Crashing daily

I'm having very similar problems. I have practically no problem elsewhere in the game, but the trials cause frequent crashes, *especially* Lambda. The crashes happen most often:

(1) Right when I first load in.

(2) When I have to move from one part of a map to another (e.g. from the courtyard into the warehouse in Lambda) - which may be why I have so much more problem with Lambda.

(3) Right at the beginning of the prisoner escape in BAF.

Sometimes it's just "wham" - nearly instant crash to desktop with either no message at all or "CoH has encountered a problem and stopped working."

Sometimes it locks up (others were describing as the 'eternal blue circle') - I've got to start task manager and kill the game to get free. This type frequently displays a message about how it thinks a particular file is corrupt and asks me to run the patcher (which I do, and, obviously, no effects). The corrupt files are all graphics textures (one time it was "Big Boots" - and I crashes right as the cutscene with Maurauder popped up; another time it was something about "Grassy courtyard" right as I first loaded into Lamba - which was odd because I don't think I've ever seen grass in that trial...).

Very occasionally I'll get the "send us an error report" popup - I fill it out when I do. But most of the time it's not appearing.

With the regular game and BAF I can run the game with everything (i.e. Water Quality, Shadows, etc.) set to High or better. I've tried lowering the settings (reduce all the Ultra mode stuff to off, and scale the 3D graphics to about 1000 x 600 or lower). Doesn't seem to reduce the frequency of crashes for BAF (which are fairly rare), but it *does* seem to help with Lambda (the crashes are still frequent, but that's what tends to limit them to 'transitions' in the trial rather than just random crashes in the middle of a map).

Has anyone checked their Event Viewer to see if anything is getting reported there when CoH crashes?

Same here, Symptoms include:

1. Screen "flashing" when I open up a UI element
2. locks up if I screenshot after flashing starts
3. Eventually locks up (not option to send crash log) usually on next zoning
4. Happens much quicker if in Praetoria and/or have ultra-shadows and/or ambient occlusion on (and I'm running a GTX460 so it should be fine)
5. I also very occasionally get the "corrupt XXX" message (and forcing a verify find/fixes nothing)
I don't see anything out of place in the event viewer

Have had this since GR beta, posted, /bugged it, even made youtube videos and posed link to it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJtkMGqlCuc

I have been experiencing several different types of crashes and hangs:

• I get a sound loop and the game tells me that CoH is going to crash, asking whether I want to continue. It crashes or hangs no matter what I say.
• The game says it's crashing and asks me to say what it was doing, which it sends to NCsoft.
• The game crashes and Windows sends a report to Microsoft.
• I get a ".pigg" corrupt message and the game crashes.
• The game exits out to the desktop instantly.
• The game hangs. The menu key doesn't work. I press Ctrl-Alt-Del and use Task Manager to kill it.

New nVidia drivers don't make any difference. I just got a crash at the end of Lambda (the first and only thing I did in the session, besides wait around in Pocket D): got the reward, then clicked Exit and the game crashed (Windows sent a report to Microsoft).

My crashes seem to fall into 3 categories at the moment, and can happen sporadically, or regularly.

Crash type 1

Irrespective of the reason, a pop up screen will appear advising me that the game "would have crashed" and giving me the option to exit, contiue and to send details of what I was doing at the time.
This type of crash will also usually make itself known through "sound looping".
Sadly, I do not give more information in the pop up screen because typing "I was doing an ITF, or I was trying to pawn an AV" wont particulary help the dev team - Im also pretty peed off when it happens and any comments I make would probably result in me being barred from the game!

Crash type 2

BOOM, and it was gone - no warning, no pop up screens - usuall a grey screen and total closure of the program.
This usually happens when rezoning after pressing the "exit" button at the end of a BAF when zoning back to Pocket D.
I also get this regularly and in EXACTLY THE SAME PLACE when jumping through the Peregrine Island map from the entry point through to portal court.

Crash type 3

The well loved mapserver disco - program siezes and I have no option but to "X" out and log back in again.

Some of these crashes occasionally refer to a "corrupt pigg file" which I find amusing, since I didnt corrupt it, I no longer have vidiot maps overlays etc as I thought that maybe VMaps was causing the problem and removed the program and clean installed COH again. As to why a pigg file should corrupt must be COH program driven.

