Pusan weirdness

[hedley]

I'm a big fan of ToW & have all of the products.
Just bought Korea & had the first real problem I have ever had with the series.

I think it may be mission specific but I am not sure (without playing the whole game through...)
This where the game grinds to a halt. Enemy troops in unresponsive parade ground order. Armour from this combat group has already attacked & been killed.


The mission is Pusan I am the US defending. 2 attacks come in - the first doesn't impact the PCs performance but as the 2nd attack comes from a different direction I got sporadic slow-downs. The slowdowns aren't relative to the amount of action/units on screen.
These were about 3 minutes long every 5 mins until the 2nd armor group was destroyed.
The engine continues running whilst the stalls occur - the events stutter & freeze & then jump to the positions they would have reached but without interim animations or sounds. Mouse cursor active, but not game.

The 2nd attack groups' infantry never moves from the spawn point. As I approach them they do not return fire or react much & the closer I get to them / killing them the more the game stalls. It will initially stall for 6 mins for every 2-3 of action, this gets worse the further I go towards this group, showing up to 5 seconds of game activity & playing back only 5 seconds of audio between freezes. Again taking minutes to 'recover' for the next stutter.
I can get to the menu & it responds perfectly - saves & settings etc all respond.
Tabbing out during a freeze can cause the whole PC to freeze for minutes. Korea.bin is taking the most CPU - but only <20% - not enough to make a difference to the system in normal circumstances. Temps do go up in line with high activity tho - CPU rising from 28 - 52C in this state
I have tried altering :-

CPU affinity for the exe
EAX
Compatibility
Nvidia game profile
'Run as Administrator'

- no change.

Playing the Pusan mission from Korean side ran through fine, no stutters or any odd behaviour - (but different map).
I did see 1 CTD on the very first try to run this mission for Korea tho (on Start Battle) but it has loaded perfectly previously (for the US) & since (the US & Koreans).

Save game (just before the stutters kill it for me.) 3.54mb .7z Maybe someone can spot whats happened (AI script buggy? Devs?)

[hedley]

I have confirmed a suspicion that any interaction on my part with the campaign strategic map causes CTD on loading tactical game (via 'start battle').
Or if the battle involves units present from previous action that once I try to load their battle (after OOB screen) the game will CTD.
I am able to load a battle only if the units were placed by the computer - ie the initial campaign deployment of the battle groups.

Disappointing.

Game version 1.2.0, log.lst & cppcrash dump samples appended.

Looks like I will just go back to ToW 1 & 2 - they always run fine for me...

[hedley]

Some more cppcrash dumps.

Games only CTDs when I interact with the campaign map, & then only on mode switch into game engine.

Or am I to assume that less than 6 months after release the devs no longer care about addressing problems with ToW3????

[Sneaksie]

I've loaded your save and encountered periodic slowdowns you describe, but they were not nearly as severe as in you case (several seconds max). Dodgy scripting maybe since these enemies weren't going anywhere and apparently the script was trying to find a way for them somewhere. Anyway, i've mopped them up and mission ended, here's the save after the battle if you need it.
CTDs are usually caused by running out of free video RAM. Try turn Compatibility mode option ON and Keep strategy map textures in memory OFF in games settings (strategy map textures are huge). I have all graphics settings on max, but i would turn high detail landscape and sky off in case of CTDs.
Another less likely CTD cause is a corrupted save or autosave (if the game crashed while creating it). Such save would crash when you load it.
Also, try deleting *.bin files in Maps folder subfolders, they are created when you load the map first time and theoretically can also be corrupted. Just delete all folders in Maps folder except _SpeedTree.

[hedley]

Decided to try the del *.bin in \maps first as this seemed the most logical common root. (& even the slowdowns/script issue I saw could be a direct result of map data corruption.)

So far everythings working now without issues. I wonder how the map data was corrupted but at least I know how to solve it now!

All ToW players owe you a debt of gratitude for keeping these games running!
Bolshoi spasibo Sneaksie.