Random Crashing in Imperial City: SOLUTION

I've been playing Going Rogue since its soft launch and had no difficulties until my characters reached the second zone. After that, random crashes--on the order of one or two per hour--were the order of the day. And by crashes I mean I had to Cntl+Alt+Del and close the application then launch the application again. Often the crashes would occur when I left the Trading House but sometime it would just happen when I was traveling to or from a mission.

I verified all the files thinking that might be the issue, but that didn't help at all.

Here's how I fixed it:

I renamed my pigg file folder (within the directory where City of Heroes is installed) to something imaginative like 'oldpiggs' and then relaunched the game. The game noticed that the pigg files were missing and downloaded them again. This took a while, but I haven't had any crashes since.

Pigg files, as I understand it, are the textures used to make world object look real rather than just a series of colored polygons. One or more of those textures must have been corrupt and whenever it was loaded into memory (say when I was zoning from the Trading House into Imperial City) there was a good chance my copy of the app would crash.

Perhaps the Devs can make the 'verify files' option a bit more robust so that it verfies that the files are correct, not just "present". Embedding a hash value into the file perhaps?

Anyway, I hope this helps someone if they start seeing the same issue.

Going Rogue is EVEN MORE AWESOME without random crashes. ;-)

-Buxley

Im having the exact same problem. I renamed the folder and spent 2 hours downloading all the piggs and it still crashes. The problem is utterly obscene in Imperial city crashing within 2 mins or less. I have the latest drivers and such and was hoping maybe someone else had run into this. Is your problem still fixed?

worth a try... been crashing randomly and excessively in Praetoria as well as normal maps and that was after updating my drivers too.

After some testing ive found that turning off the advanced graphic settings totally fixes the problem. Im currently going thru each setting to find the culprit.

I have been having this trouble ever since the launch. My drivers are updated, my computer ran all through BETA with out troubles on full UM mode. It ran UM all through I17 without trouble.
Once I got to Imperial City in live, though, the crashes are constant and very random. Travelling, zoning into the city, zoning in and out of instances.

My drivers are up to date.
I'm running a GEForce 260 GTX (which had no troubles with UM in I17 and Beta)

Dropping back the graphics does help but this is sadly distressing as I built this computer to run on UM and honestly hate having to see this gorgeous zone reduced to 'blah'.

I also had completely deleted and reinstalled the game and it seemed to help for a few days but it wound up starting up again this morning and went back to it's old tricks.

Occlusion + Full Screen Anti-Aliasing together causes problems. They're both GPU intensive operations, and even if you have an ATI card and are running Catalyst 10.8, you still suffer a pretty big performance drop even if you don't crash.

I'd never put the two on together, just for that reason. Occlusion doesn't add that much to the game, and on nVidia cards, it tends to disable FSAA. At least it did on my GTX 260 and GTX 465.

I owe you guys (and this thread) a great deal of thanks! I was really feeling sadness that I was going to be relegated to low-quality graphics any more just to continue playing, despite the nice computer setup.
I just need to decide which I like better, Occlusion or a lack of jaggedy edges

Ok so i tested for quite awhile and found that shadows are what seem to be causing the problem, ambient occ does not affect it. Ive turned off advanced shadows and know for sure turning them off altogether will fix it. Perhaps setting the basic shadows to mid may not cause crashing but I'm still finding the bottom setting for graphical quality and stability.

I had occasional crashes even with occlusion turned off, turning off shadows totally stopped them.
My crashes happened when zoning in or out, opening the enhancement window, bringing up the map, or just running down the street at random.
Interestingly though never inside of a mission.

I have not tried turning off fsaa so I will give that a shot and see if it lets me have shadows turned on.
A bit of extra info I am using a Nvidia gtx 260 and my wife is using a Gts 250 both with the latest drivers.