Crashes stopped - was it DirectX?

[Zouave]

I have had two campaign games crash to desk top through internal errors, even with the latest patch.

This afternoon, I installed a new game and it asked me whether I wanted to upgrade my DirectX (I did). This surprised me, as I thought I already had the latest version but evidently when I upgraded my Windows XP drivers it did not do DirectX.

This got me to thinking about my Distant Guns problems, so I fired up a Russian War campaign and I have now played through 7 days and 4 battles without a single crash.

HOWEVER, all is not sweetness and light. The campaign works, but the time compression is now screwed up. When I crank it up to 10,000, the game stalls for 3 seconds, runs off 6-8 minutes of game time in a burst, then stalls again for 3 seconds. The buttons all respond very sluggishly. At one point, I noticed a black rectangle appear in the lower right of the screen near the blue clock, and after that the compression ran beautifully for about 12 hours of game time, then went back to the stop-burst-stop pattern.

I tried exiting and loading a save game, but the problem reappeared.

[Daedalus]

I have had two campaign games crash to desk top through internal errors, even with the latest patch.

This afternoon, I installed a new game and it asked me whether I wanted to upgrade my DirectX (I did). This surprised me, as I thought I already had the latest version but evidently when I upgraded my Windows XP drivers it did not do DirectX.

This got me to thinking about my Distant Guns problems, so I fired up a Russian War campaign and I have now played through 7 days and 4 battles without a single crash.

HOWEVER, all is not sweetness and light. The campaign works, but the time compression is now screwed up. When I crank it up to 10,000, the game stalls for 3 seconds, runs off 6-8 minutes of game time in a burst, then stalls again for 3 seconds. The buttons all respond very sluggishly. At one point, I noticed a black rectangle appear in the lower right of the screen near the blue clock, and after that the compression ran beautifully for about 12 hours of game time, then went back to the stop-burst-stop pattern.

I tried exiting and loading a save game, but the problem reappeared.

Yes it could have been a cause.
And the other part that you are showing us could be a multitude of things. But Make sure Storm-Eagle studios gets this sent to them so they can see what you have found.

[Zouave]

OK, I sent something to SES, as I will send the below.

I think I see what is causing my slowdown -- the game is saving itself very 6-8 minutes of game time. This seems mainly to be a problem during the game's daylight hours -- things run more smoothly at night. Is there a button to turn off or adjust auto-save?

Here's a screen shot from my campaign map -- you can see all the "save game was successful" messages in the upper left corner.

16984

[Daedalus]

OK, I sent something to SES, as I will send the below.

I think I see what is causing my slowdown -- the game is saving itself very 6-8 minutes of game time. This seems mainly to be a problem during the game's daylight hours -- things run more smoothly at night. Is there a button to turn off or adjust auto-save?

Here's a screen shot from my campaign map -- you can see all the "save game was successful" messages in the upper left corner.

16984

Yea, I took a look at the Pic and I do not remember mine saving like your game is.
How much ram do you have in your system? I am wondering if this has anything to do with it. As I have two Gig of ram and mine may not need to do this or use the swap file as much. But I would like to see if you might have found something. You already sent this to SES so they will know about this also. If you have time, put down how much ram you have in your system ok. I am looking for patterns in the game.

[Zouave]

The latest patch seems to have fixed the saved game issue for me.

[Lempereur1]

Zov:

Do you know which version of Direct X it installed?

It could have been a Windows Update that ask you to install a new Version of Direct X. They just released a new version.

[Fitzwilliam]

I updated directX last night after seeing this thread. Reloaded a save from just prior to the crash (crash was a black screen lock up from within a campaign battle). Was able to refight the battle and there was no lockup. Also, after upgrading to v1.010 I was able to load a v1.009 save that had crashed on the campaign screen after returning from a campaign battle (got the DG internal error message) and have not experienced any crashes thus far.

FYI the new DirectX version I downloaded from microshaft's site is 9.0c(4.09.0000.0904).

Just to clarify; I downloaded the DirectX update manually from the directX homepage, was not prompted to do so by windows update. I noticed as it installed that some SDK's were dated April 2006, and I know I hadn't installed or updated directx since about December, though I did have 9.0c.

[Dogbert]

The SDK is only really relevant if you are developing an application that uses DirectX.

Which makes me think... the distribution version of Distant Guns is not by any chance trying to use the debug versions of the DirectX libraries rather than the real ones?

[Lempereur1]

The Direct X Installer that we use is all Microsoft Code, we just invoke it.

After that Microsoft takes over.

A couple of things could be happening.

1. Direct X 9.c was already installed on your system before Distant GUns was installed and one of the files were screwed up. We we invoked the direct X installer, it checked your Previous build and saw that it was ok so it did not install.

2. The other possiblity is that your system is playing "DUALING DLLs".
Sometimes, Video Card makers, copy over certain DX9 DLLs (Dyanmiclly Linked Libraies) and cause new prolems to occur.

Here is two links for Microsoft Direct X 9.0c

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B- (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-)
BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en

Or the general DirectX page:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.mspx (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.mspx)


If you are still having graphic issues, try re-installing Direct X9.0c

This may explain the last round of issues.


It sounds like it may not be working properly for everyone.