Hi,

it has been for around 1 month now that I experience weird crashes while playing Natural Selection. Usually after half to one hour of normal gameplay but sometimes even just 20 seconds after a reboot, NS just crashes and leaves me with a Dr. Watson Report. I hear the sound looping when Dr. Watson pops up. Before this started to happen, NS just ran fine since 1.04. Weird thing is that DoD and other mods run just fine, only NS crashes. I own a copy of Counterstrike stand-alone.

I run Natural Selection on
AMD XP 1800+
Gigabyte 7VRXP 2.0 MB with VIA KT333 Chipset
512 MB DDR
2*80 GB Western Digital HDD in Raid 1 mode
Radeon 8500LE with 64 MB
Soundblaster Live Value
Windows 2000 pro SP4, kept up to date


Nothing is overclocked, bios settings are standard. I am connected to the internet by DSL via a linux router and a Realtek RTL8029 NIC. I have latest drivers installed for all components. NS runs in OpenGL mode at 1024*768, 16 bit.

I already tried the following things to solve my problem:

- formatted HD and reinstalled windows
- reinstalled NS
- reinstalled Steam
- disabled the sound card and used the onboard unit
- ran an 8 hour memory check
- checked if any fans are not working
- installed drivers from 2 months ago for the VIA chipset, the graphics card and the NIC
- changed to D3D
- changed to 800x600 resolution
- update the virus scanner and ran a complete virus scan
- ran a complete spybot s&d scan
- disabled the resident virus scanner

Of course, nothing helped.
I really dont know what else I could do...

You certainly have run the list of typical fixes and suggestions.

Have you run any programs to clean the registry? I use NSW 2003 which comes with registry cleanup and you would be amazed how many problems that it found. After that first run it only finds an occasional one.

If you haven't tried, here is link to a program that looked like it got good reviews, but there are other programs. CNET.com is a good place for d-loads.

http://download.com.com/3000-2094-10238575.html

One very big caution!!! Be careful very careful screwing around with registry. You can make a boat anchor quickly. Make sure you have a backup of registry.

Good luck.

thanks, but it didn't help...

What are your CPU/Case temps like?
Maybe it's over heating?

Just a suggestion...

Same problem here.
My first guess is that it's an always changing steam + beta NS problem.
Last time I was always crashing on exit, then steam updates and now I'm always crashing in game instead.
I assume that once both products mature some together, these types of bugs/errors will be ironed out. VALVe's lack of communication doesn't help much either. Give it a year or two.

I added -heapsize 65536 to the halflife launch options and the crashing seems to have subsided for now.

Nope, seems like the heapsize fix was a fluke.

Maybe try a larger heap?
You have the RAM, shoot for 128mb of Heap maybe?

Also make sure you have the latest drivers for your sound/video...
Also, in past I've heard problems, not with NS in particular.. but with SB Live cards in general and gaming ... depending on driver versions, etc.

I don't know, I've never had a problem with NS except on the quit locking up ...
But now I do a stopsound quit...

I'm running an AMD 2500XP+ Barton w/ASUS A7N8X Deluxe + ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 and at 1600x1200 full detail/sound and NS runs smoothly and perfectly under Windows 2000 w/SP4 up2date...

I'd try a larger heapsize first, but personally I only have half a gig of RAM myself and I never have to do anything special for CS, NS, etc...

Next, I'd look at sound drivers IMO, as it's locking and looping sound?
Maybe even disable your sound and give it a run?

I tried and ran 3dmark03 today several times in a row... no crashes.
CPU/Case Temperature was 44/40 °C at most... so thats really not much.

@JViz: could you please post your specs? That way we could see if we have some device in common that could be responsible for the trouble...

btw, i also experienced those in game crashes only after the crashes at the map end didn't occur anymore...

