Weird crash issue

[srmalloy]

Recently, I have been experiencing occasional -- sometimes almost back-to-back -- crash issues. Not just the client falling on its face, but the whole computer -- black screen and reboot. The crashes occur when finishing a transition; I've had it happen when entering a mission, leaving a mission, zoning into my base, zoning from my base to another zone, zoning with the tram, zoning with TUNNEL, and once when accepting an Assemble the Team during a Manticore TF. What makes it odd is that I have only been able to make it occur with my Demon Summoning Masterminds; when trying to replicate it with a Robotics Mastermind, or a character of any other AT, I can't get a crash. With further experimentation, simply summoning all my pets and running around zoning repeatedly failed to cause a crash; when I used Enchant Demon to buff my pets, I was able to get a crash four zone changes later. Testing using only Abyssal Empowerment did not cause a crash; the problem appears to be related to the use of Enchant Demon. I have not yet done tests summoning only one grade of pet (i.e., demonlings, demons, demon prince), applying Enchant Demon, and zoning repeatedly. Curiously, when a crash occurs, the Homecoming launcher shows the regular Homecoming client as 'not installed' when first started after the reboot, but clicking on the 'download' arrow appears to refresh something, because it shows 'Ready' within a second after clicking.

 

Thinking that the issue might be something on my end, I upgraded my video drivers, and also wiped and completely reinstalled the game, although I did retain the mods I have installed: Vidiotmaps, the 'MoreMaps4U' i24 map update, and BernardTheBeast's sound mod to make the Demons less annoying. I will have to test removing each one in turn to see if one of them is the issue, but the problem does not occur anywhere else in the game except for loading into a new zone, and only with my Demons MMs. If I dismiss my pets before zoning, the problem does not occur, but taking the time to resummon and buff them all for every door mission in a TF gets tedious.

[Marine X]

Well, they are Demons after all....

The Demons have a more complex graphics set than most of the other pets. Have you checked Memory and CPU activity compared to other sets? Anything you can do to free up Memory can't hurt. One thing a lot of people miss is that anything on your desktop that is not a shortcut ( other than recycle bin for instance ) are sitting in your active memory. if they can be moved to the main drive, then create a shortcut to them, it may help free some memory up, just a thought.

 

PS ( Allocating some additional Virtual Memory may not be a bad idea as well )

Edited February 24, 2021 by Marine X

[SuggestorK]

Also black screen and reboot could also be a hidden blue Screen, cause most PC's are set to reboot by default instead to show blue screen and wait on response.

 

You could check this by disabling the reboot and wait for the crash to happen again, or check the windows logs of computer management.. sometimes Windows have enough time to make an entry for that before rebooting if it has enough time. The Number of error could help indentify the cause of the crash.

 

Back on 2011 when i bought this comp i didnt know about compatibility much so the RAM i put into it wasnt 100% compatible with the Mainboard, as result i got blue screens too.. funny thing it happened only if more then one memory module was slotted (of 4 normally inside) and it happened only when CoX ran more then half an hour so he accessed the 2nd module (or more).

I replaced the 4 RAM Modules with some from the Manufactures Compatibility List and nvr had an Issue since.

 

Greetings

[Grimm]

What is your video card? I was having some serious crashes on my Win10 AMD RX580, rolling back to drivers 20.11.2 stabilized the system again.

[srmalloy]

3 hours ago, Grimm said:

What is your video card? I was having some serious crashes on my Win10 AMD RX580, rolling back to drivers 20.11.2 stabilized the system again.

Radeon RX 5600 XT. The video drivers I was using were installed more than three months ago, and it was only after I started getting the crashes that I updated them, but it made no difference.

[Grimm]

18 hours ago, srmalloy said:

Radeon RX 5600 XT. The video drivers I was using were installed more than three months ago, and it was only after I started getting the crashes that I updated them, but it made no difference.

Try the specific 21.11.2 drivers if not already on them.

 

In the Radeon control panel, click the City Of Heroes icon and make sure  you are not using any Radeon specific optimizations such as Anti-lag, Chill, Sharpening, enhanced sync, etc. Disable them all only for COH and see if that helps, being an older game some of those settings may be causing the crashes. 

 

Try running memtest just to make sure your ram isnt throwing errors. https://www.techpowerup.com/memtest64/

 

Make sure your chipset drivers are updated, along with BIOS.

 

 

[srmalloy]

On 2/25/2021 at 11:36 AM, Grimm said:

Try the specific 21.11.2 drivers if not already on them.

 

In the Radeon control panel, click the City Of Heroes icon and make sure  you are not using any Radeon specific optimizations such as Anti-lag, Chill, Sharpening, enhanced sync, etc. Disable them all only for COH and see if that helps, being an older game some of those settings may be causing the crashes.

The Radeon control panel says 21.2.3 is the most current, which I'm on, and I never turned on any of the Radeon-specific optimizations. I also doubled the RAM from 16Gb to 32Gb, replacing the old RAM completely; that didn't solve the problem

 

On the supposition that one of the installed mods might have bad files, I moved the whole data folder out of the Homecoming folder after the first crash post-memory-upgrade and tried again; the client loaded my character enough to see that her demons were still summoned and buffed before it crashed again.