Hard crash to desktop

[FroBodine]

I was playing the tutorial, and I was alt-tabbing back and forth to post questions on this forum. After my turn completed, and the combat was done, the Confederate A.I. started to take their turn. Right at that moment the game crashed with a "this program has stopped responding" Windows message. I had to close out of the game.

Bummer.

[Erik Rutins]

Actually that sounds like you simply caught the game while the AI was thinking. It's a Windows thing - in my experience if you simply wait for it to respond, it will do so a few seconds later.

Alt-tabbing while the game is running it's own calculations can do this in many games.

Regards,

- Erik

[FroBodine]

I will try that if it happens again, Erik. I thought maybe that was it, too, but when I returned to the game from the Windows error message, the whole screen was greyed out. I did not wait very long before quitting, though. Hopefully it wasn't anything.

[RealChuckB]

Hi - I had two of these crashes in around 20 mins of playing on two different machines (one Win 7, one Win 8.1). Will try some more tomorrow but it's a bit concerning, as both machines are generally very stable.

[zakblood]

it's not a crash in the strictest meaning of the word as such a it doesn't make a event viewer message, all it is saying that the game exe failed to respond in a given time, (that's because it's thinking) so while it does this, windows advanced memory functions of win 7/8/8.1 and win 10 beta all think the process has stopped working, which it hasn't, if you wait the process continues in one of a number of ways it can be got around with simple windows commands which i'll now try to show in picture form, as pictures show a 1000 words imo

first locate your shortcut

[zakblood]

then right click on it for the menu it will bring up



then left click on the properties box

[zakblood]

left click advanced

[zakblood]

then make sure you left click and put a X in the box shown



then left click on OK

[zakblood]

then left click on the compatibility tab and change the boxes to what shown, then once all done as shown, click apply and ok, then it's done and set and won't be a issue for you, like i said it's not the game, it's windows being windows, as if a exe doesn't respond in a given time, windows thinks it's an error, when some games take longer than the time windows was given before it shows it.

many games need to run like this now, the more windows get played around with, the more it gets over complicated sometimes, so good luck and fingers crossed it will be the first and last time you see it again, if not come back and we will try again for you to help.



stability isn't always the game in question, it's how it's run in windows and what processes it's running with in the background, no matter how long a game is tested for, it can't be on everyone pc, some background process work well with games, some won't work at all, so some programs can't live in the same memory space as a game can, so can't be run at the same time, what works on one pc might not work on another of the same make and model bought and used by the same person, just because windows decided to load a app that day in the wrong or different order on boot, or a background app decided to do something, that the game or app or even windows itself didn't like, then you get an error, if you have never seen the error before, most think straight away it's the new program being used that's at fault, when i cna or could be a combination of a lot of things, not just that last thing added to windows, that's why some have problems while others don't, it's hardware v's software plus a random install and load thing for not better word for it..

and btw i'm not staff either, just another member helping, or trying to, IT support degree, well computer science and spent 20 odd years in AV work and data recovery but i know my way around a few games as well[:D][;)]

[ericbabe]

Thanks for the report and the responses. Windows likes to get messages from applications periodically and when it fails to get a message after a certain length of time it will report that the application is non-responsive. When the AI is thinking we send such a message to Windows after every unit is processed. It had seemed in my tests that this was sufficiently frequent to keep Windows from reporting that the application was non-responsive. I have never seen the problem on a Win7 machine (and was surprised to see that reported); we had seen this with Win8 but, as Zakblood discusses, the issue seemed to be resolved by running the game with compatibility turned on. I had thought that the game launcher through the installer was running BaB in compatibility mode, but perhaps this is not working properly. However, if some people are still seeing the problem with Win7, then perhaps there is some other issue with the Windows messages. This issue might be scenario-dependent -- movement routines that try to calculate very long paths have to explore trillions of options, and it might be that some AI moves are just taking a very long time to calculate.

If this crash does happen again in which Windows reports that the application is non-responsive, please try giving it some time and seeing whether or not it comes back when the AI calculations are completed.