Client Crashing, No Errors

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple · November 2011

Now we all, (well most of us), know about this issue. It's been around for forever. Then client will just close. No error, no Report Bugs window, No Windows Error Reporting. I've done a lot of troubleshooting on it, and I haven't been able to find any answers. I've even opened a couple of tickets on it with some of my various accounts and the response is typically a failed one blaming my system...

So, after being totally fed up with it, I've submitted yet another ticket. They usually will respond telling me to ask in the forum because they are totally clueless so I'm preempting
them and doing it now.

Here's a copy of my message...

I am having a problem with the client randomly closing without giving an error message. There is no bug report window, and Windows Error Reporting does not get activated either. This is a problem with multiple computers and I have heard of many others having this issue as well.

Because of the variances in the systems that I see having the issue and the testing that I have already done, it does not appear to be a problem with our systems, the hardware, or the drivers.

Here's my Specs:
OS Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate
CPU: Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 (2.4MHz)
Ram: 4GB
Video on Mine: Nvidia 8800GT 512MB
Video on Wife's" Nvidia GT460 768MB

Both systems are running with an optimal configuration. I have optimized the running processes and trimmed down everything that was not necessary. I have added the client to the exception list for the anti-virus software and other security tools that could interfere. I have even gone as far as running without them at all, and also have tried running it on a clean Window install, and then again with the available patches.

None of this makes any difference at all. The client still crashes randomly. I typically run the client in windowed mode, but this happens in full-screen mode as well.

Now, assuming that you actually bothered to read this and aren't going to tell me to provide you with some random information that won't actually get us anywhere....

How does this get fixed? It's quite apparently an issue with the client or with the launcher because I've already done all the troubleshooting I can on this end.

I am attaching a copy of my dxdiag.txt and a HiJackThis log file. These were taken under normal operating circumstances and after my system has been up and running for a couple of days under load. Again I will state that I have run the client with minimal processes, and it did not change anything in the operation.

Also, don't bother trying to tell my that my video chip-set is old or overheating. The hottest that it gets under a full load is 65 degrees Celsius. this is well within normal operating temperatures for my card. You might also note that my wife has a newer card, running similar temperatures, and is also having the exact same issue.
Both system are well within the parameters required to run the client. I get an average of 40-65FPS in-game with the detail settings near maximum. (I only have shadows off and distance set to the 4th mark of 5 available.) I have tried running it with minimal textures and settings, and it does not make a difference.

If there is anything to check on my end that I have left out, it is more likely because I forgot to mention something, than did not do it. I have been building and maintaining computers since 1987.

Here is my dxdiag.txt and a HiJackThis log file after a clean boot.

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple · November 2011

Well today I got a response from a GM b:shocked

Basically they said I could disable some processes and see if I have the most recent version of DirectX11.

Never mind that I already said I've tried it on a completely clean system that was slimmed down as much as possible already. (Support is SO good at missing the obvious, it's like they don't even bother to read.)

So I double-checked my DirectX versions, and sure enough, have the most recent ones.

I wonder how long it takes them to actually admit that the whole issue might actually be something wrong with the client and not my system. Of course, then they will likely tell me that it will be fixed in a future patch. (Like that ever happens.)

Belgarath - Heavens Tear · November 2011

Identical "silent crash" happens frequently on 5 different PCs in our house as well as on PCs of 2 friends. Most common occurrence is when flying over the Head Hunter platform, or running through West Archo.

This happens on every character, so it is not character-specific.

It happens on Windows XP SP3 clean system, Windows 7 32-bit, Windows 7 64-bit, on systems with RAM varying from 2 GB to 32 GB.

The graphics accelerators of the respective systems are: nVidia 8800 GT, GeForce GTX 560 Ti, GTX 580, and assorted others, running at resolutions from 800 x 600 through to 1920 x 1200.

So the problem is not with the OS, not with shortage of RAM, not with display adapter, not with resolution.

Conclusion: The client has a defect, now we hope the developers admit it and work towards ficing it.

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple · November 2011

Their latest response was to ask me what processes I turned off, never mind that I said I did it on a clean system.