I am going to try that heapsize thingy too, at 64 and 128 megs, as well as disabling sound.

it seems to me we have the same problem made a post about it a few days ago.. though its not only ns for me its other games aswell.. just that ns is worst as its unplayable.

and for me the crashes isnt random.. i getting crashes everytime a new map is started.. and my sound isnt looping its only very noisy!

i have been contacting support from where i bought my comp and if i get it to work thanks to them ill be sure to tell you =)

I find that moving the "preparing to start half life" window around a bit will crash ns when its starting up. Try not moving the mouse till it starts up fully.

hey barky i have the same problem. sept it just crashes normaly 5mins in the game with repeated sound. dunno why. i cleaned my pc and am now running it with a big fan facing in my pc to see if its heat.. i have all updated sound drivers and graphics drivers. the fan stops battlefeild from freezing and hopefully half-life and its mods i hope so or im gonna buy a new pc lol.

suprise suprise the fan didnt work with natural selection or other mods heh. relly anoying meas i just got steam! i relly dnt know anymore i have atculy triued everything but its strange how i never used to have the problem i used to be able to play ns for hours on end! now i cant im starting to think if its a driver or something incompatible installed thats making it go rong.

If you are running XP try this:

-right click My Computer and select properties.
-Select Advanced
-select performance options
-click on advanced tab
-click "change" in virtual memory

In the page file section select custom and set both to 3x your RAM. Example: I have 376 RAM so both Initial and Max are set to 1128.

See if that helps.

i'm running win2k but i tried it anyway... it didn't help though.

The problem is within NS, not your computer. I see people crash sometimes and it's not just one person, it's usually multiple and it happens at the same time.

hmm when I crash Ii'm the only one to do so... im sure of that because I had those crashes in clan games

Also, it happens that often that if all people crashed as much as I do, nobody would be playing NS anymore I think.

But I agree that I believe the problem to be within NS or rather a combination of NS and my computer, because I can run 3dmark and even DoD for hours and never experience any crash.

Okay my ns been crashing since beta 2. All random, sometimes 5 min game sometime 1 hour. First my game locks up with repeated sounds. Then this Half life launcher error comes up telling me they encountered an error and had to shut down. Anyone know how to fix this, please someone I really need to fix this. I tried virus scan, spyware scan, reinstalling.

Could we get any help here please ? I didnt give any specs of my computer but the guy that made this did. Any ideas? these crashes are happening earlier and earlier into the game. I've updated my video drivers, even my sound now.

Ah, I had nothing but problems running ME. Upgraded to XP and many problems went away. If you got the cash get XP Home or Pro.

I run Win2k, not ME. Taberif, could you please post your specs?

update: I disabled the sound card in the hardware menu. Still crashes.

I run a question and just a question. Could ns not the steam, be crashing from the cpu being overheated as in to shutdown some programs to work the cpu less(shutdown program = cooling of cpu a little)? Someone with computer knowledge and experience please.

Why don't you just try it yourself instead of not contributing at all to a possible solution and asking for advice in such a demanding way? The people here are not getting paid by you, they help because they want to.

Concerning my crash problem, I've given up. Even changing the graphics card and RAM didn't help. Seems that's it between me and NS until I get a new computer

Take out the sound card, it may be a IRQ prob

Go to this site and it gives a few tweeks which may help.

http://hcmotorsports.com/6/ubb.x?m=5077071...0511&f=36270416

It may be a memory leak in the game itself. i had this issues with plantside alot. its normally fixed by the plantside DEVS 2 days after ive spent 4 weeks fixing it though

so heres what i learned, messing with your virtual memory can fix the issue but even so if its a leak then at any moment the game can chrash and u should hear a bleep or another sound. depending on your software u will in some way get a message "halflife has caused an error in halflife and halflife will now close" basically its some fault in the game, meaning certain players will chrash out frequently.

go to RUN, msconfig. ok and select advanced or any tab to being up a menu, in this u should see your virtual memory amount windows has set. if u screw your PC up with this a boot in safe mode should allow u to alter any thing u did wrong.

another tip is that if your pc has a sleep button slam that 10 or so times and u may become unstuck. but as halflife has chrashed u will be booted outta halflife and very confused whatching your pc power up and down for a few moments. after this u should be able to rejoin NS and keep playing.

just hope the NS team know how to find memory leaks

Lightning1, I used the settings you suggested but I couldn't start any programs while running them.

