1.03 Beta Fatal CTD's

[Omnius]

Doomtrader,
I tried out the public beta 1.03 version with the 1939 grand campaign. I have a top-of-the-line Apple 27" iMac running a Windows 7 partition, quad processors and 4 GB of RAM. Once again I played Switzerland as I wanted to ascertain if this patch fixed the fatal CTD problems I encountered with 1.02. I had one CTD on turn 41 but I was able to go back to my turn 41 save and rerun past that turn. I was flying along with no CTD's to turn 117, which is where my first 1.02 foray fatally crashed, and started to think that maybe this patch fixed my fatal CTD's and then on turn 119 my game came to a screeching halt. I tried rerunning the turn 119 autosave 5 times and each time it did a fatal CTD in the German turn. I had saved the game normally at turn 117 (I was saving on the first turn of each month) so I went back to that and ran the game one turn and then on turn 118 I got the same fatal CTD that I tried 5 times getting past with the autosave with no luck. I went back to the turn 117 save and tried 5 more times but every time it fatally crashed on turn 118.

I am attaching the first turn 119 CTD in this post, a copy of that turn 119 autosave. I will post the other two saves in the following posts.
Omnius

[Omnius]

Doomtrader,
Here is the second fatal CTD from turn 118. It is a copy of the autosave from turn 118 that I couldn't get past. I'm scratching my head wondering how I got to turn 119 in my first run when afterwards I couldn't get past turn 118. I certainly hope you can find the problem and fix it soon.
Omnius

[Omnius]

Doomtrader,
Here is the turn 117 save that does run through the turn for me but then fatally crashes. All of the crashes occur during the German turn. I'm hoping that between the three saves you'll find the problem. I'm certainly frustrated that I can't trust this game to work properly and just can't get interested in playing any but the two small scenarios with any confidence that I could finish. I'm also not happy I'm doing more beta testing than playing and enjoying the game I bought.

One positive note is that in 1.02 I experienced a whole lot of recoverable CTD's, a whole lot of them. In 1.03 I only experienced the one at turn 41 until I got stuck around turns 118-119. In that respect 1.03 was much better than 1.02. I can only hope that you'll see the problems I see in 1.03 that you didn't with 1.02.

Omnius

[doomtrader]

I'm checkin tyhe first save game at the moment.

BTW, are you playing full screen or windowed?

[Omnius]

Doomtrader,
I'm playing full screen. I saw some post before buying the game about not doing the windowed thing. Also just doing the default resolution of 1024x768 or whatever that default setting is. A bummer that with my nice wide screen I only get the old 4x3 aspect ratio, I'd love to be able to see the whole screen used as that would allow more hexes to be seen.

I've been running the game rather minimally as far as seeing what's going on. I set every reporting thing to zero seconds and turn off seeing naval battles and the special FoW black out. I set the FoW to one hex and every four turns when I save I take a little time turning off FoW to look around at what the AI's are up to. Then I resume 1 hex FoW before resuming.

I hope you can find the problem, this time having three files, one of which works for a turn. As you can imagine I'm skittish to start a game of the 1939 grand campaign if I can't get to turn 120. I found a fatal CTD problem in the 1.02 patch with the 1941 campaign after around the same number of turns. I did get to 1946 in the 1942 campaign.
Omnius

[Omnius]

Doomtrader,
I tried running the turn 117 save again and got through that turn with the same settings. I then switched to setting every action to be visible for 2 seconds and turned off FoW so I could hopefully see where the crash occurred. I made it slowly through turns 118 & 119 and was able to save on turn 120. It took a really long time to execute each turn, perhaps about 45 minutes or so. Now I'm puzzled and am going to retest turn 117 with the settings set back to FoW at 1 hex and zero seconds for viewing all actions.

I'm wondering about the FPS settings. I have left that at the default 60. I'm also wondering about RAM usage. The first time I played through those 119 turns in one session. The one time it crashed on turn 41 I quit the autorun.exe game/update/manual launch app and restarted from the desktop icon. I did likewise once I started crashing on turns 118 & 119. I'm going to try running the turn 117 save again the way I first did with FoW and zero second action viewing settings to see if I can go further than before. I'm wondering if I need to completely reboot my computer after running a lot of turns, wondering if somehow it's cumulatively kind of stuffing up my RAM. I was able to rerun turn 117 okay each time but turns 118 & 119 always crashed and those saves never worked.
Omnius

[Omnius]

doomtrader,
I was really glad that one of the developers, Ret44, is looking at the files to help find the reason why I'm getting these consistent fatal CTD's. I'm using this space to keep you apprised of what little tests I do to see what's wrong.

After a break I tried the turn 117 save with my preferred "speed" settings of 1 hex FoW and zero second action reporting. Sure enough turn 117 played fine but turn 118 it crashed again to CTD. I'll have to try something like leaving FoW on but setting all the action reporting to zero seconds and then maybe switch that around with FoW off but all action reporting at 2 seconds. The developer suggested trying switching up the naval combat reporting so I'll try that too.

Thanks for you all trying to figure this out and hopefully I'll have given you enough files and alternative setting attempts to figure it out and fix it.
Omnius

[Omnius]

Ret44, doomtrader,
I tried Ret44's suggestion to change the setting on the See Naval Actions feature and sure enough I was able to use the speed settings of 1 hex FoW and zero second action reporting to quickly speed through turns 118, 119 and 120. There were several German naval actions reporting and those must have been what triggered my fatal CTD crash. Looks like I'll be able to use my speed settings and quickly run through turns in my Swiss Test of teh Grand Campaign while only having to click through some naval actions every once in a while.

Thanks for the help. Back to trying to see what I can see in my test.
Omnius