, or any other game, run in the background will almost certainly cause problems. I have no idea unfortunately, for why it would start running.

    If you experience more than one crash where it looks like the game crashes in the exact same manner, you can cancel the crash dump writing/sending. This is usually quite a lot of data and we tend to need only one full dump. That may save you a little time.

    Sorry for the long time to get back to you, I don't have a lot of time to read forum posts, and many bugs to fix before I sleep!

    Dave
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Eturnity,

    >Why would you do this? Knowing that this is a very limited resource and your game is resource
    >intensive game, what advantage does pulling from the paged pool kernel memory give you over
    > the traditional methods?

    This is the way Windows kernel, driver software, video cards, and Direct3D work, it's really the only method available on Windows, and every other Direct 3D application uses the same method. We have not yet compared our game's level of use of these resources with other released games, so we aren't actually sure if this is the root of the problem. This is just where I am at in the process of investigating this problem, since I am the programmer currently responsible for this issue.

    The reason we included all the information is we want to inform our customers, as best we can, about our level of understanding of the problems people are experiencing. Rather than just say, well, these are all driver bugs, or faulty hardware - which some of these crashes most certainly are - we included information about the only issue we know of with our game, which might be contributing to system crashes. That is not to say that there are no other bugs. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only thing I have found that our game does that could contribute to system crashes, and we are trying to address it.

    Does that help?

    Dave
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Snotvex,

    Thanks for sending in the kernel crash dump. I've forwarded it to ATI, and our developer contact would like to know if you have any idea how to reproduce the crash, or what you were doing at the time. I've already informed them of some of the kinds of things our customers have posted about, like talking to NPCs.

    Thanks,

    Dave
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Dommin,

    At least one of the crashes which you've experienced several times looks like it should have a fix on Public Test Server. It looks like there is another crash which is related and may be fixed as well. I don't know the schedule of when those changes will make it to LIVE though. The other crash, which you've experienced only once, appears to be related to the other topics in this thread, which I am working on.

    Dave
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Eturnity wrote:
    Why would you do this? Knowing that this is a very limited resource and your game is resource intensive game, what advantage does pulling from the paged pool kernel memory give you over the traditional methods?

    It is the 'traditional method', or more precisely, it is a Windows XP design flaw that they can do nothing about. What he's trying to say is this:

    Windows XP applies an arbitrary, small limit to the amount of memory that device drivers can use, which it determines at boot time. Video drivers can quite easily hit this limit when doing complex 3d rendering. This tends to break other drivers that weren't expecting that level of memory pressure.

    It's one of the few things that got fixed in vista and later.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    I"m not sure which patch it started happening in, but now 75% of the time, every 5-30 minutes tops, the game crashes cleanly to windows with no cryptic report prompt or lock-up, about 20% of the time it crashes and does come up with a cryptic error report prompt which I've sent in a bunch of times, and about 5% of the time it just restarts my computer on me. What's extra frustrating is that all throughout beta and launch I never had any crashing whatsoever.

    Am running with an intel single core 3.4ghz with windows xp prof w/sp2, nvidia geforce 7950gt with the 190.62 drivers, 2 gigs of ram and directx 9.0c

    Not sure where to include my full dxdiag as it won't fit in a post and is similarily too big to be attached to a post.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Shion_Kreth wrote:
    I"m not sure which patch it started happening in, but now 75% of the time, every 5-30 minutes tops, the game crashes cleanly to windows with no cryptic report prompt or lock-up, about 20% of the time it crashes and does come up with a cryptic error report prompt which I've sent in a bunch of times, and about 5% of the time it just restarts my computer on me. What's extra frustrating is that all throughout beta and launch I never had any crashing whatsoever.

    Am running with an intel single core 3.4ghz with windows xp prof w/sp2, nvidia geforce 7950gt with the 190.62 drivers, 2 gigs of ram and directx 9.0c

    Not sure where to include my full dxdiag as it won't fit in a post and is similarily too big to be attached to a post.