Nevertheless, thanks to everybody who tried to help me, I appreciate your efforts.

PS: I noticed that these crashes now occur in every half-life mod, even plain vanilla half-life. Just for the record.

http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/in...ic=69749&st=0&#

I found a fix for what sounds like a similar problem. I hope that helps.

Thanks a lot, crashes got significantly lesser but some still occur. I had to use no acceleration at all for both mic and speakers though, and the sound is a bit choppy in NS, but that's better than nothing.

correction: with hardware acceleration for the sound card off, I dont hear looping sounds anymore, but HL (and NS) still crash without a big difference. Maybe it was just luck that allowed me to play a longer time yesterday.

well at least youre getting somewhere, sounds like the sound card. what card you got

I have a SB Live Value (Emu10k1 Chip). But I already disabled it and used the onboard sound unit of my mobo which was also a creative chip (ct4830 I believe).
And the crashes didn't really lessen, the only change is no more sound looping.

I seem to be having the same problem. It just crashes a bunch and I do the ctrl-alt-delete thing and close hl.exe. I have a SB Audigy 2 Platinum, so probably its just SB cards being stupid. But it could be Radeon with their **** drivers (I have a 9000 pro). They seem to stink quite constantly. Can't run half of the programs I want them to. Everyone else here have Radeons, or is it just SB cards?

I'm inclined to think this may be a soundblaster related problem.

I'm getting this now and this is the first time any version has crashed on my machine specifically since pre 1.0!

My Card is an SB Live 5.1 (cheap arse version).

My Drivers are 5.1.2535.0 (Default Windows Drivers I think)

I may try upgrading my drivers and see if they work better.

I have a Radeon 8500LE and a SB Live, but any of them have to do something with the crashes. I took both out of my computer and it still crashed in Half-Life.

Well given the last time you tried one of my suggestions, I wouldn't blame you if you don't try this.

Rather than reinstalling Steam, have you tried deleting the ClientRegistry.blob in your C:/Program Files/Steam folder? (back it up on a disk if you like, or leave in recycle bin)

With your posts it seems that there is something corrupt in some file(s) and this will update Steam without going thru complete reinstall.

Also, in the Games menu, right click on the Steam games and select properties. Make sure under automatic updates that they are always up-to date.

Same problem here as well. It does appear to be sound related and cropped up after the last couple beta releases. Unfortunately, since I have an nForce2 mobo I have to use the **** Asus sound driver instead of the nVidia supplied one or my sound gets all **** up (static etc ) in NS as well. I guess I'm just between a rock and a hard place.

It has only happened in NS for me so I hesitate to call it a steam problem, though after their nifty crash on exit bug I guess anything is possible.

I noticed it on NS first, too, but it seems to have spread onto other mods. Now even plain vanilla half-life crashes. But these crashes are rather inconsistent, yesterday I played one hour without a crash (which then came nevertheless). So it might well be that you just didn't notice the crashes in other games. It took me quite a while to notice, too.

BTW, is there anybody here who could make something out of Dr. Watson's logs? The Dr. Watson report states in some line that there is an error, but I don't understand anything of it.

lightning1: Never mind, I didn't have much of a problem when I tried out your suggestions. I just switched back to the previous settings and everything worked fine (except Half-Life, but I already knew that).
I tried out removing the clientregistry.blob, but it didn't help either. Thanks for your help anyway.

