MTW Crash + Long Loading Combo possible new FIX

Hey guys, I registered on this forum for the sole purpose of writing this post.

Straight to the point. I may have a new solution to these problems. Solution that may help some of you who lost any hope on getting MTW to work properly even after trying various fixes. Of course please don't piss your pants from excitement yet. It's possible that somebody figured it out the same way I did so sorry for posting the same in advance, I don't have time to read several thousands posts on this forum :) On the other hand if this wasn't suggested yet then I'm happy it won't be a waste of time. Seeing how these bugs are present on many different pc's with different video cards I do not guarantee that this may work for you. It just worked for me.

Here's a bonus, this solution (at least for me) doesn't require downgrading drivers so no more getting back to stone age just to play MTW! ~:) Also it works for ATI video card.


So as many others I too had problem with MTW crashing and loading forever due to my video card (ATI Radeon 4770 HD to be specific). Nasty combination. I visited a lot of sites and read houndreds posts about fixing this and possible solutions to this problem including these helpful threads:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...uple-solutions
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...-and-Solutions

Unfortunately those solutions were few and mainly for NVidia cards owners. Some of them required tweaking with drivers and getting older ones and because I have a nasty history of dealing with this stuff plus I play new games too and don't want to mess up graphics for them I refused to try it and decided to use and try everything else on my own in every possible combination.

Now I'll show how this amateur fix of mine worked and try to provide some info and describe all steps I taken.:

1. I forced antialiasing on x2 and anisotropic filtering on max.
2. Disabled AGP Texture Acceleration in dxdiag
3. It had seem to improve loading time very slightly. Still loading was long as fuck.
4. Then I had a brilliant idea. Sometimes when there's a problem with game it is good to run it in window mode. Tried adding -w, -window, -windowed in the shortcut but got a strange errors. I searched high and low and found on some other site that apparently there is not legit window mode for MTW BUT you can force some kinda quasi window mode adding D in the shortcut line. In my case it looks like this "D:\Gry\Medieval - Total War - Złota Edycja\Medieval_TW.EXE" D
Ok running MTW in this mode was rather strange (game starts in pseudo window then after you load game sometimes it gets fullscreen, sometimes not, beats me why) but it shorten loading times from 3-10 minutes to 15 seconds. Strange right? But it worked.
5. I happily started campaign, everything was fine until 1st battle ended. Crash to desktop. Loaded game again. Played a while. Clicked on some province, crash to desktop. Looks like windowed MTW liked to crash a lot.
6. Several dozens crashes later found out about button fix. Here's the thread:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...h-End-Cards%29

Installed it and it worked for crashing to desktop during game even though it was supposed to help Nvidia owners with CTD problem when starting a campaign.
7. Ok so now that I got rid of pesky loading time and annoying crashes everything was fine right? No. Medieval was often freezing upon entering battle and even when using auto battle option! I had to tweak with strategy and battle map resolutions as suggested here:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...uple-solutions

Trying various combinations of 1024x768 with both of them didn't work out well so I had to set both maps on 800x600 and it worked fine altough setting my own monitor resolution on 800x600 and 16 bit colour was required to avoid weird errors. Oh, one more thing. Setting monitor to 800x600 also removes the problem with windowed mode game looking quite crappy (it works though) if your monitor resolution is higher.

And it worked! No more long loading times, no more crashes, no more anything. More importantly I didn't have to downgrade my drivers and this works for ATI card too. The key to make all those previously mentioned fixes work for me was to use "windowed mode". Without it my game is loading forever even after all those fixes are applied. The only side effect was crash/freeze happening upon exiting game but I didn't bother with fixing it.

So if you tried anything and it didn't work try this. Chances are it will be worth it. :grin:

Ps. Sorry if posting in wrong section etc. I only registered here to share my solution with you so I'm leaving the rest to moderators. ~:wave:

Welcome to the Org, Nuclear! ~:wave:

Interesting stuff, I don't think I've heard of the "D" cmd line option. Maybe CA built in a debug mode, I'll have to mess around with this when I get home. Thanks for the info. :bow:

Some more command line switches.

EDIT...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nuclear

"D:\Gry\Medieval - Total War - Złota Edycja\Medieval_TW.EXE" D

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I've just realized this surely means you're my fellow countryman. I welcome you warmly.~:wave:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Stazi

Some more command line switches.

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Nice digging, Stazi! :bow:

Hi Stazi and Nuclear

Well done chaps. Definitely worth a +1 rep in my book.

'I've been playing MTW since the dawn of time...' :laugh4: but I haven't heard of the windowed mode option before. I will try this as I do suffer quite a lot of crashing despite having a 'frozen in time', dedicated MTW PC.

Best regards
Victor

Sapere aude
Horace

Hello again. After about year and half I come here again with a little update. Some time ago I upgraded my system from windows xp to windows 7, installed MTW and faced similar problem again. This time loading times are awesome but crashes were even more prevalent than on xp. For the record, ctd button fix didn't help at all, oh and I still have ati radeon, not nvidia so I guess I'm extra screwed without dedicated solution. I was about to go on another epic journey again to search for new solution but remembered about this post of mine, and guess what? On windows 7 you don't need any mumbo jumbo with antialiasing, acceleration and resolution. The D - that cryptic debug mode solved ALL issues again :D Just my 2 cents. Cheers.