Game Crashes and flashing screens

[Mobhack]

We already state in the manual to turn off unecessary programs and background tasks.

It may be useful though to figure out which common background tasks cause problems, if any.

A standard one that causes the game to go slow and jittery for me at least is Norton's sheduled weekly anti-virus scan. (the clue whn playing full screen is the hard disk starts chittering away like crazy !. This anti-virus scan does NOT seem to realise that the end user is currently playing a full screen DirectX game (I have had it go off when playing e.g. the Sims2).

the other suspects I have is thewindows disk catalogue function (A worthless item one can turn off). This trolls your hard drive to make searching for items allegedly faster (though I have not noticed any speed decrease since I turned it off).
To turn off this catalogue function. Open explorer, find the drive and right click, under properties (General) is a check box for "Allow indexing service to ... for fast disk searching" - uncheck that, and you have better general performance, with only a slight (IMHO) slwdown in searching.

Xp tends to do these things in "idle" mode - and it seems to consider a full-screen DirectX game "idle mode" (it is blind to the process?), whereas 98 did not.

Cheers
Andy

[Yorick]

I've had the same problems as described in earlier posts, but the sound problem has been solved (deleted the mmswitch.ax).

The problem with the game going 'slow' might be solved by changing the delay time in the Misc options, at least it did for me!

Yorick
(New to this forum)

[RVPERTVS]

What kind of file is mmswitch.ax?

[Mobhack]

RVPERTVS said:
What kind of file is mmswitch.ax?

try a search of the forum on "mmswitch" - the main thread where this is mentioned is here post

Cheers
Andy

[RVPERTVS]

Well, I´ve never experienced a single crash, though I have audio "hicups" now and then mostly during attacks, and sometimes the game seems like about to crash or freeze because of these, but it hasn´t yet. They appear about 1 time in every 6 or 7 attacks.

However I would like to fix these hicups but I don´t know a single thing about programing, codecs, drivers or whatever. Attached is my dxdiag print, I hope you Andy or someone could take a look at it and tell me if there´s something wrong or what can I do to improve my audio performance in order to fix the issue I´m talking about. I know I have the latest driver installed for my machine.

I would like to fix the issue without converting to WAV, because I know it must be a configuration issue only, because the game runs without this issue on my sisters, and I know my machine is better.

I tried turning off the mmswitch.ax thing but I got the "can´t find the module" window, meaning I don´t have that aplication.

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance

[Mobhack]

"attacks" means what exactly - when your antivirus pops up a hacker warning?. When you shoot at something in the game?.

Hmmm (thinking cap on) does your sister's machine have Nero installed (it is mainly a CD burning package, but does all sorts of other things including audio and video playback now I think? - anyway there are loads of Nero items in that file that do not seem to me to be about simply CD-burning!!). If not - and you have the Nero installation CD to reinstall it ! - maybe try uninstalling Nero and see what happens?

Myself - I would go the goldwave route, and convert to WAV as it is a Windows native format, even if it is larger in terms of disk space impact. MP3 on Windows seems to cause too much grief to bother, if one is using it for mult-voice sound streams, as several third party replacement CODECS (or some integrated or low end sound cards) seem to only handle single MP3 streams. Which is OK for watching a movie or playing a song, but not for games.

We issued WW2 with WAV format sound instead of MP3 because of this (and added 50 or so MB of bloat to a ~100 MB installer).

The WinSPMBT sound system will also handle any other windows standard sound format, so .wma, .mid etc should work fine if you have problems with WAV. But we have only had one report of problems with WAV - that person (WW2 user) solved it with conversion to .wma.

Cheers
Andy

[RVPERTVS]

Andy:

Attack means shooting at something or taking shots in the game. I have NOD32 virus protection, and I always disable it before playing.

Both laps (my sister and mine) have Nero installed and I don´t have the instalation CD. Is there any way to disable it just like I do with AV without unistalling? I just make sure it isn´t on the task manager, haven´t been able to find another way.

I didn´t know about ww2 sounds been relased in WAV format, I thought the extra size was because of the new scenarios, and now that you mention ww2 has been running smoothly.