Game Freeze

[Hungry Joe]

Hello,

Have been playing and enjoying an Entente Grand Campaign of WW1 Gold with few problems, but have just encountered a complete freeze where nothing seems to be happening and my cursor will not move at the resolution of the May 1916 Interphase (please see attached savegame). I have tried simply delaying the sieges that occur when I press the end turn button but this makes no difference, have tried leaving the game alone for 20 minutes to see if it sorts itself out and I have tried several times to play out the turn but with no luck. The last message I can see in the message window is always "Germany attempts to restore order" so perhaps this has some bearing?

I am running WW1 Gold version 1.08F, though I did begin the game a few patches back. My OS is Windows 7 with UAC completely disabled.

Hope someone can help as I have really been enjoying the game to this point.

[calvinus]

Ok I will test your save immediately.

[calvinus]

I tested successfully your save:
- Finished the Interphase, Pola and Koenigsberg surrenderd, then I entered the Redeployment phase,
- I refused the Peace Negotiations with Russia from Germany
- I read and closed all popups
- Redeployment AI did her job (about 1 minute)

No freeze.

[Hungry Joe]

Thanks for your quick response.

Unfortunately, even after reinstalling the game from scratch in the order: Original game - Gold Upgrade kit - patch 1.08F and experimenting by changing various settings before hitting the end turn button, I am experiencing exactly the same freeze. To be clear, I get through the two seiges fine, with a variety of results, and the game freezes on the main map just after I press the "Go to Next Battle" button after the seige at Konigsburg. As you indicated you were able to get past that in your post above I have no idea what the problem might be.

I might try just letting the game run at the point where it freezes for an hour or so to be sure it is not just being slow, but I don't think this likely as the game works fairly quickly the rest of the time.

[calvinus]

You can try something like:
- disable sounds & musics (Configure Game)
- run the game with UAC off and logged in as PC Administrator
- turn off the Antivirus or configure it setting WW1.exe as trusted application
- turn off all processes and resident programs that could be the cause

[AndrewKurtz]

Calvinus. Could he turn on any logging and run to help figure out what the game is doing when it freezes?

[calvinus]

Calvinus. Could he turn on any logging and run to help figure out what the game is doing when it freezes?

From what he posted, the freeze seems occurring not during AI job, but during the game data structure update procedure upon end of Interphase, when a lot of calculations take place, and also a lot of RAM allocation!
For this case no game log is done, sorry.

[Hungry Joe]

As I have a dual boot computer with Windows XP and Windows 7 partitions I updated the XP installation of WW1 and tried my save game - it works fine, so the problem seems to be a Windows 7 issue. I'm logged in as Administrator with UAC disabled and Avast antivirus configured with the WW1 folder as an exclusion. I am aware that XP has a smaller memory footprint than Win 7 so perhaps I am running out of memory? I have 2GB RAM plus 3GB virtual memory and 896 MB on my graphics card which I would have thought was enough Anyway, I am happy to continue playing the game on XP, so thank you both for your help.

[calvinus]

The game runs surely much better on XP. The game does not go out of memory. Instead, when RAM is finished, the OS uses swap RAM on hard drive and the game runs much much slower. Win7 consumes much more RAM than XP, for sure.

[Hungry Joe]

Just to update you: I have discovered that this issue was not with Windows 7 after all. After playing on my XP installation I noticed that the options were set to strictly-turned based, whereas the options on my Win7 installation were set to WEGO. With some experimentation I realised that, on either OS, the game would freeze at the same point when WEGO was enabled and play through correctly to the redeployment phase when strictly-turn based was enabled. I've been able to change the settings to strictly-turn based on my Win 7 installation, get passed the problematic turn and carry on in WEGO.

Just posting this in case it is some use to you in troubleshooting.

[calvinus]

Just to update you: I have discovered that this issue was not with Windows 7 after all. After playing on my XP installation I noticed that the options were set to strictly-turned based, whereas the options on my Win7 installation were set to WEGO. With some experimentation I realised that, on either OS, the game would freeze at the same point when WEGO was enabled and play through correctly to the redeployment phase when strictly-turn based was enabled. I've been able to change the settings to strictly-turn based on my Win 7 installation, get passed the problematic turn and carry on in WEGO.

Just posting this in case it is some use to you in troubleshooting.

So please let me understand, because I'm a bit confused.
Does the freeze take place in strict-turn-based mode? Or in WEGO mode?

[Hungry Joe]

Sorry if my last post was confusing - the freeze happens when I run the turn in WEGO mode.

[calvinus]

Ok I finally managed to reproduce the freeze (the only way was to reproduce the freeze was to launch the game not in debug mode and then I attached the debug from outside! :bonk .

The freeze seems caused by the evacuation of fleets (from Pola). Bug fixed!

Next patch. Thanks.