I thought that maybe a copy of a part of the Dr Watson log would help:


eax=1443ffb4 ebx=056d13c4 ecx=00000006 edx=056d1010 esi=14433638 edi=00000120
eip=14296a92 esp=0012e92c ebp=1443dd8c iopl=0 nv up ei ng nz na pe cy
cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003b gs=0000 efl=00200283


Funktion: <nosymbols>
14296a78 d94004 fld dword ptr [eax+0x4] ds:14f59e9a=????????
14296a7b d94008 fld dword ptr [eax+0x8] ds:14f59e9a=????????
14296a7e d9c1 fld st(1)
14296a80 d8ca fmul st,st(2)
14296a82 dcc0 fadd st(0),st
14296a84 dc2d20603d14 ds:143d6020=3ff0000000000000
fsubr qword ptr [vgui::ProgressBar::`vftable'+0x27c (143d6020)]
14296a8a d9c1 fld st(1)
14296a8c d8ca fmul st,st(2)
14296a8e dcc0 fadd st(0),st
14296a90 dee9 fsubrp st(1),st
ERROR ->14296a92 d919 fstp dword ptr [ecx] ds:00000006=????????
14296a94 ddd8 fstp st(0)
14296a96 ddd8 fstp st(0)
14296a98 d94008 fld dword ptr [eax+0x8] ds:14f59e9a=????????
14296a9b d8480c fmul dword ptr [eax+0xc] ds:14f59e9a=????????
14296a9e d900 fld dword ptr [eax] ds:1443ffb4=3f7fe68a
14296aa0 d84804 fmul dword ptr [eax+0x4] ds:14f59e9a=????????
14296aa3 dec1 faddp st(1),st
14296aa5 dcc0 fadd st(0),st
14296aa7 d95910 fstp dword ptr [ecx+0x10] ds:00b19eec=????????
14296aaa d94008 fld dword ptr [eax+0x8] ds:14f59e9a=????????
14296aad d808 fmul dword ptr [eax] ds:1443ffb4=3f7fe68a

Its not just a SB card problem, I have a hercules card, same problem.

disable eax?

I notice it also usually happens if I hit the ~ ingame. Seems to freeze right as it switches to the menu mode.

Based on your log banky the dump is hapening around a bit of code that processes the VGUI.

Does the crash occur when you bring up your menu or are devouring anyone?

By the looks of things some variables aren't being set which is causing problems.

come to think of it, I think it happens often when I fire, both as marine or alien. I didn't notice any connection with bringing up a menu, though.

I have the save problem

NS crash after 1 hour or 10 sec !?

I try different version of driver for my graphic card (radeon 9700 pro), and update my audio driver (gigabytes 7VAXP ultra motherboard)

I also reinstall XP, Steam..... same problem

I try all the options of NS ( EAX on off, ........)

Problems begin with NS3.0 beta 2 or 3 i think


HELP ME please

The dump log does seem to indicate a possible issue with the way the VGUI is being handled. I also always get a white cursor (windows cursor) frozen dead center as soon as it occurs as well.

when I start Windowx XP i can play 5-10mn after NS crash (no crash with CS or other games : only NS)

After the first crash if i don t reboot windows I join a server and usually it s crash after 1 or 2 mn

It crash randomly : bite a rines, jumping, building .......


HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP !!

This problem seems to be quite widespread.

I get it too. For me, it randomly crashes, with or without the looping sound (although when the sound does loop I can usually get back to the desktop without restarting - the colours are just messed up).

Just for the record this is my system:

Windows XP Home
AMD XP 1800+
768 Mb RAM
Geforce FX 5200 128 Mb
Vinyl AC'97 Audio

I've tried tweaking my system and fiddling with the sound, to no avail.

I was wondering if this has been recognised by the NS team as a problem and if they have had any ideas as to how to fix it?

using win2k...theres your problem buddy...JK

if your gonna use an old O/S might as well go with 98, its been pretty good to me until i got XP but ANYWAY...

is it only crashing with NS? or all steam games? what about NON steam games? does it crash too?

if its only steam...then try a clean install i gues...im not a real fan of WIN2k or NT, i think they both suck...(take note that I think they suck, and my opinion can or can not mean anything to you)

the problem affects all games launched via steam, and even a complete reinstall does not help. So as it seems to be a general steam problem, it is likely not to be fixed.