So, in spite of having told them all of this already, I went ahead and made a partition, installed Win7, updated it, loaded drivers, and ran the client.

Guess what?
NO Change.

They also reminded me that the engine goes back to 2004 and that some systems nay have issues rendering graphics. OK, but rendering isn't the issue, it's the client crashing for no reason when I'm standing in a remote area typing in text. Or when I'm in a squad working, or when I'm doing CS, or WQ, or TW, or hell, just about anything, even nothing. Even with the graphics on the lowest possible settings.

So I'm doing some further troubleshooting, but all my hardware monitors up, and here's what I found....

8800GT, Memory on the card never gets higher than 17% with 2 clients running, 11% with one. In either case the load on the GPU does not exceed 25% or so.
My CPU, Highest I've seen with 2 clients running is a 64% load, that's with Pandora and this web page up.
My RAM, now here's the kicker... When did PWI start taking up 1.4GB of freaking ram? So I popped up a second client, and saw it was at 1.4GB also. Said what the hell, threw a third client into the mix and watched the mem usage. It started around 600MB with the loading screens, then flew up to 1GB when I logged in, and steadily increased from there!

And of course, now that I've found this and am monitoring the memory usage, it's not crashing. Never mind that I couldn't keep it up long enough to type a sentence 5 minutes ago.
I'm able to kill other processes so that my ram drops down to 61% from the 97% it was at before, but hell why is the client using so much ram now?

Also, you would think that since 2004, they might have figured out how to fix **** like this.

Miqqo - Harshlands · November 2011

I am also experiencing these crashes on my main machine. Running a Core i5 2500K, 8GB RAM and Nvidia GTX 570. Yet my Core i3, Mobility Radeon 5470 laptop is totally fine and has no issues whatsoever. Windows 7 Home Premium x64 on both systems. So far found no fix.

Allisandre - Sanctuary · November 2011

Now they say to run it windowed and on a lower resolution and turn down my settings. Looks like they still haven't learned how to read the original ticket. >.<

darthpanda16 · November 2011

We are reading the tickets, and it helps if you guys reply to the Need more Info requested from your tickets.

SylenThunder please reply to your tickets.

The more info you guys can give, screenshots of the general area, in-game coordinates, helps.

The time spent complaining on the forums could have been spent replaying to your tickets so that we can figure things out and have info to send to the devs and QA to work with b:sad

zilect · November 2011

This is actually the first time this happened to me I simply updated my pwi through patcher automatically and then clicked start to launch game well needless to say game didnt launch. As a matter of fact patcher just kinda sat there for a minute then closed itself out. Seriously What gives?

Allisandre - Sanctuary · November 2011

darthpanda16 wrote: »

We are reading the tickets, and it helps if you guys reply to the Need more Info requested from your tickets.

SylenThunder please reply to your tickets.

The more info you guys can give, screenshots of the general area, in-game coordinates, helps.

The time spent complaining on the forums could have been spent replaying to your tickets so that we can figure things out and have info to send to the devs and QA to work with b:sad

I did reply to my ticket. (I'm SylenThunder but got banned from the forum on that account so can't post from him).

The info is, the client is using a HUGE amount of ram and it swapping heavily on the page file. I have tried it with minimum graphics on a perfectly clean system, and it STILL closes. It also still eats up a huge amount of ram. (primarily when I enter archosaur, but it never releases it once I leave to an area with a lot less stuff going on.)

My return response time on the tickets is less than a day. Can't say the same for the support team, and they keep asking me to do things that I have already done, and stated I have done.

We're at the point of dancing in a circle here. Support keeps blaming my video card or system and I keep proving that that's not the case. It might not be so bad if it were something that happened occationally. But it's not. It happens all the time, anywhere, under any condition. And it's not limited to one computer. I have 7 systems all with different hardware and each one is having the exact same issue. The only common factor here is the client.

I've been back and forth with support on this issue for over a year with various accounts and tickets. It never changes. They blame my hardware or settings, I prove that it isn't hardware or settings, and then they just kind of drop it. I wait a bit, rinse and repeat.

