Steam Theatre of War 1 - Crash to Desktop [SOLVED]

[xane]

I purchased ToW through Steam and cannot get the game to play for more than about 15 minutes before it crashes to desktop without an error message of any kind.

System: Windows XP SP3, Phenom II 560 BE, 2Gb RAM, AM3 mobo with built-in Radeon HD 4290.

I have tried various settings, lowering the video right down and turning off sound, to no avail.

Recommendation is to use Catalyst 9.2, but this is not compatible for my video card, I am currently using Catalyst 10.9 (10.10 has removed certain video resolutions for my graphics).

I've also checked the crash log (log.lst) and it crashes on various errors each time.

[Korsakov829]

Perhaps your CPU is heating up?

What are the most common errors from the crash log?

[xane]

Here's the most common error (from log.lst)

ERROR! DAMAGE_SYSTEM: cant read armor scale for <SKY>
*** FAILURE *** [SYSTEM] Main loop: Structure handled exception arized, see cppcrash
java.lang.RuntimeException: Structure handled exception arized, see cppcrash
	at com.maddox.core.TTFont.OutputClip(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.core.TTFont.outputClip(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.core.GUICanvas.draw(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.gwindow.GWindow.draw(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.gwindow.GWindow.draw(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.gwindow.GWindow.draw(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.bc.gui.xmlskin.TextGuiItem.onDraw(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.bc.gui.xmlskin.BaseRenderGuiItem.draw(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.bc.gui.xmlskin.CounterGuiItem.onDraw(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.bc.gui.xmlskin.BaseRenderGuiItem.draw(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.bc.gui.xmlskin.BaseRenderGuiItem.draw(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.bc.gui.ingame_CM.minimap.MinimapWindow.drawDistanceToTarget(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.bc.gui.ingame_CM.minimap.MinimapWindow.render(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.gwindow.GWindow.doRender(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.gwindow.GWindow.doChildrensRender(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.gwindow.GWindow.doRender(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.gwindow.GWindow.doChildrensRender(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.gwindow.GWindow.doRender(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.gwindow.GWindowRoot.doRender(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.gwindow.GWindowManager.doRender(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.ww.core.WWGUIWindowManager$_Render.render(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.core.Renders.doPaint(Unknown Source)
	at com.maddox.core.Renders.paint(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.ww.game.MainWin3D.checkFocus(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.ww.game.MainWin3D.loopApp(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.ww.game.Main.exec(Unknown Source)
	at com.ic.ww.game.GameWin3D.main(Unknown Source)

[Korsakov829]

ERROR! DAMAGE_SYSTEM: cant read armor scale for <SKY>
Well that seems rather odd. Perhaps a file is corrupt (missing, edited) or your system is incompatable. XP and Windows 7 don't work well with modern games.

Send a detailed report of all your PC specs including information from DirectX, the log reports, a list of all file names in your game folder, to support@1cpublishing.eu.

If they don't help, change the game settings around, try it. If that doesn't work reinstall.

[Sneaksie]

Armor setting for sky is not relevant to crashes)
Does it always complain about fonts or about different resources each time? How much of your 2GB ram is dedicated to built-in video card?
I'm thinking of some incompatibility between video driver and the game. Try to turn off Catalyst AI, turn off high sky detail and high landscape detail in the game. If it doesn't help, turn the shadows off completely, they use some funky OpenGL technique AFAIK.

[xane]

I did some investigation into the ATI Catalyst drivers and found out that OpenGL has been broken since version 10.4, this seems to have affected a lot of older games including ToW. I haven't been following Catalyst development for some time after my previous ATI card broke and I moved to nVidia.

Because the HD 4290 is relatively new it is unlikely to be fully supported and I had trouble rolling back to 10.4 anyway, but there are instructions to isolate and extract the ATI OpenGL driver (atioglxx.dll) from the Catalyst 10.4 release package and copy it to the ToW directory, where it should be picked up.

Instructions can be found here:
http://forums.amd.com/game/messagevi...hreadid=139981

I originally tried this method with the driver from the 9.2 package and it refused to work at all, but this indicates that the driver is being picked up, now with the driver from 10.4 it ran a lot longer without crashing the first time I tried it, I need to play some more to prove it.

[xane]

I played the game for over an hour and no crash, so that is the solution.

Briefly
* download the Catalyst 10.4 release
* use 7-zip to extract the file atioglxx.dl_ from the release .exe
* use expand in a DOS box to uncompress atioglxx.dl_ to atioglxx.dll
* copy atioglxx.dll to ToW folder (SteamApps\common\theatre of war)

[Sneaksie]

Thanks for finding a solution for Ati users!