Freeze at the beginning of HQ plot (POSSIBLE SPOILER) - Workaround found.

[fafner2000]

Hello,

After months I have at last finished the hub plot, only to get a freeze in 1 of the first HQ plot missions. After the Yaki raid on Bala Gi's station, I was sent in Ocracoke’s Storm to find "something useful". Well, of course there is that suspicious station. There are also a handful of small ships that get destroyed rather easily... except that when I do the game freezes every time. I tried 3 times in a row with the same results, and a few other times with variants such as:
- "Finding" the station before or after destroying all the ships. Nope, still freezes.
- Leaving at least 1 ship intact. Nice workaround, I was proud of myself, except that the following mission is impossible to do without destroying that last ship. Have you tried instructing a ship to clear a mine field without killing the bad guys? Yep, the AI blows a fuse (as do I)
- Trying under GNU/Linux (initially I was playing under Windows 7). Nice to have a game that behaves the same way whatever the system, even with the bugs

At this point I am rather stuck, I would appreciate if someone had a clue. You can download here a save where you have to report back after destroying the raiding Yaki, in case you need it (just follow the arrows, as always).


Oh, and here is the technical blah blah
- Steam X3TC 3.2c 2012 English
- Game is not modified. It had been in the past, so to make sure I deleted all local content (Reunion, TC and AP) and reinstalled TC alone from scratch. I don't think the modified content made it into the save games because I never saved while it was modified (but who knows, still, the saved game starts on vanilla).
- Started game as Terran Defender.
- DxDiag report is here.

[Alan Phipps]

Is the freeze always at the point of destroying the ships, or is it more at a fixed time after loading your save whatever you are then doing?

I ask because a fixed time (after a load) freeze is usually a result of having one of your traders on Manual Trade Command dock at a station and try to do a trade under certain infrequent circumstances. The remedy there is to stop all manual traders before the freeze happens.

Random DxDiag observations.
Why is your cpu under-clocked? Is it unstable at native clockspeed?
You can update to AMD Catalyst 13.4 at the AMD update site.
You can update your RealTek sound chipset driver to the RealTek Win7 x64 HD Audio codec 2.71 at the RealTek update site - and lose that old default/generic Microsoft driver.
Keep that Hard Drive defragged if not an SSD and maybe clear some more free space on it too.

[fafner2000]

Is the freeze always at the point of destroying the ships, or is it more at a fixed time after loading your save whatever you are then doing?

Yes, *exactly* when the last ship blows up. I often had a nice frozen view on the explosion if it happened to be on front on me, to help me be patient waiting for several minutes before killing the game Sorry for not being explicit on this.

I ask because a fixed time (after a load) freeze is usually a result of having one of your traders on Manual Trade Command dock at a station and try to do a trade under certain infrequent circumstances. The remedy there is to stop all manual traders before the freeze happens.

Yes, I had seen about that while searching. I have no manual trade under way, in fact I barely used it at all at the beginning of the game, so I assume that even if I had forgotten one it should be over since then.

Why is your cpu under-clocked? Is it unstable at native clockspeed?

My CPU is underclocked?
*run at the system property page*
Hmmm, looks like it is, I will have to investigate that.

You can update to AMD Catalyst 13.4 at the AMD update site.
You can update your RealTek sound chipset driver to the RealTek Win7 x64 HD Audio codec 2.71 at the RealTek update site - and lose that old default/generic Microsoft driver.

Will try to upgrade the video drivers. Since the freeze occurs under GNU/Linux as well I don't expect to fix that, but it certainly can't hurt.

[fafner2000]

Upgrading the video drivers didn't change a thing. I can confirm that the game froze again right when the last ship exploded. I even had some kind of "half frame" with my right-left reticle showing the target about to explode with the Starbust Shockwave right in its face and its hull still around 75%, but no target stats on the lower part of the screen. No screenshot, didn't find a way to coerce a frozen program to do a screnshot

About the underclock thing... I found how to configure it but it was at 100%, so it shouldn't be at what it looks like 90% . Probably Windows decided that it was my best interest to have my CPU underclock and don't I dare question its decisions Anyway I don't expect that to cause troubles, it must be that way since 6 months already and I hadn't noticed it

[Alan Phipps]

Firstly I can play on normally from that save, and go on to the destroy the minefield phase. However, there is probably still something wrong with your game.

That save at 55 MB is more than twice the size of even very busy sector saves for my (long-term) vanilla X3TC game. I suspect you either have a sector somewhere stuffed with surplus ships or you have an invulnerable ship somewhere with every military ship from the surrounding sectors pounding it continually to no avail. That is stressing your system more than it does mine, I would suspect, which is why I can play through the plot.

You need to check through your game universe as to why your saves are so big.

Anyway, I would update your sound driver as well.

[fafner2000]

On my side the save file is 15 Mb, I just connected to my server to check it. However, it does climb up to 55 Mb when I download it After investigating, I discovered that the save files are compressed using gzip format, and sure engouh, when I uncompress the file with gunzip, its size is 55 Mb (and the local version I downloaded is binary different from the one on the server, unless it is uncompressed). Somehow my web server decided that the file was better sent uncompressed. I HATE "intelligent" softwares So to sum up, you can consider the file size is 15 Mb.

