Still get frequent freezeups with 1.08g

[Art99]

Before I describe the problem I'd like to clarify something. When you play against the computer just by yourself are you supposed to use the 2 player game or the 4 player game ? I am playing the 4 player game and have had major freezeup issues ever since I bought the game way back last fall. I also bought the 15$ gold upgrade and things improved a bit but it is rare when I can play 2 turns in a row without freezes. The freezeups always occur during the 'political phase'. I have probably started 25 games now and have never even been able to get through year 1915

I am using 32 bit vista on a Gateway laptop. UAC is off and video drivers have been updated. I have all sound off too. I also am experiencing very poor performance by my mouse (not just when AI is thinking - all the time)and it's a major chore to move troops and refill units and other basic tasks. I'm at a point where I am going to shelf this game if I can't resolve these issues - just can't waste hours a day trying to play 2 turns you know. Perhaps my laptop just sucks but I have been able to play a wide range of games on it. It'd be a shame to shelf it because it looks like a good game plus I'm out at least 60$ too.

I could send you the saved game file but don't know how to do that.

thanks for any help

[calvinus]

Hello, how much RAM? Have you tried disabling the Antivirus? What is the Antivirus?

[Art99]

It has a Turion 64 x 2 processor with 2 GB ram. It also has an ATI Radeon 1200 series video board with updated drivers. I was able to play BOA2, Forge of Freedom, Europa Universalis 3 and a couple other games on it ok though it was a bit sluggish at times during intensive AI usage but it was manageable. I use Avast Free Antivirus program which I have disabled when I play World War 1 Gold but it still freezes. I also reinstalled the game and Gold upgrade recently.

Since I don't see many people posting similar problems I'd guess the problem is something with my laptop or perhaps Antivirus or some other software I use on it. I might install it on my desktop pc but that is supposed to only be used for my business so I really hope I can get it to work on this laptop.

Thanks

[Longhairedlout]

Hi there ART, I have avast as well, its a good free virus program isn't it, when I play WWI gold I have to make sure that Avast is closed down completely or I get freezes in and after battles, I then have to use the task manager to shut the game down, anyway make sure Avast is not still running in the background and has stopped completely....

I just had a look, when Avast is closed down completely there is a little white cross in a red circle in the bottom left hand corner of the Avast icon....

LHL

[Art99]

Yes Avast is a nice free program - the newest version has a silent gaming feature in it. I've tried using that and also have completely disabled it like you did with no luck. Fortunately when the game freezes I'm able to ALT/TAB out and shut it down in task manager like you do. It would be a royal pain if you had to reboot every time.

I get through the battles just fine but sometimes I get a newspaper graphic and the mouse stops responding and there is 'press pause to continue' message at the top of the screen. When I press the pause button it goes into the political phase and then freezes up. It seems to happen every other turn usually. It never freezes up during any other game phase as far as I can remember. I'm running all options at the default values and in the game configurator have low color depth, display game map of Gold Edition and AI memory checked. Screen monitor = use monitor resolution.

Hope this helps

[calvinus]

Yes Avast is a nice free program - the newest version has a silent gaming feature in it. I've tried using that and also have completely disabled it like you did with no luck. Fortunately when the game freezes I'm able to ALT/TAB out and shut it down in task manager like you do. It would be a royal pain if you had to reboot every time.

I use AVG, that is fantastic to my opinion. I had even not to configure it in order to make WW1.EXE a trusted application. No freeze no crash.

The game performace is rather acceptable even when the scan procedure in ongoing! But I have a core Quad CPU with 4 GB RAM.

Edit: I removed part of my post when I realised you are already playing with 1.08G.

Edit2: it seems you're having freezes in the phases when huge calculations take place. In such moments, the amount of RAM allocation is also huge.

On my low RAM laptop, I have such erratic freezes, but only when I have the Development Environment running in background. This is caused by swap RAM usage (hard disk).

Thus, can you try turning off all background processes that are using much RAM?

[Art99]

I've tried to shut down as much stuff as I can - I even switched off my internet connection. I am reluctant to turn off any services when I don't understand what they do. I managed to free up almost 200k ram and the game still freezes up. Normally the political phase takes about a minute to finish when things are working right. I have waited 30 minutes and it still stays frozen up - I'd think that should be more than enough time to finish even during the most intensive AI operations. I didn't see anything called Development Environment running. I assume that's some kind of programming tool.

If you can assure me that this problem is not some kind of game bug and is a result of my pc being underpowered or some other issue with my laptop then I guess I'll give up and install the game on my work desktop and see if the saved game file will work. It is a core duo pc with 4 gb ram and a much better video card. The only problem is that if my boss learns I'm playing games on the company computer I'll get in trouble but I usually am anyway If the game keeps freezing up on that pc too then I should probably send you the game file I guess. Thanks for your input.

[calvinus]

30 minutes are absolutely a total freeze of the game application. It means the game application has definitively stopped working. This makes me think the cause is outside the game.
In fact, if there was a infinite loop bug in ww1, why you are experiencing so many such loops and we not?

So I advice you to investigate and try a new antivirus, or disable it if you can.

Also try on your desktop, where I hope you haven't the same antivirus system.