Irrespective of the type of crash, I am reluctant to load further programs to help send data to NCSoft. Sadly I did this for Ghost Raptor a couple of years back when IP issues were a problem and I was invited to provide input to help solve the problem, and, as is always the way with reporting bugs etc, the feedback from NCSoft is zero. Ghost Raptor promised me then a solution to my particular problem and didnt even have the common courteousy to get back to me. I am therefore not prepared to waste more time providing such information for no reply, when I could be using the time providing such information more constructively in shouting at my monitor, and logging back in on the hope that I reenter before the BAF is finished and at least getting some of the merits I have missed.

Sorry I cant/wont be of more help, but at least you know what kind of crashes I get, and why I wont provide you with more information. Until NCSoft changes how bug reporting , resolution and keeping those informed changes, I will pay my subscription and let you guys figure it out.

Sorry!

Crashed 3 times last night just working on my base .

Hopefully today things will be better but I did notice during the Sutter TF on Virtue last night several moments of long lag during the TF. Man I need a new computer

Maybe someone would like to make a suggestion to my related post?

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=258829

And as an "after-post",

I played for 4 or 5 hours last night - Lambdas & MOBAFs, and crashed 8 times, only on 2 occasions was I able to post a comment if wished, 2 times I suffered sound loop crashes with no comment screen, and 4 zone crashes straight to desktop.

I'm not sure why everybody tries so hard to defend Alienware, or ignores any hardware-related issues they're seeing because "it's an Alienware!"

My company used to distribute Alienware laptops as part of our mobile solution, but their customer service was awful and we were having issues with about 1 in every 3 laptops we ordered.

Since the company I work for is not a game developer, and our main laptop requirement is that they need two hard drives, I made a strong case for switching to Dell's "mobile workstation" laptops. In the two years since, we've had problems with one machine, and the price, customer service and available options have been far superior to what Alienware offered.

Would I buy a Dell laptop as a gaming machine? Probably not. But I sure as heck wouldn't buy an Alienware, based entirely on my own experience with them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

"Alienware is an American computer hardware company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Dell, Inc"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alienware

I have no other software related problems.

Maya works fine.

Lightwave works fine.

Game engines for game development work fine.

Dragon Age and Mass Effect work fine.

Gigs of video recording works fine.

In other words, very ram/cpu intensive programs run like silk on my computer.

All except CoH since i20.

And hmm... oh ya! hundreds of other people are experiencing CoH crashing too!

That tells me it's a specific piece of software issue. (CoH i20)

...

How many of those applications use OpenGL? Have you tried the Unigene demo in OpenGL mode?

http://unigine.com/download/

Tonight I did a number of trials, and after each run I checked the memory usage of CoH, and it seemed consistent that when doing BAF my memory usage increased around 0.1 GB per run, and I crashed when reaching 1.5-1.6. So after around 5 BAF trials I crashed.
Going to character select screen released the memory (to avoid crashing).

The error codes (if any) when crashing changed from time to time, but corrupt pigg file was one of them.

Well, it's looking like a video card problem in my case. The Cuda - GPU settings in the Nvidia control panel when disabled make it so the game can recover when it stalls a bit, whereas when enabled, get a good hard crash. Nvidia drivers released on the 18th at least make it so we can get some info now. The ram is fine. Memory test attests to that. Going to test a bit more.. and take it from there.

Update: well.. forget that.. worked for awhile.. but turned out to be shortlived like all the other tests.. gonna play on the intel mac tower, windows side for awhile.. just a good gald darned thing we have so many computers! :P

Update: been playing today for 2 hours so far on Alienware without crashing. Hubby ran burn tests and everything checks out. Computer, video card, ram all passed. Only thing different today is reinstallation of drivers with Nvidia ones being installed after Intel ones, otherwise Intel ones overwrite the Nvidia sound ones. Note: game has hung 3 x so far but recovered without crashing.. Fingers crossed.

Update: managed 4 hours, 6 hangs and recovers, before two hard crashes and switching back to intel mac/windows side.. not a bad day. Guess waiting for next driver update as hardware is good. Or may switch to Linux.

Update:

Conclusion based on so much testing is it's a driver/openGL issue. We've tried multiple driver configurations each with differing results.

We've researched online and found other people having the same issues with different games, not just CoH.

We've ran every hardware test and passed.

Whatever changed at i20, something is not completely copacetic with available drivers. Hopefully Intel, Nvidia, Dell and CoH will get everything in sync at some point like it was before i20.

Current drivers are working ok. Hangs in CoH usually recover and crashes only happen usually after about 4 hours, so it is playable on my favourite gaming machine.