Siwa Oasis Crash

[Athoram]

It's a rather strange problem, so I don't really expect anyone to know a fix for it. But I thought I'd try anyway.

 

The issue is, that every time I load Siwa Oasis my computer crashes approximately 5 to 10 seconds in, as in stops responding completely and a hard reboot is required. It's only this map, and every version I've tried acts exactly the same way. Stock, stopwatch, you name it. Has been this way since I reinstalled the game a few months back, though it has worked on this computer before.

 

Another issue I have, which others seem to get as well, is that the game randomly crashes every once in a while but won't lock up the computer. I thought I'd mention it in case it's related, but I don't really care about that one as it's not really common.

 

There is one fault I'm aware of hardware wise with this computer. And that's the video card. One of the ram modules has a problem in it, and it causes strange things to happen when I approach the 150mb mark. Under that mark, everything is just dandy for any game I happen to throw at it. Though, in most games it's just in the form of graphical tearing since it starts rewriting the location of pixels, but won't actually crash. Also, given how dated this game is.. I assume it doesn't use nearly that much video ram.

 

Temperatures remain fine during normal gameplay and when it crashes, power is stable on this system, and OS maintenance is kept up with.. I also strip processes and services aside from an antivirus and firewall before playing to rule out any conflicts.

 

I've tried reinstalling the game, playing on 2.55, 2.60, and 2.60b with the same results. PunkBuster is also updated and I've tried the PK3 cleaner you guys have.

 

Specs for this system are as follows:

Athlon XP 2400+ (2ghz single core)

768MB DDR RAM

GeforceFX 5500 256MB 8x AGP

Windows XP

 

Sure, it's a little dated. But it could be worse.

 

I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on resolving this.

-Athoram

[Pepperonipizza]

This might seem like an automatically-generated-didn't-read response, but are all your drivers up-to-date? I'm also assuming that this happens on every server you play on?

 

Maybe it's worth deactivating your graphics card to see whether the problem lies there? (I only suggest this since the crash always seems to happen as oasis)

[Athoram]

This might seem like an automatically-generated-didn't-read response, but are all your drivers up-to-date? I'm also assuming that this happens on every server you play on?

 

Maybe it's worth deactivating your graphics card to see whether the problem lies there? (I only suggest this since the crash always seems to happen as oasis)

 

 

Drivers are as up to date as they can be. Nvidia no longer makes drivers for this card. And I'm using a version below the latest because it causes frame buffer issues with this particular card.

 

It is every server. Any version of Siwa Oasis hosted anywhere. It can be reproduced without fail 100% of the time. If I just start the game, after playing for hours, doesn't matter. Siwa Oasis starts, renders the map, and after 5 to 10 seconds, hard crash.

 

Testing the card itself is a problem.. As I don't have onboard video and this is the only AGP card I have. However, I have tried limiting hardware acceleration, with the same results.

 

Though.. your post reminded me that I haven't checked the logs for the crashes.. Heh. And it does generate a few before it goes down. nvoglnt.dll (Nvidia opengl driver), the dll layer, and an odd blank one go with the program itself.. Will look into these and see if it sheds any light on it.

 

I appreciate your help.

-Athoram

[Vanaraud]

Maybe \com_hunkmegs 156 or 192

[Pepperonipizza]

If you find the cause/a solution please post it here, I'm quite curious

[Athoram]

Maybe \com_hunkmegs 156 or 192

 

I gave that a shot. The game defaulted to 156. I tried switching to 192 and 128. Oddly today, with both of those and after going back to the default of 156, the computer itself didn't crash. But the game did in the same fashion. It simply stopped processing, the graphic fragments left on the screen were like the last moment of a tape running out. Crash reports for the first one referenced opengl32.dll. And the second two tries only referenced et.exe.

 

Thanks.

-Athoram

[Athoram]

Resolved!

 

The issue was caused by the failing of the AGP Bus on my motherboard. Disabling various AGP features improved performance a bit with each one. However, that wasn't the only thing was failing on it. As the card began to run better, more issues arose with the motherboard. The motherboard is now extremely unstable, to the point where it might as well be dead. It'll occasionally stop reading one of the ram chips, sometimes the hard drives, and it no longer runs at all if the temperature is too low. My only theory now is that it may contain a short somewhere that I can't see by looking at the board.. Heating it up probably bridges that.

 

But eh, the board was 10 years old, ish. And it ran near constantly, as well as moving about the country with me. So I can't complain about the quality of it. It served me well through the years. Using a laptop now.. Will find out if I can run ET on this bad boy. If not, I'll see you guys when I get my hands on a new motherboard. Thanks for all the help you guys offered.

 

-Athoram