    I am having the exact same problem, only occasionally does my computer actually let me get back to desktop though, most of the time its a total computer freeze. This only started happening with the patch about 2 weeks ago or so.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Tonight it's about every five minutes... so yeah, can't really play, and with no help on the forum I'm pretty much at a loss. :/
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Shion_Kreth wrote:
    Tonight it's about every five minutes... so yeah, can't really play, and with no help on the forum I'm pretty much at a loss. :/

    Yep i am still looking for help one this.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    bump for help
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Hi BrettJ,

    I am trying to find our error tracker reports for your crashes, but nothing is showing for your account. I'm not saying you are not having crashes, I just can find the error reports, though they are usually easy to look up. Can you post one of the error tracker numbers that appears in Cryptic Error?

    If you are still getting blue screens, or having the computer restart during gameplay, please follow the instructions at the start of the thread to send us a kernel memory dump. Note the kernel memory dump is a very different thing than the application crash reports Cryptic Error sends, and requires some manual steps to upload to us.

    Thanks,

    Dave
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    I am unable to get a crash dump, or kernel. My computer always hard locks, and i am not sure if i want to try to follow Microsoft instructions to manually crash my computer. I am attaching my preferences and dxdiag. Thanks for the help :)

    If it helps i did see a BSOD one time and i believe it said something about a2tiag. (i could be wrong about name ill keep trying to get a dump that will let me see the error message).
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    My friend recently gave me a 14 day trial key to try this game. I have updated my nvidia video drivers to the most current (Oct. 05, '09), but after creating my character, my system hard reboots about 10 seconds after I push "Play" to select my character.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    BrettJ wrote:
    I am unable to get a crash dump, or kernel. My computer always hard locks, and i am not sure if i want to try to follow Microsoft instructions to manually crash my computer. I am attaching my preferences and dxdiag. Thanks for the help :)

    If it helps i did see a BSOD one time and i believe it said something about a2tiag. (i could be wrong about name ill keep trying to get a dump that will let me see the error message).

    Ok so i finally got my computer to crash properly here is what windows is saying the error is ati2dvag display drive error. Also my computer is now seending a crash dump using the cryptic error tool, but it is taking like an hour. I hope this info can help a dev help me. (Btw if it matters this only started happening after the most recent patch)

    Edit crash dump number (error ticket I.D.) is: 5515534
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Dave,

    Thank you for the post. The game has managed to do a dump now a couple of times and sent it via the crash format of the game. Today was the most recent occurance of the crash and it did send the dump. Took an hour to complete. So at least you should be getting the data and, hopefully, it can help to fix whatever is causing this. Thankfully, my son is able to play on our machines when we are not playing, so he is not completely out of luck. The SPORE thing, I don't know what happened there, but that only happened the one time. Could even have been an accidentaly click on the most recent items in the start menu in the process of trying to get to Windows. The game has however continued to crash regularly for him after about 20 minutes of play time, sometimes less.

    Thank you for taking the time to read this and continuing to check in on it. Hopefully, the upcomimg "fix" will help with this.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Hi Dave,

    I was playing CO just perfectly fine until i tired getting a guest and it says "unable to get quest, inventory full" so silly me i look into my journal seeing if i got alot of quest. but there are only like 3 quest. and i thought there might be some error with the game so i thought of restarting my computer.

    so i restart my computer and the next thing i know. my CO client keep crashing non-stop. they can crash when it's loading the patcher from the start all the way to logining into the game. not once am i able to get into the character selection screen where all the time i was playing perfectly! i didn't let the client verify themself to check for anything problems but there were none. now i can't play the game...

    and the worst thing i realised is that i know why i can't get the quest... it's because my inventory is full and the quest is one of the area 51 quests where you need you get a camera from the npc to do the quest...

    i feel so stupid now. please help me! =/

    Meteoric


    EDIT: nvm. i got in the game again. but after that i keep crashing again... what's going on? i didn't buy a game for it to keep crashing and stuffs... first rubberbanding and now this?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Since last night, my game crashes either right after entering my login info or when connecting to the login server, this has happened every time Ive tried to log on since last night.
    I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game to no avail, wich means it is something you changed yesterday to deal with the server delays?
    Ive heard something about crash fixes being in the PTS but not knowing when they will go live... Im still paying for the game this whole time I cant log on the game while these crash fixes are being delayed, Im going to want more than a "free weekend" to make up for the fact that I cant actually PLAY the game for days.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    [QUOTE=Solin Im still paying for the game this whole time I cant log on the game while these crash fixes are being delayed, Im going to want more than a "free weekend" to make up for the fact that I cant actually PLAY the game for days.[/QUOTE]

    I totally agree with this statement. I just bought this game Thursday Sept 22 and now it is Sunday the 25 and because of some billing problem on your guys side I was just able to start playing late friday night. Saturday was a complete fail because of problems on your end. Now yet again I'm not able to play because of crashing at login or character loading screen. There had better be some redemption for this.

