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ENGINE error

tommy61157

tommy61157

Unofficial Pirate Potato
Staff member
QA Tester
Provisional
Storm Modder
Hello, I love POTC and I think the people who have made the build mod have done a great job at improving this game for the better :yes , there is just one problem I have with the stable build mod 13. :? When I run the game for 5 or 6 hours (or sometimes even less) the ENGINE.exe will crash for no reason, and no logs will record even with the recording log enabled. It's not a big problem, all I have to do is be sure to save after doing anything major, but if anyone could offer a fix, it would be much appreciated xD:

My specs:

4 GB of RAM (3.84 GB usable)
2.2 GHz AMD Athlon Duo-core processor
252 MB ATI Radion 4250 Video card
Windows 7 home premium OS SP 1
Toshiba-brand Laptop

I love my computer :sail

Sorry if the smileys seem random, just made an account on here
 
Also, I should mention my version is build mod 13 update 3
 
Ahoy tommy61157, welcome aboard mate! :dance

The Storm engine, the 3D graphics engine POTC is built upon, is not the most stable of graphics engines to begin with. The game has always had some occasional random crashes, our mod teams have done their best to try and minimize what we can, but the limitations of the engine sometimes creep up and there is not a lot that can be done for some things unfortunately. It sounds like for the most part you have a fairly stable installation, 5-6 hours of stable game play is good! If your crashes are not happening at the same point, or when you try and do a certain thing, then I would say that it's just the limitations of the engine. The best you can really do is make sure your hard drive is defragged, and make sure your hardware isn't overheating. Your laptop hardware has more than enough punch to handle anything this game will throw at it, so that shouldn't be an issue. It might be that after such a lengthy session, your laptop is starting to overheat a bit, laptops are much more susceptible to heat problems because they are tougher to cool than desktops. 5-6 hours of gameplay on a laptop is pushing it mate.

There are a couple of free programs you can use to monitor your system temps, few of the ones I use are HWMonitor, CoreTemp, and SpeedFan. I have a Toshiba laptop as well, and all of those will read your CPU temps just fine. Your graphics chipset may be a different story, sometimes laptop graphics chipsets are not recognized properly.
 
You're probably right, I was just making sure that there wasn't anything I could do to help this issue, all I know is that the engine did crash a little more often on the stock POTC. thanks :onya
 
Also, I use core temp too, and it never goes above 64C when I play this, also, even if the video card isn't fully enabled when I play this, it shouldn't matter since it only requires 1.0 shader and 32MB of video card.
 
Plus, I have a seperate laptop fan that you set the laptop on which should remove the problem of overheating for this game at least.
 
Does this generally happen after you looted ships during a sea battle? This is a known problem if you have a very full cargo hold.
Fix here: http://www.pyratesahoy.com/build/midnight_fullcargohold_ctdfix_b13.zip
 
No, it happens at random points, but thanks anyways, I'll keep that in mind should that problem ever arise.
 
It cannot hurt to install anyway; no new game required for that one.
 
well, I installed build mod 14 and now the engine never seems to crash, and so far, I've found 0 glitches :dance, I'm very surprised, good job pirates ahoy :cheeky, this could be ready to be a stable expansion by the end of this year in my opinion :cheers
 
We do seem to have traced and tackled a few long-standing bugs, so the next release will be more stable still, even if it won't be perfect yet.
Whatever the case, it IS quite playable. :wp
 
Alas, I just got a few new errors which I'll state on a separate topic :facepalm, nothing too bad though.:rolleyes:
 
...and remember this is a BETA build. There are going to be errors until it is called 'Build Mod 14 Full'. It will be important to keep that in mind, as you are in effect being a beta-tester by playing the curent version :yes
 
I know, but I would really like to get this to start moving along a little quicker, so I'm trying to advertise the issues the best I can in order to hopefully get them solved quicker.
 
indeed, and all contributions to the bug fixing is awesome, if you like have a look through the bug-tracker here:

http://forum.piratesahoy.net//index.php?autocom=tracker&showproject=1

As this lists many of the know bugs, so makes your reporting easier :onya

One BIG issues is that currently we have no programmers to help in fixing the games code, so that will also make this a slow process.
 
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