Greetings everyone, I have been playing, and trying to play, the game for about a month now. I bought the game from the Steam store. I have had no end of crashes, annoying problems, and frustration. For us old-timers, this game is what we have been wanting since TA. I applaud the efforts of Uber, and its staff. Now for the guts of it. After the updates recently, the Steam version became buggy to the extreme, leaving this old RTS veteran rather horked off, but being persistent, I started looking at the logs, forums, and whatever I could find to solve this problem of seemingly random "PA.exe has stopped working" crashes. One Steam update even deleted the file live_game_unit_alert.json file in the en-us folder at C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\Planetary Annihilation\media\ui\main\_i18n\locales\en-us, which caused the game not to run at all, copied the one from the dev folder into en-us, and that fixed it. After looking and scratching various anotomy, I stumbled on a forum post about the UberLauncher. I downloaded it, and ran it. Ah ha, the invisible window problem. I applied the "--software-ui" command, and installed the game with UberLauncher.exe. The packages downloaded and installed, so I fired it up expecting the usual crashes, in planet generation, etc. Low and behold my faithful readers, an amazing thing happened. IT WORKED and the Galactic War campaigns that had hit some sort of render/whatever impasse for various reasons, became playable. I have now played non-stop for 4 hours without a crash, out-of-memory error, renderer errors, or any other error. 1-4 planets at medium setting, windowed (I was watching resources and memory use). I was also able to use the various UI mods via PAMM in the UberLauncher version I could not in the Steam version So you know what the rig is that this is played on: Gigabyte GA-MA78LM-S2H motherboard Nvidia GT 420 PCIe video card 1gb 4gb DDR2-800 RAM Windows 7 DX 11 1TB HD, 12gb cache enabled I keep all my drivers up to date, and even though I knew they were, I re-checked them anyway. 3gb memory patch applied >>Obviously I am on the low end of the specs here and I know it<< Both versions are 75740 in Main Screen start PALauncher version is 2.00gb on disk, 6469 files on disk, 595 folders Steam version is 2.10gb on disk, 6745 files on disk, 599 folders PALauncher uses 8 CoherentUI instances in the Task Manager Steam uses 10-16 CoherentUI instances in Task Manager PA.exe via PALauncher uses at most 800mb of memory max playing PA.exe via Steam uses on average in excess of 1.2gb of memory max playing when it works. PA via UberLauncher hasn't had a "Lost Connection to server" error in 4 hours+ of play PA via Steam has one consistantly. There are obvious differences here. I tried the "disable steam overlay" option as suggested in a forum post in the Steam version, no change in behavior. I had even tried the deprecated "--coherent-options="--renderer-process-limit=6", which didn't help the Steam version in the least. So Uber whats the scoop on the differences? Why does a supposedly "Same" version game different in files/folders? With the holiday gifting season this is a major concern in stability and playability. Sincerely a concerned customer
One thing I forgot to add. At desktop no background progs/extraneous services, I have 3.0gb memory free The PALauncher version never dropped the free memory below 25% Steam would hog it all, until an out-of-memory error or hard fault
Launch the game directly from the .exe don't use the uber launcher or steam unless your updating, it will run even better again. Running the game directly from the .exe should reduce the coherantUI process amount by another 1 or 2 instances.
Completed a 59 battle campaign with no crashes or memory errors on the Uber Launcher version 75740. Stable 4+ hours at a time, 1 render error that didn't cause a crash, but had a lovely red grid for all 4 planets in that system. Unfortunately I playing against the red side, made for an entertaining hide-and-seek sort of fight. Now to find out what the major file differences are between the Uber and Steam versions. weeee!
Ran WinMerge on the directories of the 2 versions. There are notable differences for being the same version 75740
I have a thought on what might be happening here. Although I use Steam for other games I've always used the Uber Launcher for PA. I've noticed that the install folder used by the Uber launcher has changed about 3 times since the first Late Alpha build I tried to now. I gather you've had PA for a while- and I think the steam installation hasn't moved (since Steam lumps everything together in the same folder). That might suggest that there are old files in the steam version that Uber aren't expecting / accounting for (certainly old mod folders can really screw with PA- if it's there it tends to load it unless you add in the '--nomods' tag to force it to not mount them). As an experiment, have you considered deleting the entire steam installation for PA then reinstalling (via steam) and then doing your test / comparison? I have a feeling that might just resolve the problem.
Yep Did a wipe of Steam version, cleaned-up any traces, cleaned registry of it, and re-installed. Had the same problems as before. This was one of the reasons I wanted it to work, was for mods. The Steam version almost certainly has some directory/file mismatch going on. I started this thread hoping Uber would fix/acknowledge this, as I have seen far more complaints out on the 'net about the Steam version. BTW-saved Galactic War campaigns from the Steam --sometimes-- work, depends on what tech has been acquired. Case in point-one old campaign I had acquired the Sub Commander, he sits like a dumb stump when it is loaded in the Uber version. Ones acquired within the Uber version work fine
PA doesn't use Steam for mods. Instead we have the PA Mod Manager. Also, this should hopefully help to fix the steam overlay problem some people were having:
