Lag, Crashing and Siezing Up

[Venachar]

To show my faith in this forum, I come with an issue Since I came back to ARK earlier this year I've been experiencing fairly regular seizing up when playing AO - which normally leads to crashes. This can be anywhere but is very noticeable in the Shadowlands - locations I notice include Pande (2 seizeups in one raid, which recovered, followed by a seizeup in the lair which went on for so long I BSOD'd) and Elysium is quite bad for it, although I've only noticed it on petitions.

Any suggestions, as it's starting to affect my ability to do petitions, frankly :s

[Uragon]

The "BSOD" thing sort of makes me think it's quite likely your hardware or OS. A few years ago, I had a computer that would eventually crash after some time in outdoor areas (everything without a roof basically) but was rock stable once I entered a dungeon, shop or other area (with no visible sky). AO seems to be weird like that. No other game that I played back then would crash either.

[Mireiawen]

Random crashing sounds like it is getting bad data somewhere, though it can be about anywhere.

I myself did have a faulty hard drive controller on my old computer; it just slowed down over time and then did crash randomly.

Could try to test the hard drive with some utilities, like windows own disk checker.

Could also try testing the memory, it is one of the easiest to do: http://www.memtest.org/
Let it run over night or even longer if possible.

Also, make sure computer heat sinks aren't too dusted for it to overheat. AO tends to be heavy on CPU and might cause overheating even if many new games don't.

[Honorbound]

I assume by "seize up" you mean the client going unresponsive (no response to input, screen content frozen), then it recovers and starts working (more or less) again for a while. During this period, do you see intense/continuous HDD activity by any chance?

If so, it may be a variation of the severe memory leak (in my case it could crash the video driver in a matter of minutes when being at the "right" place in the game world) AO may cause on certain video hardware + driver combinations. The way I avoided that on an affected system was to lower the texture colour depth from pure 32 bit to 16/32 bit.

[Juggernat]

Sounds like you have a Creative sound card, so the standard tech questions: pc or laptop and what hardware/OS does it have?

If you do have a Creative aka soundblaster, quick fix is take it out and use the motherboards on board sound. Creative's have well known driver issues they can't or won't fix for Vista/win7, which can require using 3rd party made drivers that work for some and not for others

[Venachar]

Mireawen: I'll give all those things a shot and let you know where I got to.

Honorbound: Yep, that's exactly it. However more often than not it seizes the entire computer so I can only really judge activity from the noise of the CPU fan.

Juggernat: Not a clue what my sound card is, I'll need to check

Thanks Uragon. I guess I'll run those things down through the above.

Cheers all!

[Blondenurse]

Do you get a bubble near lower-right corner of your screen saying "Display driver stopped working, and has been restarted", or something like that?

I've had that problem on and off with ATI 5000-series gfx cards. They were gone from 11.1 - 11.7, but that particular problem is back now with 11.8 drivers.


And if its extra noticeable in SL - Pande takes alot of mem. Do a memorytest as suggested

[Venachar]

Necro as this issue calmed down a bit, but has come back with a vengance. My client didn't last 10 minutes in Adonis yesterday, and it's spreading to other games such as Dragon Age: Origins as well.

For the above: Memtest showed no issues and my soundcard is a Realtek, not Creative.

[Uaintseenme]

I and several of my friends have been having this same issue since last patch, to the point where we've decided to take some time off AO untill it resolves itself as the game is litteraly unplayable for some of us right now.

(Theres another post in this forum about it).

having logged on to test since it patched to a new version i get no such problems what so ever there.

go have a run through multiple zone on test and visit some of the "bad places" where this tends to happen most and see if you still experience the problem.

[Gaveup]

*waves@Uaint* I miss you! The healpet didn't keep me alive long after you dropped in Collector room, please fix! (specially if that means starting Halloween).

[Venachar]

I and several of my friends have been having this same issue since last patch, to the point where we've decided to take some time off AO untill it resolves itself as the game is litteraly unplayable for some of us right now.

(Theres another post in this forum about it).

having logged on to test since it patched to a new version i get no such problems what so ever there.

go have a run through multiple zone on test and visit some of the "bad places" where this tends to happen most and see if you still experience the problem.

Thanks Uaint, I'll do that, but I am concerned it's my hardware or some issue as it happens in other games too?

[Darkbane]

It does sound like that, something slooooowly failing... or some wierd software issue (I assume that you've checked for all the usual nasties? upgraded or downgraded vide drivers etc?)

[Krattonomic]

are you getting any error codes when you seize up in the error log? both AO and Windows?

how old is your rig? / How old is your graphics and Ram?

all Drivers up to date?

[Venachar]

No error codes for AO; not sure about Windows or indeed how to check? The computer is about 1-2 years old (can't remember exactly), graphics and RAM are still as bought. Graphics driver updated recently to no change, I ran a Driver checker programme and it said my System Management PCI driver was out of date? However both the Windows tool and the Nvidia website say that it's as up-to-date as it can be, so I'm not sure that tool was kosher. I fairly regularly do a check for nasties, but it never, ever finds anything and this is su****ious as I'd expect it to find SOMETHING. Change of anti-virus might be in order too.

[Krattonomic]

kaspersky is a very good one in my opinion and uhh give me a few minutes to research something and ill get back to you on Windows Error checking (ill edit this post)

**** Start Menu, under Run (Event Viewer) or Search Programs and files (Event viewer)