Getting kinda tired of running in circles here and starting to wonder if anyone is even capable of admitting it's a problem with the client and bothering to attempt a fix at it. Especially given the apparent complete lack of ability to fix bugs that the devs have. I mean seriously, how hard is it to fix a cleric buff so that it works the way it should? How hard is it to re-code the bosses to fix the glitch causing the tab quest to fail? We've got a massive list of bugs, apparent since closed beta that still haven't been fixed.

And it might be one thing if we even had word that they were working to fix them, but we don't. We just get expansion after expansion and pack after pack with no end of new content introducing new bugs.

The ultimate expansion would be the one where they actually bothered to fix what's broke. Maybe even upgrade the game engine to something more current.

It would be a huge improvement over just pushing the bugs under the rug and pretending that they don't exist.

darthpanda16 · November 2011

I'll see if they can go through your hijackthis log more in depth.

Feel free to reply back to your tickets and thanks for your feedback about the game.b:victory

condo2009 · November 2011

same coures as the Jones Blessing was. will take them forever to even try and fix it so we send them useless info making us think they are working on an issue that is YEARS old. It is a Directx problem related to the client and when we used to get the crash box up, THAT IS WHAT IT SAID IT WAS.

darthpanda16 · November 2011

The directx errors are usually a corrupt video driver or it needs to be updated. Or, it can be your directx needs to be updated to the latest revision from this year (you have to seek it out on your own not use MS's updater) or similar.

The Jones Blessing stuff is web and game engineers, not tech support

We try to help you guys the best we can.

Send us your system info and we give you feedback.

condo2009 · November 2011

corrupt drivers? who you kidding here? they are all up to date, just admit the truth, it's the client engine like it always has been. it's was this way before tideborn expansion, and you're going to send us feedback? lol, we got NO feedback for 3 months with the Jones Blessing and now you say the same stock answer? it's the client that has not kept up with directx PERIOD

Jacobb - Dreamweaver · November 2011

The same thing is happening to me. Has been for quite awhile. Been trying to gather as much info on the issue as possible. From all the information out there, it sounds like there is a memory leak in the client. If this is so, then it would cause issues with other software that is trying to access memory as well (such as DirectX). I will see if I can find the cause of the leak or gather more info on it to submit a trouble ticket on the issue.
Just my 2 cents,

Allisandre - Sanctuary · November 2011

Yes it does look like it's an issue with a memory leak. It also appears as if it's linked to running in windowed mode as well because of DirectX sharing input with the OS. (In full-screen mode it runs exclusive and does not have to share.) I'm working on setting up a second monitor so I can take a look at the memory load while the client is in full-screen.

_Angelina_ - Harshlands · November 2011

HUH.. I had same problem... b:bye
But my problem was with drivers.. ATM I'm reinstalling it... hope it's gonna help..
They were all installed and everything was "fine" but it wasn't b:surrender

For me it wasn't only client crash... hole system was crashing -.-"
I had huge problems with graphic and lagged places in game...

But I dont complain because my computer configuration is really low.... b:shutup
I am amazed that i can even play game b:pleased Sometimes on 2 clients b:laugh

Allisandre - Sanctuary · November 2011

Initial testing in full-screen mode. Client resolution is 1680x1050.

Location ~ Commit Memory ~ Private Memory
Login screen ~ 622MB ~ 470MB
Character Selection Screen ~ 811MB ~ 545MB
Dragons End ~ 866MB ~ 684MB (What I would call normal, and similar to what used to be the constant)
Cave of the Vicious ~ 930MB ~ 723MB (an expected rise here, had herc out and gathered half the instance.)
Plume ~ 1.1GB ~ 934MB (a little more populated, there's the giant tree and all too, and expected rise.)
Archosaur ~ 1.6GM ~ 1.2GB (Holy freaking cow! Although TBH, it's kind of expected to rise here as well. The real test is coming up.)
Back to Dragons End ~ 1.4GB ~ 1GB (Here's where we start to see the issue. It hasn't released the data from Arch. It's still hanging onto quite a bit of ram and it's not necessary, as seen by the previous data from this location.)
Character Selection Screen ~ 1GB ~ 812MB (There's a huge difference between this and when we started the client. It has absolutely no reason to be holding onto all of that ram now.)
Even after sitting at Dragons End for an hour, it's still holding the ram. A program that isn't releasing the private memory it's allocated is a sure sign of a memory leak.

