weird RTW 1.3 bug

[BigBZ]

Ive spent a full day trolling for someone else to experience this and havent found someone else with the same problem yet :) and another bunch of ime trying to fix it without results

Playing an imperial campaign for a while, saved the game and got some sleep..

next day load game and it crashes (dump to desptop) during a battle. I restart the game same result. I try auto result for battle, but the next battle I play crashes.

Im thinking this is weird, mabee its the save game- its also the first time ive bothered to save a game.

New campaign, crash during first battle. test this another couple of times. There appears to be no obvious link between crashes.

Reinstall game, still the crashes persist, always during battle at random.

Delete the savefile, no change.

I dont understand why it would suddenly start crashing after not doing so beforehand, and crashing so consistently.

Any Ideas before I reinstall windows?

Cheers
BZ

[LestaT]

Have you try the show_err command ? Right click the short cut for RTW on the desktop , on the target type -show_err . It might helps.

[Dutch_guy]

I was going to say the exact same thing LestaT said,

It's the best advice you can get.

That way you can trace the problem back to it's start - so to speak.
Then you can alter it back to how it was supposed to be.

[rotorgun]

Playing an imperial campaign for a while, saved the game and got some sleep..

next day load game and it crashes (dump to desptop) during a battle. I restart the game same result. I try auto result for battle, but the next battle I play crashes.

Im thinking this is weird, mabee its the save game- its also the first time ive bothered to save a game.
BZ

Just a dumb question, but were you running this campaign before you installed the BI expansion with 1.3 patch? I've seen on some other posts that if you try to play a previously saved game, under the original program with 1.2
patch, that it causes problems. You might have to just delete all your saved campaigns and battles, load the BI, and then restart from there. Unfortunately, this sucks. If this doesn't work, I'd just reinstall the original RTW and then install BI right after that.

Hope this helps. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more tech help.

[Dagobert II]

Hey all;

I've had this before, it seems that the save file may (how)
became corrupted. The only way i leared (managed) is to keep
savefiles to refer to //somehow I attributed it to the Autosave
function with NTFS, but that's reaching. Reloaded the file, saved
at that point, and played out my turn, then saved, then ended
my turn. once worked out, I Defragged. it happens rarely, but it
is annoying.

[BigBZ]

Thanks for the suggestions guys!

I've tracked the problem down, or at least fixed whatever the problem was even if I still have no idea what caused the problem in the first place.

@LestaT: I hadnt tried that, still havent come to that :)

@Dagobert II: after experimening I found this had nothing to do with the save file per se, as all battles were crashing even new campaigns.

@rotorgun: the game install was RTW:BI (ie 1.3/1.4) with no mods. Only RTW was crashing, BI worked fine. I assume BI has a slightly different battle engine (?)

@BizBZ: you sound tired and frustrated- relax, you'll live longer

Since I needed to reinstall windows anyway I did that and had a totally clean RTW install to work with.
The error seems to be caused by DirectX 9.0b (installed from the RTW cd), as I had a the same crash after the windows reinstall. Having made sure the vid drivers were as up to date as possible (with no change in crashes) I then upgraded DX to 9.0c and the problem goes away.

I'm still baffled by the problem starting after playing for several hours and numerous battles with no problems tho.

Thanks again
Bz

[Papewaio]

It might be related to a memory leak.

How much RAM do you have onboard?

[BigBZ]

@Papewaio

Ive got 512 with 64 of that allocated to video.

Last night I played continuously for abnout 6 hours with no problems, the DX update has fixed whatever the specific err was.

[rotorgun]

Thanks for the suggestions guys!

@rotorgun: the game install was RTW:BI (ie 1.3/1.4) with no mods. Only RTW was crashing, BI worked fine. I assume BI has a slightly different battle engine (?)

Since I needed to reinstall windows anyway I did that and had a totally clean RTW install to work with.
The error seems to be caused by DirectX 9.0b (installed from the RTW cd), as I had a the same crash after the windows reinstall. Having made sure the vid drivers were as up to date as possible (with no change in crashes) I then upgraded DX to 9.0c and the problem goes away.

Thanks again
Bz

As far as the battle engine, I have no idea. Just another dumb question, but are you by any chance using Windows ME? I had many similar crashes when running Total War games when using this operating system. It is only designed to handle a max of 512 meg of Ram in its cache. I also upgraded my video card from a 64 meg to a 128 meg Radeon 9200 AGI one. Is the card your using compatible with the minimum requirements listed on the gamebox?
I also found far less problems when I finally upgraded to Windows XP.

Good luck,