Game freezes

[rickyoswald]

Hi all, I've recently purchased IL-2 over steam and have been enjoying it but the game keeps crashing. It is quite a random occurance, it has happened in flight (fustratingly I have not yet completed a campaign mission because of it!) and even in the menu (I was outfitting a plane for a quick mission). The game freezes and after a brief duration seems to put itself into windowed mode displaying a solid grey screen and the vista "This program has stopped responding" message displays, giving me options to wait or terminate the program.
Intel C2D E4600 (OCed @ 3.0ghz)
2x1GB GeIL PC-6400 (800mhz, 4-4-4-12)
Zotec GeForce 8800GT
EVGA 650i Ultra motherboard

I've got around 30 games installed both old and new and do not experience problems with any others. I've also tried applying the 4.08m patch.

[rickyoswald]

Oh another thing I forgot to note. A small icon appears near the clock (bottom right) after the crash of an exclamation mark in a yellow triangle, although I have a suspicion this is a Vista warning that the colour scheeme has been changed to basic which often happens when you launch a game - I do not notice any difference in the colours after the crash despite the icon remaining until I reset. I cannot click or right click this icon and there is no popup when I hover the mouse over it.

[IceFire]

Does the error message that pops up from the yellow triangle say that a display driver has crashed or stopped responding or something along those lines?

[Feuerfalke]

Yes, IceFire, that just sounds like it.

The typical nvlddmkm error:
"Driver has stopped responding but has been restarted"


If you just upgraded your RAM, you may be lucky and return it and get some other you won't have problems with. If you made another change, try to reverse that. If it just came out of the blue, it's not easy to fix. Apparently it's a memory-addressing bug that is in Vista (and of course in Win7, too).
Usually it won't be a problem, as error-correction can make up for it, but if you use overclocked hardware, have power-problems or driver conflicts, the error might occur more often. I noticed that with 64bit Vista/win7 this problem occurs a lot more often, if you use more than 4 GB of RAM. But though the nvlddmkm-file is an nVidia file, the same problem occurs with ATI, too.

You can try to lower frequencies or get them more tuned to each other, but there is no easy fix for this.

[rickyoswald]

No such nvlddmkm error occurs, just the default program has stopped responding. I did see others with the driver problems and have heard that a driver rollback can fix it for most. I am reluctant to lay it down to this however, as I said I have no problems with any other games - I am a computer games programmer myself so I run plenty of graphically intensive programs and play dozens of games on a regular basis.
The only recent upgrade (with 18 months) is a new HDD I bought just after Christmas, have had no issues with it in other areas. It's Vista32 and as stated, just 2GB ram.
When you talk of frequencies, do you refer to ram timing ratios? I beleive they are 1:1 but it was a long time ago that I performed the overclock. The overclock is purely BIOS overclock, although the GFX card is factory overclocked.

I have had a look through the graphics options as I noticed some people talking about issues with OpenGL - I've switched over to DirectX now but have not had a chance to test it, I'm writing up a report and tidying up some code ready for a deadline tommorow but hopefully I will get to play a little after midnight.

[Feuerfalke]

Are you sure you have the error-reporting enabled. If not, it will simply quit with a black screen. If there is no message, you can still check the event manager. Just open the taskbar and type event viewer into search. It will bring up the link and you can check it. Under "Windows-Protocolls" you can see if there was a problem reported when the game crashed. If there are only informations and no critical reports posted, you have the protocol-client disabled.

By overclocking I mean custom frequencies you changed in the BIOS or Tuning-utilities. If you are running non-standard frequencies, your PC will more likely produce these errors, but of course other errors will occur, too, if you overclocked too much or cooling is inadequate.

Hope we can solve this for you. ~S!~

[Billy885]

Check the temp of your video card the next time you play the game.

[rickyoswald]

Well, as I said, my OC is completely stable. I've been running it for 18 months now and I don't get issues in any game (i.e. FarCry 2 nearly maxed out, also ran stress tests when I first OCed).

Not sure if error reporting has been disabled, but I do get an error message -as described- just not a very informative one.

In any case, switching to DirectX has solved the problem so I assume the issue was the same as others were having with OpenGL. Most said a driver rollback cured the problem in that case.

But a new problem has arisen - I suck balls at the game! Since I had so many take-off attempts due to the game crashing I can now take-off pretty well but I've yet to finish my first campaign mission (flying the IL-2 to take out a small convoy). The first time round, the first attack run took out the whole convoy and we just headed home, but I crashed on landing :|
Since then, it's taken several runs to take down the convoy and eventually enemy fighters are upon us and the annihilate us every time! The other two IL-2s flying with me don't seem to engage in a dogfight, the just fly straight and level to get picked off while screaming for help while I try and chase these nimble fighters around at 350m and often end up crashing into the trees.

I don't think any level of computer maintenance will help me with that :(

[Feuerfalke]

This sounds so familiar. ;)


No, I fear that a computer-guru won't help. We've all been there and it's just practice that will get you out of there. Plus setting up joystick and input curves, maybe. But judging situations, situational awareness and knowing your own plane and others are the keys for mastering these situations. And these come mostly with experience, your own, or those you read and salvage for your own tactics. ;)