Now to do the same test in Windowed mode with a resolution of 1440x900.

Location ~ Commit Memory ~ Private Memory
Login screen ~ 489MB ~ 460MB
Character Selection Screen ~ 768MB ~ 585MB
Dragons End ~ 795MB ~ 665MB
Cave of the Vicious ~ 954MB ~ 789MB
Plume ~ 1.0GB ~ 934MB
Archosaur ~ 1.4GB ~ 1.1GB
Back to Dragons End ~ 1.2GB ~ 1.0GB
Login Screen ~ 1.0GB ~ 847MB
As you can see the numbers are rather similar, although a bit less. Likely because of the lower resolution. It's still not dumping ram when it doesn't need it allocated anymore.

Now to monitor the memory load when it crashes....

Jacobb - Dreamweaver · November 2011

I just seen that the elementclient.exe got all the way to 1.8gb of memory usage before shutting itself down.
Once shut down, it tried to free some of that memory which then set it to 1.7gb of memory usage before finally closing out.

My question would be to the devs and to support as to why the client has this memory leak and when can we expect a fix for it?

While we wait for a patch to fix the memory leak, I will see what I can do (sans source code) to resolve the issue.

Miqqo - Harshlands · November 2011

Game seems to take more and more memory over time. I reached 1.6gb commit so far when initially in Archosaur had "only" 1.2gb used. After just a short stroll between districts.

Full screen 1920x1080 with max details.

Sometimes I also suffer major graphical tearing and missing textures. Again these issues are not happening on my laptop.

Allisandre - Sanctuary · November 2011

Using GameBooster while in Arch, I got the private memory down to 200MB or so. It does start climbing again, but slowly. While standing in South Arch it went up to 482MB, running through West brought it up to around 677MB, and then travelling to the platform took it to 723MB. The Coomit charge is still high at 1.5GB, but it's the private memory that we're worried about with the leak.
Private memory continues to increase as I travel, but activating GameBooster to clear it seems to keep the client from crashing. IT's annoying sitting and watching the memory so I can play though.

According to the GM working with me on the ticket, they can't replicate the client crash, and they don't have enough people submitting tickets to really bother looking into it. They are currently asking me what hardware I've updated so far >.<.

If you have this issue with the client closing randomly with no error, submit a ticket please. I'd love to flood them with data that shows it's not just me since they are still trying to blame my hardware/drivers/computer that's way newer than the client.

Allisandre - Sanctuary · December 2011

This is hard to track down since there aren't that many complaints along this line similar to yours and we can't reproduce the same problems that you are reporting.
What parts of your hardware have you updated so far?

That's their latest response. Again they are going back to blaming my hardware/drivers when I've explained very precisely the methods I have taken to rule that out.

I replied back to them on the 25th and haven't heard anything since. (Although I haven't gotten a response from ANY of my tickets since the 25th, aside from the e-mail I sent yesterday about not being able to get to support.)

FiveAps - Dreamweaver · December 2011

don't expect anything, I quit buggin them years back.
I updated my card to a 6870, I run every game possible and impossible at max res. PWI? lags. I get 50+ fps in hardcore games with my GPU used at 80-90% load. I get 12 FPS in PWI while moving at South banker.
I go at south tele, pass the gate in that back area no one uses it , voila, back to 50 fps, fluid motion. Coming back to south tele, lag is back on. That's a 50m distance in game metrics. And let's not talk about instances like nirvana where i have 30-40ms ping , and then HF + Mire + poison + BM aoe skills and I can hardly press my Subsea button because of graphic lag. Good thing I have it on hotkey.

I have 4G of ram on my PC, Q6600 @3Ghz running on a Assus Extreme Foruma.

All you're ever gonna get from tech (and mods/admins like darthpanda) is request for more info, blame of your drivers, request for more info, balame on some other driver, request for more info....then no response, lol.
No matter what you try, nothing's going to change.

