weird RTW 1.3 bug

[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,