Coas crashing constantly during large scale at-sea engagments

[Sornan]

Hello everyone

I broke down and got an account to post on this here, as I'm not really sure what exactly might be causing this issue that has cropped up with Coas on my system.

Basically, for the first 20 hours or so of gameplay, everything has gone perfect, a few random crashes, nothing to note of. Now that I've gotten a 4th rate ship, and intentionally getting into bigger sea battles, the crashes have become constant, and strictly limited to sea battles involving either large enemy ships, large numbers of enemy ships (4 or more) or both. I get switched to sea battle mode against a significant enemy fleet and often within 20 seconds I get the error "Start.Exe has stopped working" or something like that, and back to desktop. Other times I get lucky and get through the beginning phase, until I do a boarding operation, then when I am sent back to the sea in the midst of the large enemy convoy it crashes. The only other time I get seemingly constant crashes, is when I ram my ship into another ship, and if it doesent cause a crash, sometimes my ship flings around the enemy ship wildly before finally breaking free.. (very weird).

I did do quite a bit of searching on this mess before posting, and I did update my system cleaning, defragged, ran anti-virus, cleaned registry, and also did the DEP thing (Execution Prevention) on the executable (start.exe). I really havent noticed a difference.

I am running the latest version of Gentemen Of Fortune (with the updated patch installed).

System Specs :

Dell XPS 400
Windows Xp 32 bit (service pack 3)
3.0 Ghz Pentium 3 dual core processor
2 Gig Ram
GeForce 8800 Gt 512 MB card (overclocked)
(note that the Overclocked status shouldnt matter, heck the game hasnt done enough to even get my cards cooling fan to kick in yet..)


Honestly I'm just not sure what more I can do here, something is definetely going on with the sea battles, and strictly the bigger ones. I had no issues in the 20 or so hours of inital gameplay with the smaller sea battles involving smaller ships/fleets, now its a random crash mess during the bigger stuff, and heck I havent even seen a 3rd rate ship yet.. wonder what happens when the really big ships start showing up.

I'm totally open to suggestions, this is a great game, I'm willing to try about anything to at least reduce the volume of these annoying crashes.

TIA

 

[Thagarr]

Ahoy Sornan, welcome aboard mate.

Thanks for providing your system specs mate, I wish more people would do that when they post their problems. You should really have no issues running the game hardwarewise, you more than meet the minimums on pretty much everything. The only place there might possibly be an issue is with your ram. 2 gig is really about the absolute minimum, but as long as you don't have any intensive background programs running, you should be fine.

I haven't been following GOF development much for a while, so I don't know how much I can help, but I do know that there have been some issues with the ships. The team is working on them as best they can at the moment, I am sure one of them will stop by this thread and give more useful information than I can.

You say you are using the latest GOF, plus the patch, are you referring to the latest version of GOF 1.2? You might want to have a look at the GOF 2.0 beta.

 

[Luke159]

Ahoy Sornan, welcome to PA bud.

Just some questions to get it off to a start and try to understand whats happening.

Which version of GOF are you running, GOF 1.2 or GOF 2?
When your ship is weirdly flung around ships do you hear a noise like a scrapping sound?

A tip is to save often, for example before grappling with a fleet or naval battle from the world map, save your game. Then should you have a crash, you can at least load your game without loosing anything. If you are been followed and they get into grappling range, save your game just in case its a large fleet or a fleet with bigger ships from class 3 up. Sadly for GOF 1.2 there was a huge problem with large naval battles, i can't say if this will happen in GOF 2 because no one has reported anything or no one has reached the stage of the larger naval battles yet. But on a whole GOF 2 seems to be more stable at the moment, but there are still bugs been fixed within the game. Most are little things that have yet to be fully ported over from GOF 1.2.

As Thagarr said, ram might play a role in your problems however you are running on XP which uses about 512MB's on a standard system (no big background programs running etc). So its hard to think that its just memory related, however i would say for a basic system today, you need a minimum of 4GB's of ram and a 64 bit system so you can use all 4GB's as XP and other 32 bit systems will only use 3GB's. That can wait for a rainy day though since its not just system related, upgrading your memory might delay the crashing slightly, but it won't stop it sadly.

 

[Sornan]

Hello guys, thanks for the responses.

@ Thagarr

I wasn't suspecting actually that Gof may be the culprit here, although I have never played Coas vanilla, so I woulnd't know if it may indeed be something with the ships/etc of the mod. I am running 1.2, and thanks for the link there. I did check out the thread, I didn't see anything in the main description (unless I missed something) that indicated a potential fix for issues induced by newly added ships, either way I am inclined to wait on that until it becomes a stable version. If this is indeed something to do with Gof it seems I may have posted in the wrong area unknowingly.


@ Luke159

Hello, and again I'm running version 1.2. I wasn't even aware of the new beta in the works there. When I do get that rare instance where the ship spins around the ship it collided with there is the collision sound which is repeating at the speed of light.. although I should note that I saw this same bug happen to someone on you-tube and I don't beleive that he was running Gof.

Ah thanks for the info on the large naval fleets major issue in 1.2, dang now I am reconsidering trying 2.0 . Defintely at the point in the game where the bigger fleets and bigger ships are more profitable and enjoyable to engage now. Ironically last night I saw my first 3rd rate along with a 5th rate and had no crashes, but that's still only two ships.

Maybe this weekend I'll take a closer look at 2.0, I would assume that a full reinstallation of the game would be required along with not being able to use previous saves. Better to do the switch soon rather than wait if it's going to be neccessary.

Thanks again

 

[Luke159]

No problem bud.

You could copy your intire COAS directory into a folder on the desktop, then uninstall the main game and reinstall COAS, then take a copy of the fresh install and copy that into a folder on the desktop (for example, Games, GOF 1.2 = COAS + GOF 1.2 installed, GOF 2.0 Beta = COAS + GOF 2.0 installed) then you could continue to play GOF 1.2 and test GOF 2.0 out.

You also have your main COAS installed without any changes to files, so you could test vanilla out to see if its the mod or hardware ralted problems. By using GOF 1.2 and GOF 2.0 out side of the programs folder, it also elliminats problems cuased by the programs folder. Sadly GOF 1.2 does have problems with larger fleets, some of it is related to the player's rig and others are related to the mod, however how much is related to what is something we don't know. But some people have been able to play with little to no crashes for a long time while other peoples game crashes upon loading into sailing mode when a large fleet is within sight.

You are correct on GOF 2, you do need to install it over a fresh copy of COAS and any savegames for GOF 1.2 will not be compatable with GOF2.

 

[Sornan]

Hey thanks Luke159 for taking the time to put all of that down. I certainly see the wisdom in the approach there, I'm not quite sure if I'm prepared to go that far with discovering the issue though, as I have very little time even on the weekends often due to my job. Honestly I did play a little bit of Coas vanilla, and ironically it was Gof that brought the game back onto my system, as I was so disgusted with the overall game originally I had put prolly about 4 hours into it and removed it lol. So, basically that kinda narrows it down for me, I might be inclined to try out version 2.0 though, but there's just no way I'm playing the vanilla game

I really appreciate all of the help, and hey congrats on the release of Gof, you guys have done an amazing job, the amount of work that's been done in this mod to me is really mind boggling.