Try a fresh PWI client install, I don't know if they have something with all updates packed, that might help you. I got rid of some of my problems (that a friend also shared) after a clean install of PWI client. Funny thing is, my friend got rid of random DC like yours after I gave him the new client installation I had on my pc.
So yeah, it's not the hardware/drivers/you or whatever else they blame. It's the game, and they have no idea how to fix a lot of these random crash things. Besides, they don't even care, look at your posts, you say you have problems everywhere in game, they ask you for coordinates, lol.

Mor_Toran - Sanctuary · December 2011

My system is almost exactly the same as yours FiveAps, except for running on a 512MB 8800GT and the system is homebrew instead of an Asus.

I get 18FPS in South Arch, 12FPS in west, 40-65FPS out in the rest of the game with no more than a 27% load on my GPU. CPU load is usually around 30-40%, but memory gets loaded through the roof. PWI is the only game I play that my ram usage goes to 97%. (I monitor using the All CPU Gadget from addgadget.com on a second display.)

All I really know is that no matter what I do to prevent it, the client just closes. Occasionally I'll get a chinese error. When I get the error, the client window stays active, but I can't do anything.

versengeterix · December 2011

I am not a sophiscated computer user. I'm not even a sophiscated PWI user. I just want to game. I just re-tooled and am running a monster system now built by my "Techie" future son in law. I told him of my dc problems and he found this thread. So to tune it for me and see the problem I in fact could force it to dc about every 5-10 minutes yesterday so he could diagnose the symptoms. Now this is complete BULL that we had to do this but this is what he figured out and it seems to get me a few hours before dc. I actually prefer the visuals now anyway. (go figure) He set "Over all" to minimum, texture remained at max as did distance. That seemed to get me a few hours and I stressed it out all over Arch doing the same things that would make me dc every 5-10, I have since adjusted texture to 1/2 as well as distance see if that extends my gaming duration. I've got 2 freaking fans on my Vid card alone ya I could pull up all the specs and post them here but so what. It's obviuosly not my system. Now this really sux playing a game that I have to walk around like I'm on egg shells it's just time and money I guess but I won't do this much longer. I'm not sending a ticket on this BS after reading this thread it's obvious PWI is aware of THEIR problem they either fix it soon or I'll move on and spend my dough on something else. It is apparent that PWI is attempting to obscure this issue with the BS responses I see from the GM that has posted on this thread, I have no idea what will cause PWI to take action, I'll give them till the New Year and make a decision at that time.
I'll send a PM to the GM that is posting here so he knows about my situation as well and check for a response I guess, it's just time now no more money will be invested here!

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple · December 2011

you would think. They closed my last ticket because they hadn't responded in 48 hours. (Yes, you read that tight, I did not typo anything.) So, of course, I opened some new tickets.

They are asking for the standard dxdiag and hijackthis logs, so I took them from my fresh windows 7 install that's been completely stripped down which still crashes like crazy and sent them in.

Again I have referenced them to this thread, but so far it's been my experience that they lack the reading comprehension of a 10-year old, so I don't expect much.

Also yes, I quit spending money here after they released the pheonix wings, and even then that was only a gift card given to me. I don't even do the free Zen offers because PWE still gets click-ad money from them. I will not support a company that disrespects its customers in such a fashion. And does it on purpose at that!

AnnBlackfire - Archosaur · December 2011

OpenGL likely, that causes for more games for problems. I do not know the details, but indeed with a few things disabled it will be less crashing. But you still can crash while in busy areas (such as Archosaur's West side), likely due to the many people being there and specially because people keep using their pets, mounts and fights within the busy city streets. If that wouldn't happen, it would be a lot nicer for everyone.

