Help me describe this bug

Discussion in 'Support!' started by infowars, December 9, 2014.

  1. infowars

    infowars Member

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    Now, I haven't created a new entry in the bug tracker because I don't know how useful it'd be and it may have already been covered:

    What happened was, the game became unresponsive to anything but the scroll wheel on the mouse, so I could zoom in and out of one planet and watch the last of my attack die.

    Build up to it was, galactic war, up against the spider of mean home base. That's four moons (grey rocky planets orbiting a star, makes me think of the moon), lots of sub commanders, against just me. Destroy the first two on my starting moon. Send a beachhead to the little 1 hailey moon, build a hailey, take out the third. All that's left is a fully developed moon.

    I send nukes to it, half of them are intercepted, some get through, doesn't blow up the commander. I send in orbital builders and interceptors to sweep as the builers make anchors then a teleporter. And I send in my army, along with those space sniper lasers.

    That's when the game becomes unresponsive. Can't hit esc, can't chronocam, can't even lasso select units that are on one side of the planet towards the enemy commander who I can see, who's being uncooperative and not walking to his death like he should (and that would be a fix).

    You know, I got from the early days a lot of the technology in this game is ambitious and when the UI works, I love it, features in it I miss when playing other strategy games, but this really sucks. I know this is not an issue for those top players with their 9 minute long games on one planet with T1 armies but I like a good long slow game with nukes and all that and right now I have a fear that if I go over some unit or time limit the game will break.

    You know what, this is not necessary and I'll just be happy if you fix it, but if you could explain why this mouse and keyboard non responsive issue happens, I'd be really interested to learn. I'm not a programmer, but I have a lot of enthusiasm for this game and the technology underlying it. So, don't worry if you think the explanation will go over my head, it would satisfy my curiosity which at the moment is greater than my annoyance (which back then was pretty big, as 4 vs 1 is not easy)
  2. s03g

    s03g Member

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    I too like a long game so I can in a sense feel your pain as it were, if my thinking is right this sounds to me that the UI had crashed. I'm sure that if you were to upload your dxdiag then we would be able to help you further :). I don't know if you'd be happy to give this a try whilst waiting for a response but try increasing your pagefile to see if that helps as this kind of problem is usually caused by the RAM being used up or you could give this a try: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...asing-ui-memory-usage-on-windows-linux.63043/


    As for the explanation as to why such a thing occurs, it's due to PA using a separate program for the UI side of things and so if it crashes for whatever reason then the whole screen becomes as such a spectator as you can see what's happening but you've got no control over it.

    When you were playing this match were you playing with a local server or playing online - reason I ask is to narrow down the cause of the problem.
  3. infowars

    infowars Member

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    Oh, local, I was playing a galactic war game.

    Next time I'll get a dxdiag for you, but if I alt f4, or three finger salute to close it with task manager, will it still be there?
  4. Clopse

    Clopse Post Master General

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    Post your dxdiag please. You use or ever use any mods?

    Yeah you can rejoin the game if you cntrl alt delete.
  5. s03g

    s03g Member

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    Depends on what you mean by will it still be there, the dxdiag will be but the game won't be - no matter how you closed it for a galactic war whereas if you run the server by itself then that's another matter although it doesn't work for a galactic war I believe although I could be wrong.

    @clopse I just tried out what you had suggested and it didn't work in regards to closing the game through the task manager (curiosity killed the cat kind of thing lol).
  6. thetrophysystem

    thetrophysystem Post Master General

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    This much of the bug I would describe, if familiar indeed, as:

    "You are still using an outdated UI mod."
  7. infowars

    infowars Member

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    Next time it happens I'll post DXdiag. I checked, I had two server mods enabled (PAMM shows them as selected) that's commander regen and popcorn unit balance but I don't think either of them work in galactic war?

    And my system has 4gb of ram so it tells me I shouldn't be running a server. Aren't I doing that, technically, when I host my own single player game? Unless there's some online version of galactic war. I dunno how any of this works. I only found out today you can use the chronocam ingame and do a picture in picture
  8. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    Well, technically yes, I suppose, but the difference is that the server is running at Uber and not on your own computer. So it's not eating up your RAM and CPU. It all goes through the internet in that case.

    Also, you are correct. Server mods stay inactive during Galactic War.
  9. infowars

    infowars Member

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    completed the game in 48 minutes. Tried to rewind the chronocam to see the last few minutes of the game (also so I could screenshot a spherical ball of wreckage, all that was left of a planet that got asteroid-ed/smashed) and the game just up and dies on me. Not even a win 7 notification saying "Did you notice your program crashed recently?"
  10. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    Sounds like it's time to post that DxDiag.txt then. (Press <Win>+R, type "dxdiag", press "Save All Information..." and upload the resulting file here)
  11. infowars

    infowars Member

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    Ah, didn't this time but next time I will. Will PAMM be affecting it at all? I have tried without but honestly I find it bloody annoying typing my password in each time when I want to play a game.
  12. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    You don't need to wait for the dxdiag-thing. It's just a file containing info about your system, such as hardware and drivers. It's independent of whatever program is running at the time.

    PAMM shouldn't affect it. All it does launch PA with an extra parameter containing a login cookie of sorts. Although there was something going on for a while with Windows 7 and the offline server(, which has since been fixed). So you can try to see if it matters, but probably not.
    cwarner7264 likes this.
  13. infowars

    infowars Member

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    Ah, right so. Here it is. I thought it'd have some sort of memory dump summary file.

    Attached Files:

  14. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    Ah, no. Those memory dumps get automatically uploaded to Uber when PA crashes for debugging purposes.

    I notice you have a very small page file. That's likely the cause of the crashes because it can mean that PA has run out of memory and therefore dies. Especially, since you only have 4GB of actual RAM, the OS really needs to be able to resort to virtual memory. Try increasing the page file to 12 GB or something like that. The page files can be spread out over several disks, but try to keep it on only one drive and disable it for the others. That's because sometimes Windows has issues with small page files, even when larger ones are available on other drives.
  15. infowars

    infowars Member

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    the small page file is due to it being on an SSD, but I'll increase it, see what happens.
  16. infowars

    infowars Member

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    Huh, that's strange. I hadn't set an amount for it. I must have forgotten to do that this time round. But anyway, it's done now. I'll be adding new ram to my shopping list.
  17. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    Neat. Let us know if that fixes it.

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