Matrix Games Forums

Hey all, I'm glad to finally make a post here after months of reading. I just wish it wasn't for the issue of performance problems. I'm a wee bit lost on how to fix this, so I'd appreciate anything by way of suggestions.

Essentially, my game keeps crashing and I'm not sure why. It seems to happen after enough time has passed (usually a few minutes), but also:
1. When I click away from the tab and come back to it (especially on fullscreen mode)
2. When I try to use the keyboard - mouse controls are fairly steady, but when I go to use my keyboard for navigation,
it immediately crashes.
3. Not a direct cause itself, but it seems to happen more whenever I try new window configurations.

After the game 'crashes', it doesn't immediately lock up per se. Often I'll still be able to move around the screen with my mouse, but no tooltips come up and menus don't come up with I click on things. The game isn't ever recognized as being unresponsive, so I have to use the Task Manager to close the window and try again.

So to begin with, here's the most stable setup I've found so far (but even this crashes):
"C:\Matrix Games\War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition\Beta2\War in the Pacific Admiral Edition.exe" -w -skipVideo -fd -px1920 -py1080 -altFont -deepColor -dd_sw

My specs are as follows:
Intel Core i5-9400 CPU @2.90 GHz
12 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Running on Windows 10
(Please let me know if I've missed anything important)

It's been a few months since I actually installed the game, so I don't remember much except that I have the latest (at the time) beta installed with it, as well as a custom map.

Any potential fixes would be a godsend, since this is the one game I really want to immerse myself into. Please let me know if there's any helpful info I overlooked.

(also, any recommendations on a good starting scenario would be helpful too, especially as Japan)

Thanks!

I am not sure if it is the problem, buy you have the switch -w which is for windowed mode and then the switch -fd which is for full screen mode and daily saves. You need to take one of them out.

Nomad wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 2:09 am I am not sure if it is the problem, buy you have the switch -w which is for windowed mode and then the switch -fd which is for full screen mode and daily saves. You need to take one of them out.

Good catch! I took out -fd, but unfortunately it seems to be having the same problem. Still, it's progress! Thanks for the quick reply.

Another question. Did you install the 1126a update before you installed the 1126b update? The 1126b is not a comprehensive update.

The crashing when you are scrolling the map using the keyboard sounds suspicious. Do you have a lot of overlays on the map display when you are doing that? Things like the F6 key to show hexside details, the 'w' key to show hexside ownership, range circles for aircraft and ships, 'z' for patrol vectors, etc. All of these put extreme pressure on the graphics processor to redraw the map with all this info in the right place with every shift in the map display. Using keys to rapidly shift the display might pile up all the redraws.

Thanks for the help all, just wanted to give a post-mortem since the problem's been solved (for now). This problem occurred even with nothing selected, just the plain map. What I noticed was that this error would only happen while other tasks were in effect - specifically, having Youtube on a second monitor while playing. My guess then is that there's not enough memory being allocated to WITP, or that it's simply that demanding? I know about CPU adjustment but I'm not sure about RAM, if that even is the issue.

Not that it really matters, since the game is stable with general web browsing and I've already been able to play quite a bit with it since then. Thanks for the advice!

WitP AE is a 32-bit program that runs in its own space. Task Manager shows it only uses about 350MB of memory.

Resource allocation is determined by program priority, which is determined by several factors. Running the game in full screen is one. So even if you do have some programs running in the background, it shouldn't have that significant of an impact on overall performance, unless system specs are borderline, which is most certainly not the case with your system.

This is most likely a compatibility issue, which can be solved by CPU throttling.

I suggest that you add a switch to have it run on a specific CPU if you have a multicore system. That might help. Also, did you install it using SeaBee? That might give you slightly different switches but you can still change those if you want to. I would suggest having just a vanilla installation and then ones that you plan on if you want to have different art, maps, or other modifications. That will also work good for PBEM games as well.

As far as the first games, try Coral Sea and then Guadalcanal.

One of the common causes of crashing is an improperly installed game. If you installed just the base game and not the patches, it can crash from database info not being updated.
If you downloaded and unpacked the patch but have not downloaded the game, you should not have been able to get the game running to start with.
If you did not set switches to make the old game work with new hardware and new Windows versions, you get slow performance and greater potential for crashing if the game is searching for something in the operating system but does not have the switch to make it look in the right place.