    Also, I feel its a bit ridiculous and unacceptable to ask the customer to go through all these steps in order to send you a proper bug report. We the customer have paid for a game and are continuing to pay for a game we can't play. How much longer will this go on? The game is currently unplayable by many and your not even in beta. Perhaps beta should have lasted longer or you should have ironed out the bugs before releasing your game.

    This is the number one killer of many new MMO's. You launch your game too early, the game is unplayable by almost half your customer base and they leave and your stuck with the bill.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Found this in another post

    "managed to get it to work by removing both Gameprefs.pref files in local file of the main directory i also removed _SWMWindowPosList.txt for good measure."
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    I actually didn't delete anything. I just logged in with the option of US proxy turned off and i'm golden. But we will see in the coming minutes and hours as to how long this fixes the problem. I've been getting many crashes lately. Mostly when traveling to Canada.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Been crashing while exiting CO for weeks. Today was zoning from Malifica Bookstore (whatever it's called. It's where the Black Shepard is) to M-City and crashed. Tried logging back in under that toon and crashed. Tried logging back in and crashed at 'Patching...' stage. Been stuck at this point for hours. Rebooted but CO still crashes. Obviously this is a Cryptic/CO issue, NOT end-user problem. I, too, think we should get more than a free weekend for the "privilege" of paying to test this software.

    Z
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Well, CO works again. For now. Hopefully, this kind of thing will become a rare occurrence as opposed to something that happens every 5-7 days.

    Z
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    I am thankful for this thread because of it's explanation of the BSOD's that I continue to have when playing this game.

    However, can someone (dev/anyone) explain why it seems to come in waves?

    This last week I played a ton, and I still had crashes but I always sent in my error report. Starting yesterday I have a full system halt after playing the game for about 5 mintues. I uninstalled/reinstalled all my drivers. rebooted. uninstalled/reinstalled the game. rebooted and still can't play for more than 5 minutes at a time. I also tried setting the graphical settings down to see if there would be a correlation, but it seems totally independent of my settings.

    Prior to yesterday I hadn't had a hard crash in at least 3 weeks, what changed?

    Also I'm a little nervous about how long it will take to get this resolved since BSODs interrupt the error report process.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    BrettJ wrote:
    Ok so i finally got my computer to crash properly here is what windows is saying the error is ati2dvag display drive error. Also my computer is now seending a crash dump using the cryptic error tool, but it is taking like an hour. I hope this info can help a dev help me. (Btw if it matters this only started happening after the most recent patch)

    Edit crash dump number (error ticket I.D.) is: 5515534

    Still need help on this, qouting my previous info with the things asked for. Also a few more post above is also attached files required too.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    BrettJ wrote:
    Ok so i finally got my computer to crash properly here is what windows is saying the error is ati2dvag display drive error. Also my computer is now seending a crash dump using the cryptic error tool, but it is taking like an hour. I hope this info can help a dev help me. (Btw if it matters this only started happening after the most recent patch)

    Edit crash dump number (error ticket I.D.) is: 5515534

    Thanks for sending the error tracker number, I was able to get the crash report and I'll be looking at it shortly. I'll see if your crash is something new or something we're already working on.

    Also, knowing the crash only started after the last patch should narrow down the possible problems.

    When you say you got your computer to crash, you do mean a blue screen or instant hard reboot, right? Or did the game reset to desktop? If it blue screened, and the blue screen error reported ati2dvag as a likely source of the problem, I would appreciate you sending in the crash dump from that. Please see the instructions at the start of the thread. Unfortunately, we can't collect those kinds of crash reports automatically. We have some reports under Vista of the GPU hanging and resetting, which then causes our game to crash to desktop, instead of causing a system crash.