[Art99]

Just out of curiosity ( and desperation ) I uninstalled Avast and then rebooted and the game still froze up so it does not appear that Avast causes any problems. I think that I may have figured out the problem though. I tried playing in Windows XP Service Pack 2 compatibility mode and the turn played fine without any freezeups The mouse seemed to operate better too. I am tired now so will have to test it out more when I wake up later. If the game seems to play correctly I will reinstall Avast and see what happens. I was unaware that AVG still offered a free version ( they make it pretty hard to find on their site ) so might try that too. I see that it also has spyware protection which Avast only offers in it's pay version. AVG with free spyware protection is too good to pass up ! I use Spyware Doctor which works fairly well but it would be nice if AVG works well enough so I won't need the good Doctor and save some money.

Anyway I'll report back about how things work out later. I'll be so glad if I can play it on this laptop finally. Thanks for your efforts and patience Calvinus.

[calvinus]

Good news!

I use SuperAntiSpyware free without any problem.

[Art99]

Using XP compatibility mode on my laptop had mixed results. It seemed to work about 1 in 3 times so for now I've given up on trying to play it on that machine.
I guess it just doesn't have enough juice. I suspect it might be the video board. If they issue another driver update I'll give the game another try on it.

I installed the game on the desktop and the problem save file played fine but on the next turn I had another freeze. I decided to start a new game and have played 3 turns in a row fine. On the first turn there was an issue where the box appeared in the center of the screen that shows the phase the games is in and it began to rapidly blink on and off during the military phase and would not stop. The mouse was still functioning and I opened the options window and then closed it and the flashing box disappeared and the turn completed properly. It certainly is much more enoyable playing on this machine with a large monitor and decent speakers ! I'm playing France in the 4 player game and what's different is that the Germans are kicking my butt but it's still early ! In my laptop games I was always able hold them off and keep my territory. Getting my butt kicked seems more realistic. I still have Avast installed but it is disabled when I play. I'll experiment a little with it on and see how it works and if it causes problems will replace it with AVG.

I'll report back if any major problems come up but it seems to run pretty smoothly now on the desktop.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

[Art99]

The game has played much better on my desktop pc, however on the Aug 1915 turn there is a freezeup on this machine too. I've spent countless hours replaying previous turns, freeing up ram and trying other fixes and no matter what I do it always freezes on the Aug 1915 during the politics phase. I realize that you are making every effort to ensure this game works properly and commend you for it but either I am the most unlucky person who has ever played this game and have the worst computers of any players (which I think is quite unlikely) or this game has a bug during the political phase. I've also never had any problems playing other Ageod games until this one even on my somewhat underpowered laptop. My desktop PC I've played it on recently easily exceeds the recommended requirements stated in the manual and I've updated ever imaginable driver on the machine as well. I've turned off all firewalls, anti spyware software and uninstalled Avast (which has never given me any problems before). I've played video games for at least 25 years now and it seems like with nearly every one there are a handful of people who can never get them to work. I guess it's my turn now.

Since there seems to be nothing I can do on my end to get this game to work properly (other than to hope that my problem will get resolved in some future patch) I am giving up on this game . I'm just hoping I can still get a refund and if I do will use it to try another of your games of which there are several I have interest in. After owning the game 9 months now and still not being able to play it properly on 2 different machines I don't think I am being even minimally unreasonable. I hope you will not take this post to be some sort of flame or personal attack - I am merely stating facts about my experience and am out of patience so it's time for me to move onto something else. Who should I contact about a refund ? Also would it be useful for me to send the saved game file to you to examine ?

regards and thanks
Art

[calvinus]

If you wish, you can post here the zipped savegame (.SAV & .MAP files), so that I can check if there's a bug in Politics phase of Aug. 1915.

Also, we will publish a new beta patch 1.08H later today, that includes several improvements in game performance and allows you to run the game with one CPU only (some Win7 users reported huge lags with multi-core PCs).

I hope this helps.

[calvinus]

New beta patch 1.08H can be found here:
http://www.ageod-forum.com/showthread.php?t=17982

I suggest you launch the game in single-CPU mode.
You'll find a new link in WW1 folder inside the Start menu of Windows:
World War One (single-CPU mode)

If the game now runs fine with no freeze during Politics phase, it means your CPU chipset is non compatible with the game in multi-CPU mode. WW1 is indeed a multi-threaded application, not like other AgeOD games (all single-threaded).

Other useful tip: set WW1.EXE to be run in XP SP2 compatibility mode!

[thip]

Hi Calvinus,
I have the gold version which runs fine on my PC with XP. But on my laptop (dual core) with win 7 it freezes on the initialising screen after I pick a tutorial/scenario.
I've got the latest patch and tried running in single core mode but it still won't load into a game.
I can still play on the PC though. Looks like a lot of fun.

[calvinus]

Hi Calvinus,
I have the gold version which runs fine on my PC with XP. But on my laptop (dual core) with win 7 it freezes on the initialising screen after I pick a tutorial/scenario.
I've got the latest patch and tried running in single core mode but it still won't load into a game.
I can still play on the PC though. Looks like a lot of fun.

For the Win7 my suggestion is:

1) Logged in as PC Admin, UAC off
2) Run WW1.EXE in Win XP SP2 compatibility mode (try also SP3, I'm not sure what's exactly ok, sorry)
3) Disable Desktop Composition

Look also here: http://www.ageod-forum.com/showthread.php?t=17701
You will find a lot of useful tips.

[thip]

Thanks Calvinus. I have tried points 1 and 2 so I will give point 3 a try.

Cheers.

[thip]

Thanks Calvinus. Disabling Desktop Composition did the trick. All the best.