Computer freeze

[george456]

Hello. I think I may have posted my first post in the wrong forums, so I am going to repost it here. I am sorry for the double post.

I have some technical problem running the game, so I registered to seek help solving the issue.

I have bought the full game pack with all the expansions a few months ago. I really like the game, but It seems it has developed a serious crashing problem. At first the game run smoothly and I did play it for about 3 days for about 3 hours each day. No problems. But then the game froze bad time. Not even crash to desktop, It was a proper computer freeze, where screen goes black and nothing short of hard reset button works.

I have been looking for a solution back then and saw that there is a patch comming out soon, so I have shelved the game and waited if the patch is going to solve the issue. Sadly I had no such luck. Yesterday I have checked the game for updates and it downloaded a new patch (1.7.0.16). After the patch I have started a fresh game, not an old save, but in under 5 minutes of gameplay the game froze again. I am reluctant to go and try different settings in options and or windows, since every time it freezes I have to hard reset the computer.

my specs:
Win 7 Proffesional
Amd Athlon 64 dual core
Ati Radeon HD 6870 ( 1GB video RAM)
4 GB Corsair RAM

Obviously I don't have any crash reports because of the nature of the crash.


I really hope this is simply some sort of setting issue, since I very much like the game.
Thank you in advance.

[Bingeling]

Do you run other games with no issues?

I am thinking in a line that ends with looking for a memory test.

[george456]

Every other game and program runs fine. To be honest this is the first time I actually saw complete lockup on the win 7. It used to be quite common on the old win 98 and win xp. I have a very good CPU cooler, it is almost impossible for the CPU to overheat, what with only 2 cores and so on. The memory is about a year old. I am at a loss, that's why I came here looking for help.

[george456]

I just did a full reinstall of the game, into the default folder. Made sure I deleted the old folder completely. Tried to run in win xp compatibility mode. The game ran for around 7 minutes and then the whole computer froze again.

[Dracus]

make sure your flash player is upt to date.

[george456]

I have updated the flash player and tested again. The game froze again in under 5 min. Its weird, when I leave it paused and just look around while pause, the game seems to run fine, untill I unpause. Is there some way to enable debug mode ar start writing some sort of log file, or maybe run the game in windowed mode? Right now it just insta-kills my PC.

[george456]

I have successfully ran a game for 2 hours straight. Dwarf galaxy with 100 solar systems, 4x4 sectors, 4 opponents, minimal video settings.

It seems with only 4GB system RAM I can run only bare minimum galaxy.
the strange this is even on default medium galaxy 8x8 sectors the game still only take 700 MB in RAM. 4GB should be more than enough for the game. When I was monitoring the default game, I still had over 1 GB free ram and still the PC crashed.

[george456]

Previous save crashed pretty much instantly after I un-paused it this morning.

[thisisnotanick]

Are you running the game with administrator privileges?

You shouldnt have to run it in XP compatibility mode I think, Im running Win7 64bit and it works with no compatibility mode. I have to run it as administrator though or else it crashes.

[Darkspire]

Just a thought but you might need more memory unfortunately. If memory serves you really need a bare minimum of 2gig for Win7 to perform without problems. I know you have 4gig but you have to take the 2gig off for Win7 then whatever memory your GFX card has. So a ballpark figure would be 2gig (Win7)+1gig(GFX card) leaves you with about a gig left. Memory isnt that costly these days and for Win7 I would always say a minimum of 8gig for gaming.

Darkspire

[george456]

Where are the days when I could carry around a full game on a 1.44 MB floppy. My first PC had 512 KB RAM and 34 MB HDD. I didn't know what to put on it, I had so much space.
I decided to shelve the game for a few more months, until I upgrade the motherboard and few other things.

[Darkspire]

ORIGINAL: george456

Where are the days when I could carry around a full game on a 1.44 MB floppy. My first PC had 512 KB RAM and 34 MB HDD. I didn't know what to put on it, I had so much space.
I decided to shelve the game for a few more months, until I upgrade the motherboard and few other things.

My first was a Sinclair ZX80, 512kb?? LMAO I had about 4-5kb on that if memory serves [:D]

Darkspire