    Dave
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    I am still experiencing BSOD, Just installed windows 7 64bit on a new Harddrive and thought everything was fine (was running wonderfully)....

    then it crashed.

    I've uploaded a full dump to your FTP along with a handful of other files that might help.

    Any advice would be great, as i'm running out of options and all my tests suggest my hardware is working properly (Memtest, video stress test and testing the card on a seperate system, re-install of windows, etc.)

    Sad panda :(
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    BrettJ,

    I looked at the crash report sent in by Cryptic Error (for ticket ID 5515534). It has some puzzling information in it, in particular it did not indicate what error had occurred, if any. Were you actually playing at the time of that error report? Had you locked your computer temporarily? It looks like it is possible the game was hung. DId you manually trigger the crash report with Cryptic Error?

    I also found out why I was unable to search for your errors; they are showing up under a slightly different name than I expected. So, I looked at some of the other crashes you've had and they are inside Intel integrated driver code. Though it could be our game sending bad data, I'm going to send that crash dump to Intel to look at. But it would probably be useful to get a full crash dump for that crash as well.

    Thanks,

    Dave
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    SuperCrypticDave wrote:
    BrettJ,

    I looked at the crash report sent in by Cryptic Error (for ticket ID 5515534). It has some puzzling information in it, in particular it did not indicate what error had occurred, if any. Were you actually playing at the time of that error report? Had you locked your computer temporarily? It looks like it is possible the game was hung. DId you manually trigger the crash report with Cryptic Error?

    I also found out why I was unable to search for your errors; they are showing up under a slightly different name than I expected. So, I looked at some of the other crashes you've had and they are inside Intel integrated driver code. Though it could be our game sending bad data, I'm going to send that crash dump to Intel to look at. But it would probably be useful to get a full crash dump for that crash as well.

    Thanks,

    Dave

    Here is what happens normally my comptuer completly freezes and i have to do a hard reboot. So i started playing and it crashed once and i had to hard reboot like normal, then started again and had champions crash but it didnt freeze my entire computer so i minused the screen down (btw my graphics on my computer got really weird. It looked like the screen magnified and it looked like i was using a very old version of windows (and im not)), after i got the screen down i used the crypticerror.exe (or w/e its called) and followed the instructions for that (while i still had co up, even though it was frozen), after this i got another crash and got bsod and the error i posted earlier is what it said was causing the problem. Also if it helps the crash almost never (maybe never) occurs while im standing still, it always occurs while i am moving or turning camera. Thanks for the help again i really appreciate it.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    This sounds very similar to the type of issues Ive had.

    The video errors you saw were due to your video drivers crashing, often this will cause a BSOD, but sometimes windows will recover and display default lowest video settings.

    I have also seen the cryptic error pop up after a crash (to the desktop) but still have a BSOD after submitting the error (most likely not sending the info to begin with)

    Today I had one BSOD that reulted in a proper crash dump that I was able to submit, once I fnished that. Attempted to play again (this time with nothing running in the background) and within 5 minutes my PC froze completely (stuttered looping audio, frozen video) and I was forced to Hard Restart. This type of crash doesn't dump memory and therefore has no crash dump to send.

    I am currently running memtest on my rig ...again... To further verify my hardware is functional.

    I hope we can solve this... I'm worried I'll miss Bloodmoon!


    UPDATE: I ran Memtest86 4.0 for 14+ hours, it completed 15 passes with no errors.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Bleh, tonight it's been like every 3-4 minutes for whatever reason, all clean crashes to windows with no lock-up or error report prompt.

    That aside though I did want to add to the thread that somewhere around a week or two ago it seems to have stopped 'crashing' (prompting an error report) whenever I intentionly log out and close the program.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Hello ,


    My problems started last thursday , was getting fatal error:piggs/texture.hogg:error decompressing data..
    did what dev told me to do, deleted file and ran a force verification.. didnt work, did what dev told me and deleted live folder , same deal .. deleted the whole game and reinstalled and patched same thing..

