50-50 Chance the UI will freeze in the first 10 minutes

Discussion in 'Support!' started by Jackbandanna, May 31, 2015.

  1. Jackbandanna

    Jackbandanna Active Member

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    So for the past few months, after the major update that caused the units to be invisible when reconnecting, I've been having the UI freeze up on me. It usually happens ~10minutes in and makes the entire UI worthless. Nothing is clickable, F5 does nothing, enter does not open the chat, but I can still see everything that is happening and the game still runs. Like me helplessly watching my base get steam rolled.

    The only way to fix this is to ctrl-alt-del out and end pa.exe, then restart the game. Leaving me behind everyone else by 5minutes as I restart the game and reload the planets which makes any prospects of winning unsalvageable.

    PA was running pretty well before this update, and it's never really been the same since. Making the game much less fun.

    How can I help to expose this problem?

    Windows 7
    ATI Radeon 4670
    AMD Athlon II X2 270

    1.3Mbit Internet

    Just have to wonder if it's my old card
    Last edited: May 31, 2015
  2. cultusmechanicus

    cultusmechanicus New Member

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    Same here, if you add --coherent-options="--single-process" to your PA.exe shortcut then it seems to help.
  3. Jackbandanna

    Jackbandanna Active Member

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    Thanks for the advice but I'm not exactly sure where to add that.
  4. cdrkf

    cdrkf Post Master General

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    If you use the official launcher, go into options top right, in the settings menu there is an option for 'command line options'. Add the switch in there (it needs the double hyphen btw).

    The other one you could try is '--softwareui' which will prevent the ui using your gpu for acceleration... Also I'm almost certain the issue is your graphics card- amd stopped doing driver updates for it in 2013. They still support the 5000 series and newer tough as these are all dx11 cards (4000 range was limited to dx10).

    I expect they will cease support for the 5 and 6 cards this year when dx12 and windows 10 come out (the hd7000 cards all support dx12 so should remain supported).
  5. cultusmechanicus

    cultusmechanicus New Member

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    You'd know if you needed --software-ui, there'd be horrible artifacting/ missing mouse cursor etc. Also, I've been running with --software-ui on since release (dubious Linux/ATI hybrid graphics :) ) and only needed the single-threading option since the last release. If you want to deliberately trigger a UI hang, all you need to do is scrub your mouse pointer over a build menu quickly... presumably there is some multi-threading deadlock happening that --single-thread prevents.
  6. Ralith

    Ralith Member

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    I'm having the same issue, except the game crashes to desktop with no error message when I try to reconnect. This is incredibly frustrating, as a game will be going fine and I'll just . I feel like PA would probably be better off if they just ditched Coherent UI entirely. I have SLI GeForce 970s, so it's not an old GPU problem.
  7. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    Could you try it without SLI? PA had some problems with that. I'm not sure if that ever got fixed.
  8. Jackbandanna

    Jackbandanna Active Member

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    --coherent-options="--single-process" does not seem to help but has an interesting effect.
    Instead of freezing when I'm click on a unit or click to build factories, it just freezes when I'm trying to select multiple units with a drag select. It acts like I'm not letting go of my left mouse button. Still freezes just the same, it's just triggered in a different way.

    --softwareui or --software-ui seems to do nothing as I the problems seems to be unchanged
  9. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    There is going to be a new version of the Coherent UI in PA soon that should address the freezing of the UI in Linux. Maybe that will help with your UI freezes too. It's due for the next PTE as far as I know.

    (And for other users that may come across this thread: the correct flag is --software-ui, not --softwareui)
  10. Jackbandanna

    Jackbandanna Active Member

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    Thanks for that info, and if that does not fix it I'll just get a newer graphics card as I need a different one of other reasons too.

    Thanks for the correct flag usage also.
    cdrkf likes this.

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