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Demise, hanging.

Zaknafein
posted 02-20-2001 11:43 PM
Has anyone else had the game just 'hang' on them? I've experienced this in the last 3 weeks or so. I know that occasionally, the game will pause for anywhere up to 10 seconds, then restart. Now when I experience that behaviour, instead of resuming, it hangs. I have to ctl-alt-del, to 'End Task' the Demise program. This happened with my old system, but is also now happening with my new system. It's getting more than a little annoying.

Any ideas (apart from re-installing the game)?


rc
posted 02-21-2001 12:00 AM
i don't have any ideas on a fix, but i do experience the same thing. Doesn't seem to matter if my puter has been on for days, or if i just fired it up. All action freezes, kinda like a screen shot, then up to 20 seconds later, it picks up where it left off. Doesn't necessarily happen in the large room s, either. Nor does it seem to matter where i'm at in the dungeon. I just wait patiently, yeah right,

and then continue on.


Frostbite
posted 02-21-2001 01:04 AM
same thing here, occasionally hangs for about 5 secs then resumes normally... now played about 70 hours on w2000 and not a single fatal crash, so got rid of them at least...


mel
posted 02-21-2001 01:36 AM
Same here. Never even near 20 sec thgough, luckily



Panthera
posted 02-21-2001 02:12 AM
Hangs once in a while anywhere from 5 sec to several minutes with no apparent reason. I have lots of free diskspace, 256 MB RAM in a PIII 550 MHz and a 32 MB ATI video card. Very irritating!!! Just another of those bugs we probably have to live with as AE seems to have forgotten about Demise. All those bug-reports and nobody in AE cares. What I can't figure out is why they don't release the code, so somebody who cares can patch up the work they left unfinished and obviously don't want to work on anymore



Arkeld
posted 02-21-2001 03:16 AM
Even IF they release the code I doubt somebody will succeed in cleaning out that kind of bugs unless they want to work on that full-time. I have not had anything like you describe happen to me but I do get occasional crashes straight to the desktop.


Vorlin
posted 02-21-2001 03:58 AM
I get it like Panthera described: anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes. I've walked away from keyboard, fixed lunch, come back, started eating, and then suddenly action resumes. I figure it's either a cleanup routine that is -really- non-optimal or possibly some problem with the random item placement algorithm. It doesn't involve disk access, and changing from an 8 meg graphics card to a 16 meg one didn't effect it one way or another.


Morek
posted 02-21-2001 04:28 AM
Humm... I sincerely think that this should be on the technical board. Beam us up Dogg

Well i can think of two possible solutions, if they will work i canīt say. First some info... I did have this some time ago, but i donīt have it anymore... First solution try disabling all sound and see if it stops. (That was my case) More on this later. Second see if the hard disk light is blinking or something when those crashes occur. Perhaps there is another program in the background or some windowze stuff going on and crashing Demise. More about the sound. Creative labs being smart, developed a very low cost board for countries like mine. The boards are good, but cheap

I have a SoundBlaster 16 PCI (I think it is the better board from them that donīt have the emu10k chip)There is a part in the control panel that allowed me to select the amount of memory that would be disponible for the sound samples (1, 2, 4 and 8 Mb i think...) I lowered it a bit and this kind of solved. (PS.: This is with 128MB ram... go figures). If someone tries and it solves his problem please post so i can pinpoint better this stuff. Thanks. PS.: I remembered some things. Perhaps this has something to do with the PCI and AGP wait states... But let us try everything else first



Panthera
posted 02-21-2001 05:22 AM
I'll give the sound a pinch and see what happens.


Foucter
posted 02-21-2001 07:31 AM
Also if you have Norton's Utils; clean out the protected deleted files every so often in the recycle bin. Seems to help, so the game doesn't crash, hang, etc., as much.


Xeider_Kwinn/
posted 02-21-2001 07:38 AM
I had this problem when my computer was running at full speed. After a bad crash, and losing my video card, I have not had this problem. It may have something to do with how the game interacts with your video driver. just a thought


Dogg of Demise
posted 02-21-2001 09:23 AM
How BIG is your character file getting. The char file bloat can cause HUGE hangs and crashes.


ulsterjones
posted 02-21-2001 12:35 PM
The only time I had this problem was when I changed my FSB speed from 105 to 106. Obviously the system became unstable, so I put it back to 105. Works fine now.


TheDuke
posted 02-21-2001 02:34 PM
When it hangs for couple secs/mins... does it also LOOP music/sound? My sound loops so I press reset, never tried waiting for a couple of minutes though... but as the sound loops I just assumes it's complete stuck anyway.


Panthera
posted 02-21-2001 11:27 PM
When it hangs, it's like somebody in a bad b-movie yelled FREEZE - everything just stops, including sound. I've tried fiddling with the sound, but it didn't help. Btw my char file is quite small, about 500kb. It's just one of those mysteriously hangs that I'll attribute to bad coding, just like the error message I get more often than not when going under water. This one doesn't hang the system, but a window appears with an error and I just click OK. Annoying though.


Frostbite
posted 02-22-2001 01:29 AM
hmm. no hanging when using software renderer here, when using voodoo3 hanging starts happening again. char file 950kb now. also tried to turn off all sounds, no difference


Zaknafein
posted 02-22-2001 07:59 PM
My character file is 38kb, so, I don't think that's the problem. I've also noticed that since I changed motherboard/cpu (Duron 800), I've noticed the sound effects, gradually become distorted. I have to go into the Audio options, uncheck/recheck the Special effects, then the sound is ok again... for a little while. I don't believe it the game, as I never had the problem with the old system.
Just another annoyance. I'll probably have to remove/reinstall the sound drivers, and maybe other drivers as well... I just couldn't be bothered.


Kevin
posted 02-23-2001 08:18 PM
This is about the only thing that I have problems with. My system will freeze, but no matter how long I wait, it never resumes... and I can't even use ctrl-alt-del cause the keyboard is locked out. So I power down and when I run scan disc there is always an error. I sometimes can tell when it will happen, but usually not in time to exit and shut down. It seems to do this when I'm in certain parts of the dungeon (the parts I would like to spend more time in ).

My trouble spots are: Level 17 - the whole level! Level 18 - NE area Level 19 - NE area Level 20 - NE area Level 24 - Hell room Level 26 - Ogre Lord room (SW) Level 29 - Graveyard It will not necessarily lock up while I am in those areas. For instance, I often go through the large room on 18 down to 20 for a quick path down. I will then have things lock up when I am down near the Lead Murderer area... Or if I run through the Hell Room, it will lock up there or maybe not until I am in a different area. But if I go to those areas without running through the problem spots (I skip the NE area of 18-20 or the Hell Room) it won't freeze on me. I have tried running in various graphics modes, resolutions, sound setting, etc, etc, etc... but nothing seems to help.


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