    Then i reformatted and updated all drivers and reinstalled game and downloaded 105 updates from microsoft (not once , not twice but three times ) so after 3 reformattes and all that jazz..i get all of the above... Bluescreens, with ad_pool_header ect, this is just one of the bluescreen messages , like 6 dif ones..hard locks, game freezes, ect..

    this is my crypticerror pid:1064 etid:5575542

    have spent a total of about 25 hours running every test, checking every driver , at a loss here guys need some help.. with blood moon release today i was hoping to be able to play .. but game crashes after about 5 minutes..

    system specs amd 64x2 black edition 3.2 msn32sli deluxe with 1 8800 gts 320 meg card ,6 gigs ram, 1 250 gig hdd ,1 500gig hdd, 1 500 gig removable hdd, windows vista 64 and playing on a 50 inch 1080p plasma..

    If it wasnt for having a 6 month sub i would have dropped this game prob over the weekend..if i cannt get any help or if i miss the bloodmoon event all together i'll prob uninstall the game and not look back..

    Thanks for your time and a good game up untill all this mess ...
    Arcanus Demon@scifiwiccan
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    BrettJ,

    Based on what you described, it does sound like the game was deadlocked, so I'll have someone look at the crash dump with that in mind. Thanks for the detailed description of what lead up to the crash report.

    As for Windows showing a "magnified" look, what resolution are you playing the game in? I assume full screen, relatively low resolution? If you run full screen, and use say, 800x600 resolution, perhaps Windows did not restore your screen resolution when you forced yourself back to the desktop. It would normally do that if you deactivate a full-screen Direct3D game - and excuse the speculation here - perhaps the game being deadlocked somehow interfered with restoring the resolution.

    Dave
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Daylater,

    I'll take a look at your crash dump shortly.

    Dave
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Daylater,

    Check the timestamps on memory.dmp. Sometimes Windows fails to display the BSOD, but still writes a crash dump. Also, make sure you set your page file size large enough to write the largest possible crash dump. I think that has to be larger than physical RAM plus some extra space - see the reporting instructions for a link to the Microsoft support page that details the exact requirements.

    Dave
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    SuperCrypticDave wrote:
    Daylater,

    Check the timestamps on memory.dmp. Sometimes Windows fails to display the BSOD, but still writes a crash dump. Also, make sure you set your page file size large enough to write the largest possible crash dump. I think that has to be larger than physical RAM plus some extra space - see the reporting instructions for a link to the Microsoft support page that details the exact requirements.

    Dave

    I'm not sure what you're saying Dave. Did you not receive my Memory.dmp? or was there an issue with it.
    Or were you just referring to my post about "Freezing" and not having a new Memory.dmp upon re-boot?

    My settings should be correct. But I increased the size just in case... please clarify what you meant for me.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
    edited October 2009
    Daylater,

    I've been looking at the crash dump, and I don't yet have a conclusive diagnosis. However, I did notice you are using Nvidia driver version 191.07. The crash dump doesn't implicate the Nvidia driver, at least not that I can yet see. But for lack of other options at the moment, I would recommend 190.62, as I've been using that here at work and it's been stable for a month or so. We've seen a lot of complaints about stuttering problems with 191.07, and have been able to reproduce it here.

    The kernel debugger and Internet searches both point the finger memory corruption of some sort. The various crashes you've sent are all over the place, which also indicate some sort of memory corruption. This can be caused by a bug in a driver, but I find it somewhat surprising that you'd still be stuck with a bad driver after upgrading to Win7. Did you build/buy a new machine for Win7, or just upgrade the OS on your current computer? The debugger shows that you are not using very much paged pool memory or other internal kernel resources, at least not compared to how much is available, so I don't think kernel memory pressure is the cause.

    Several sites recommend testing RAM sticks and slots individually, and also some other options such as cleaning/reseating the chips. Also, double-check in the BIOS to see if it's overclocked.

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms793604.aspx
    http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-xp-support/187987-bsods-game-crashes-help.html
    http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-vista-windows-7-support/411616-blue-screen-death-vista-x86.html
    http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-vista-windows-7-support/273064-microsoft-vista-annoying-errors.html
    http://forums.techguy.org/windows-xp/649141-computer-has-rebooted-bugcheck.html
    http://usasma.vox.com/library/post/bsod-troubleshooting-preliminaries.html

    I'm going to keep digging in the crash dump, as well as send it to Nvidia.

    Dave
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