Too many crashes

[Fleshbits]

I am getting awefully frustrated with the amount of crashes. I get at least 2 per 8 hour session.
What is your crash per hour ratio?

For a game that's been out 4 years, I expected it to be more stable. It's in .NET too so it should be less error prone than C++ (or so all the .NET guys keep telling me). I like pointers myself

[pycco]

i have never crashed, are you using the steam version or matrix version. also what size map,how many empires, how late in the game. is it a memory dump file crash? are you using mods? what is your pc specs?

[mikeCK]

Game has always been stable for me. I have been playing since the original came out and have never had a single crash. Apparently, it doesn't like something on your rig

[warzer]

I am going to join in on the too many crashes front. I crash at least 4 times a day. IT seems to go between 2 errors. Today it has mostly been "System.InvalidOperationException: Object is currently in use elsewhere"

Using the steam version 15x15, 700 stars, 15 races. no mods custom start. mid/late game. never seems to crash prewarp.

win7x64, 32gb ram, gtx 680 driver:337.88

[pycco]

ORIGINAL: mikeCK

Game has always been stable for me. I have been playing since the original came out and have never had a single crash. Apparently, it doesn't like something on your rig

what version are you playing steam or matrix?

[Spidey]

Odd. I'm playing this on Win 7 x64 Home, on a system with a rather old C2Q Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz with an immense 3 (!!) GB of RAM and a GF8600 GT and I'm routinely letting my game run for days at a time with no problems at all. I've seen it crash once on its own aside from the Dead Zone bug and various problems related to themes and buggy save games.

[warzer]

Well I do notice it barely uses any resources on my pc. Maybe 1.3gb of ram max and less than 10% cpu spread across 6 of my 8 cores.
What size of game do you normally play that does not crash? Have you played with the sizes I mention?

[Spidey]

I'm always 1000 or 1400 systems and 10x10 or 15x15 size galaxies. But I'll give you that I tend to end my games a bit before the AIs actually grow "large". That is, my end game is somewhere between 2020 and 2030, usually. It is conceivable that if I let a game run long enough, I'd run out of memory and it would crash. I've just never been in that situation so far.

Edit: But I'm surprised it's using multiple cores for you. For me it's pretty much limited to just one core. You might want to consider single coring the game, just to see what happens. Some games get confused when using multiple cores and I don't think DW is all that good at taking advantage of multithreading anyway.

[Bingeling]

I have not crashed since release. During beta, I would quite a few times put the game on automation and let it run over night/the next day. My main purpose was to fish for the repeatable crashes. These games almost always eventually crashed.

The exact reason why they crashed has been fixed. As more spots of "rare" crashes are fixed, it is a bit less likely for a "rare" crash to happen.

I am a bit surprised at some of the crash reports seen in the tech forum. I would not expect repeatable crashes to happen at any frequency at all, but those doing modding with either themes or the editor could open up for crashes in areas that I would not have seen in my automated runs, at least. And maybe race matters, I usually started with my trusty Gizurean. If you plan to automate the game for 12 hours or more, you better not start with some silly Atuuk that are probably wiped within one hour

[Bingeling]

ORIGINAL: Spidey

Edit: But I'm surprised it's using multiple cores for you. For me it's pretty much limited to just one core. You might want to consider single coring the game, just to see what happens. Some games get confused when using multiple cores and I don't think DW is all that good at taking advantage of multithreading anyway.

Performance improvement has been mentioned in patch notes (and the Universe (and maybe Shadows)). What could those performance improvements be? They could be multithreading.

I know that when it says "fixed a rare crash..." in the patch notes it is most likely related to multi threading, and that one (or more) specific spot has been "fixed". I have not actually checked my gaming computer, though, I am far too busy playing the game for watching the resource monitor.

Report crashes. Make a post in the tech support forum, paste the contents of the crash report found in the DW and version folder in appdata (one step up from where save games are stored). They will be attended to, and right now it seems like they are more in "fix it" mode than they have hardly ever been. If it repeats after reloading, report and upload the savegame (see tech forum sticke), in that case it is not a "rare" crash, but a "proper" one.

[Osito]

I get frequent crashes when changing theme.

Also I can reliably induce a crash in any game:

1. Go into planet editor.
2. Create a dozen (say) red supergiants.
3. Zoom in and double click on each of the stars one by one.
4. More than 50% of the time, that will crash the game because the supergiant size is too large.

Actually, maybe this isn't technically a 'crash', because you do get the option to continue. But it's a system error, nevertheless.

Osito

[hewwo]

I get quite a lot of crashes as well, ever since the last patch. booo.

[Hannable]

Hmm, weird how some people are getting lots 'o crashes and others are not.

I play on a 1400 star system map with a heavily modded game and the only crashes I get are:

a) A crash involving the "Dead Zone" once every few games, but that's a known issue and is slated to be fixed in the next update.

b) A memory crash if I leave the game going too long. Since the game can take awhile to load, I often pause the game and go to bed so I can just sit down and get back to it when I can the next day. Game doesn't like being run continuously for 4 or 5 days hehe.

Otherwise, it's been rock solid stable for me and I'm running Win 7 64 with 8 gigs RAM and 1 gig GPU memory.

[Antiscamp]

Wow. Thinking about it, I can't even recall the last time I had a crash in Distant Worlds.

[Jeeves]

I only had one repeatable crash during beta testing universe, related to asteroid belt spaceports. I run my games for about 2 1/2 to 4 days at a time without exiting until I finally get an out of memory crash, pausing the game while I do other things. I suspect the variation in time to crash is due to how many times I do save games per session or the memory leak in my daily auto virus scan that happens while I'm playing. I'm quite satisfied with the state of crashing. If the game never crashed, I would never reboot on that machine until it came time for an upgrade...

Lonnie Courtney Clay

[Upuauta]

Crashes? Well I had perhaps 2-3 since starting to play this game at the first release (V1) some years ago.

[Erik Rutins]

We did introduce one new crash bug in 1.9.5.1, which we fixed in 1.9.5.2 along with a few others from the reports we've seen since release. If you are experiencing crashes, please give the 1.9.5.2 beta a try and let us know if it helps.

I will say that on my systems here, DW is completely stable - but with a complex game like this, so many crashes depend on very specific combinations of settings, automation, playstyle, situation, etc. that they can be relatively common for one person and invisible to another. Good save files that can repeat the crash allow us to diagnose and fix them faster than any other method.