I've been having this problem since I first started playing, but I figured I'd wait for a patch or two before making a thread here in case it was something that was going to be fixed. I can't seem to make it through an away team mission without crashing to desktop *at least* once (an average of three to five times per mission). The crash only occurs in away team missions and during combat. This makes it extremely difficult to make it through storyline missions that require me to escort someone or something like that. There have been many times where a character that I must interact with becomes impossible to interact with because the game crashes out during combat directly before I'm supposed to interact with said character.
I have filled out an automatic crash report every time this has happened, but I haven't heard anything back about this and it still happens, even though I've sent 30-50 (conservative estimate) crash reports and have had times when I've had seven crash reports uploading at once due to repeated crashes in the span of five minutes.
I'd love to get this figured out, because it's incredibly aggravating to have to log back into the game an average of three-to-five times per ground mission if there's combat involved. And that's not including having to restart missions where NPCs become "un-interactable" due to a poorly-timed crash.
System specs:
Windows Vista Ultimate x64
Intel Core2Quad Q9550
ATI Radeon HD 5850 (10.3 Catalyst drivers)
DirextX 11
Edit:
Still waiting for a response.
Also:
DXDiag
http://pastebin.com/WuJX3h6p
Comments
My old system with a GTX 260 didn't do this.
Current system:
Win 7 Premium 64-bit
i5 750
Radeon 5850 (Catalyst 10.2 will try updating and see if any different)
Nothing overclocked or overheated as far as I can tell.
edit: Catalyst 10.3 does the same thing.
Honestly this has been a problem with Radeon cards in this game for a long time. It's pretty sad that a card we pay 300 plus bucks on we can't use all the features it has. But this is Cryptic so just go ahead and get used to it.
Other then that it's a pretty fun game whenever it decides it's going to work.
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If you like me have an expensive ATI card and are annoyed that we have second-class graphics to those that buy from a particular company (if you look on the main www.startrekonline.com site you will notice big "nvidia the way it's meant to be played" branding on EVERY PAGE at the bottom), try taking a look at www.startrekonline.com/videos (THE TWO LATEST VIDEOS UPLOADED ON THAT PAGE) to see what you are missing and prepare to get even more angry/disappointed...
...so, it's very disappointing how Cryptic don't think it's important for on the release of a new game to have support for ATI cards for features they themselves say are pretty much vital like dynamic lighting...
On a technology forum this is pretty much what people seem to be saying everywhere atm when I researched (to check whether it was time to buy a new card or not hehe
http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-net/183495-nvidias-geforce-gtx-480-finally-unleashed-reviewed-rated-8.html#post1899293
also see: semiaccurate.com/2010/03/23/nvidia-bends-definition-honesty-gtx480-benches
You cn play with limited Dynamic Lighting if you turn the settings down to 2 dynamic lights. SInce I did that I have not had a single crash. It is very annoying though if you have a graphics card, bought for a couple of hundred punds, that you have to rurn settings off on, especially for a problem that has been here since beta.
A note to say we know and we are fixing it would be great Cryptic.
Though, as for playing without dynamic lighting, yeah. That's not going to happen. I'll deal with the crashes. I updated my graphics card to the 5850 so I could eek out a bit more performance in Maya and Mudbox over my old GTX 280 and was hoping there wouldn't be any compatibility issues with other software, but I suppose it's to be expected. Hopefully ATI will patch their drivers, as I'm sort of inclined to believe the problem would be more easily rectified on their end as opposed to Cryptic's end. I suppose we'll see what happens.