I would recommend to shut down these options:

- Sharpen
- V-Sink
- Soften
- Shadows
- Warp
- Sun/Moon

While entering Archosaur, or other busy cities, do know there is a quick button that is like a switch between your own settings and the lowest possible. (and back off course). This button is on your top left above your healthbar. You should notice there a button that is not yellow like the rest.

morigorum · December 2011

I have a pretty clean install from the past month (replaced some guts of system and info below:

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 SP1
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3
Intel i5 2500K w/stock cooler, running ~31c at idle, Prime95 run for 6hrs no probs, tested all memory sticks for 11-17 passes NO failures
16Gb Corsair Vengeance (4x4GB)
Corsair HX650 650W PSU

All new items above
SATA Optical DVD/CD burner
Samsung 500GB Boot drive
WD Green 1TB data drive

Avast AV Pro
Malwarebyte registered
Office 2010 User Home Program (Outlook running)
IE 9 running w/3 tabbed panes

Playing PWI over past week since I had to do a fresh install and it has blown out 3 times since then. Moving in Archosaur or somewhere else.

This is from event log:

Faulting application name: elementclient.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4e702356
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.17514, time stamp: 0x4ce7ba58
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000343b0
Faulting process id: 0x1190
Faulting application start time: 0x01ccbf6b5a971d9b
Faulting application path: C:\Perfect World Entertainment\element\elementclient.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll
Report Id: 4abdc3d8-2b79-11e1-ac7a-50e549bd5bc0

So it is pointing to the elementclient.exe file as being the culprit as far as I can tell. And it's the same error message (not sure about process id or fault offset). And the game just goes POOF and I can reload it and play for hrs afterwoulds each time this has happened. I did not do a file check after the install. I may set that/try that next but doubt that's going to make any difference.

I don't like it disappearing like this with no error info from the game itself now....that is strange in of itself. And I am not a novice computer person, been working with them/on them for many many years and build my own systems preferably.

Mike

Chibisuke - Dreamweaver · December 2011

If you're using a 32bit operating system, you might want to try to set /3GB mode.

in windows XP this was done by adding /3GB to the end of the boot command line on boot.ini
On vista/7 you need to run "bcdedit /set IncreaseUserVa 3072" as administrator.
Reboot afterwards.

The client does in fact memoryleak, and it looks like it does that when allocating sprites.
Once the client size reaches 2GB it crashes. The above setting increases this value to 3GB.

If you want to undo the change, remove the /3GB option from boot.ini
for vista/7 calll "bcedit /deletevalue IncreaseUserVa" as administrator

Razikeal - Raging Tide · December 2011

im having a similar problem to one of the guys on page two that, when i hit start on my launcher, it just sits there for about a minute then closes. I did play this game yesterday and had it on for quite a long while and did not notice anything out of the ordinary. I am currently verifying my files to see if it fixes my little silent launcher crash

Fox_claw - Sanctuary · December 2011

SylenThunder - Sanctuary wrote: »

Now we all, (well most of us), know about this issue. It's been around for forever. Then client will just close. No error, no Report Bugs window, No Windows Error Reporting. I've done a lot of troubleshooting on it, and I haven't been able to find any answers. I've even opened a couple of tickets on it with some of my various accounts and the response is typically a failed one blaming my system...

So, after being totally fed up with it, I've submitted yet another ticket. They usually will respond telling me to ask in the forum because they are totally clueless so I'm preempting
them and doing it now.

Here's a copy of my message...

Here is my dxdiag.txt and a HiJackThis log file after a clean boot.

You need check the dsl modems firewall settings it is separate from computer it has its own ip address for dsl modem not sure on the wireless but do know dsl modem you have to go to its ip address and set it k might be same situation on wireless allso instead of on comp setting for it k.Have been a programmer way longer than that k b:pleased and it took me awhile to realize my modem settings can interfere with a connection k try setting it below medium ok and should fix prob ok reason problems happening is modem disconnecting from client server k because of its firewall setting and yes its different from the pcs setting ok.

Fox_claw - Sanctuary · December 2011

Theres nothing wrong with the client or server ok its a simple setting on your comp or dsl modem ok whether it be wireless or dsl hardwired,most most dsl modems have an ip address you have type in to get to page to set it k your provider will tell you if if you contact them ok.recommend a setting below medium as medium and above affects client ok.A setting on medium and above will dissconnect client or crash it k,and allso it wont let some get fully in game ex. they can sign in but char will not continue login to game page k.So set it below medium and it corrects it k,on modem whether dsl or wireless.

Client Crashing, No Errors

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