Constant game chrashes and freezing

[ClaytonRISING]

Whelp, I just updated to .05 about a week ago and since then I am getting constant “not responding” and crashes. It happens seemingly randomly; walking down a road, in any way interacting with an NPC (even if it’s not directly acting with them, sometimes them being on screen crashes it) and other non-specific things like picking something up. It’s rather annoying. The only thing I’ve modified about the game has been adding a couple new professions, but even if I make a character that doesn’t use them it crashes. I really don’t understand, but it’s killing the enjoyment of my game. Some of the times the screen will go partially black, as if I cant see, then crashes.

Also, whenever I load up a character after a crash I have all my items and stats, but the map reverts back to me not having explored anything.

Please, any advice would be appreciated. It’s killing the game for me.

EDIT: I just did a fresh install, will play around and see if it crashes or if there are any problems. Forgot to mention that I changed my viewpoint width and height, would that be any cause of crashing?

[Soron]

If you’re having NPC crash issues, I’d suggest turning NPCs off for now. They’re known to be buggy, and might be causing more crashes than you expect.

Picking stuff up… that’s a new one, I think. If you’re able to determine reliable reproduction steps, that would be helpful.

[ClaytonRISING]

I turned off NPCs and auto-save. I think that did the trick, as far as I can tell. From what I can collect it seems that the auto-save is causing all the crashes I have been having. I tried searching the forum for any information regarding this, but I have found none.

[Soron]

Hrm, we HAVE been getting some reports recently that autosave is causing some issues, but it’s mostly data loss, not actually crashes.

One possibility is that your data got corrupted slightly by one of the earlier crashes, which then lead to further instability, but that’s honestly just a guess.

[ejseto]

The issue is that autosave doesn’t save the map, artifacts or master file. So if you haven’t done a hard save, the maps.txt, master.gsav, and artifacts.gsav never get created at all. Then, if you’re on a mission, the game crashes since you have a non-existent mission.

[BeardtongueV1]

Hmm… I’ve had the freezing problem before, but this is a first:
I seem to have encountered a “dead zone” on the map which I can’t enter without the game freezing indefinitely.
I’ve turned off random NPCs and auto-save, and I’m getting consistent results. This is interesting…

[ClaytonRISING]

[quote=“BeardtongueV1, post:6, topic:1347”]Hmm… I’ve had the freezing problem before, but this is a first:
I seem to have encountered a “dead zone” on the map which I can’t enter without the game freezing indefinitely.
I’ve turned off random NPCs and auto-save, and I’m getting consistent results. This is interesting…[/quote]

I’ve had those same “dead zone” issues as you. But mine weren’t very specific; it happen around a lot of things outside of town. Mainly Public Works places.

[vultures]

Also, whenever I load up a character after a crash I have all my items and stats, but the map reverts back to me not having explored anything.

In a nutshell, you're losing data written on the hard drive. I did some testing of my own, just to have some insight on the caching/writing issues I've read/stumbled upon and pushed some data onto the page file; also, I intentionally slowed the CPU a notch. Sequence for the 32bit Windows compiled version is: -calculate space for the mem/page end -close the game -save data on the hard drive -close mem/page writing -exit .exe -instruct process to verify and clear all inputs -exit process

Being a classic 32 bundle this game, and a classic PC my end, any problem referring to illegal instructions or page faults is a system issue. If you have a FAT32 filesystem, be careful when combining resident apps for software drivers and heavy disk/mem dependent processes such as cataclysm.exe