As for the stress hypothesis, it would seem strange to me since in my experience "breaking thresholds" are not so sharp: you don't go from a cleanly smooth game to a complete freeze. Even when the swap file is brutally sollicited there are at least a few frames before the whole thing breaks down (tested with a program that voluntarily crashes the system). This is not to say there is no stress in my game. I do have a few VERY crowded sectors that ram the FPS down below 10 while it usually is beyond 30, but unless I go there (which I do not if only to avoid collisions) there is no problem. Anyway, according to what I read here and there you would probably not call them so much crowded (barely 50 stations connected together with a handful of big ships, I heard of more than 200 stations)

And for the sound drivers, I think you mixed the ethernet card (which is Realtek) with the audio controller (which doesn't have any brand attached to it):

Name: High Definition Audio Controller
Device ID: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3A3E&SUBSYS_A0021458&REV_00\3&13C0B0C5&0&D8
Driver: C:\Windows\system32\DRIVERS\hdaudbus.sys, 6.01.7601.17514 (English), 11/21/2010 05:23:47, 122368 bytes

...

Name: Realtek RTL8168C(P)/8111C(P) Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.20)
Device ID: PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_E0001458&REV_02\4&2E680ECD&0&00E5
Driver: C:\Windows\system32\DRIVERS\Rt64win7.sys, 7.02.1125.2008 (English), 6/10/2009 22:35:42, 187392 bytes

It may have a better driver, but I must admit that I have no idea which one I could use

Edit: Is there some way to activate a debug mode that might help diagnose a problem?

[Alan Phipps]

Thanks for clearing up the save size business but that leaves why I can play through it and you cannot yet to be determined.

From your DxDiag:
Hardware ID: (of your onboard sound chipset): HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0888&SUBSYS_1458A002&REV_1000

That decodes to: Device: 0x0888 Realtek High Definition Audio. Vendor: 0x10EC Realtek Semiconductor Corp.

As I mentioned, download RealTek HD Audio Codec R2.71 for Win7 x64 to replace that old generic Microsoft default driver.

[fafner2000]

So why does DxDiag identify one as Realtek and not the other? Such mysteries are not to be questioned in computer science Kind of late today though, I will try to install the driver tomorrow.

In the meantime, I fetched my laptop and made a try on it (dxdiag report here if you're interested). It froze too, I must be cursed This one runs Windows XP with a dual-core CPU at 1,67 GHz (doesn't seem to be underclocked) and 1 Gb of RAM. Not as many FPS, but is still freezes exactly when destroying the last ship (same kind of "half frame"), so I think the stress hypothesis is gone this time. When killing the game, the system was rather responsive, except for the kill itself which took something like 10 seconds, probably to free the memory.

[fafner2000]

I found the problem. It is caused by... the autopilot When I kill the last ship manually, the game doesn 't freeze. If I try again with the autopilot, it freezes. I did it a few times for each case.

It makes sense somehow, because when the last ship is destroyed, there will be only the mines to be targeted, but they can't be targeted. So I suppose the game will loop forever, searching for a suitable target among unsuitable targets. If it is what I think, it should be easy to fix by 1 of the developers

Now if you will excuse me, I have a mission to finish

[Alan Phipps]

The plot should need you to leave and talk to someone before the kill the mines phase so I don't think plot recoding is too likely to help. It may be an obscure bug of that sort in the general ship scripts though that have been around for years. Glad you have a workaround though - let's hope nothing else crops up. Good luck.

[fafner2000]

After playing a few times, I saw that the bug didn't go away so easily: going back to Cloudbase to advance doesn't solve it very well, because there will still be small ships, and killing them with the autopilot will still freeze the game. In my opinion, the minefield is part of the problem, because the mines aren't targetable at a low level (hit 't' in the sector list and the game buzzes).

I think it is a bug in the program code, not in the scripts. I may be wrong though, as I am rather unfamiliar with the script engine. I have barely had a look at the various scripts that went through my hands, and the most elaborate script I ever wrote (maybe the only one) was to try to make the Xenon race my friend just to see if I could dock at their stations (it failed by the way, but maybe because it wasn't possible). Tried with the Kha'aks too; call me pervert, I assume I suppose there is a "search target" function somewhere in the executable that is called by the autopilot to find a new target when the current one has stopped to exist (whatever the issue), and my opinion is that the function is confused by the fact that some potential targets aren't actually targetable, and loops forever when all the potential targets aren't targetable at all. The loop must miss a terminating case, which may be that there are still potential targets to examine but none are targetable, maybe a test for an empty set and nothing that removes untargetable potential targets from the set?

Mind you, I am not begging for the developers team to fix the problem so I can continue. I know that even if it is, it might take months before it makes its way to a patch. I am merely still pondering how I will clear a minefield that I can't see nor target, even without the bug in the way

[Alan Phipps]

Here is a similar issue thread I dimly remembered but could not find until now. It also has some minefield clearance hints if you want them:
Link

[fafner2000]

Clearly the same problem. Glad I found the core of the problem. Not using the autopilot is the solution, but you have to aim decently

About the minefield, I found a neat trick: I called a Boreas Destroyer armed with PPC and FLAK and rammed everything on sight By moving the camera alternately left and up (with the numeric pad) I could triangulate each mine with the yellow arrows. Quite painfully long, but it did the trick, as well as eliminating anything that might have been hostile ...and dispose quickly of the station. Love those destroyers