Game Crashes and flashing screens - Page 7

21sec · #61 October 30th, 2005, 08:24 PM

I just got the CD version, and am having a problem. When I get to the main menu screen I can try and select anything and when I click on say editor nothing happens. I've waited a couple of minutes and still nothing happens. When I do the task master it has [not responding] next to WinSPMBT. This has happened in both windowed and full screen. Occasionally this does not happen, but 9 out of 10 times it does. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

BTW I'm running Windows 98, PIII 550mHz

Mobhack · #62 October 31st, 2005, 12:00 PM

Quote:

21sec said:
I just got the CD version, and am having a problem. When I get to the main menu screen I can try and select anything and when I click on say editor nothing happens. I've waited a couple of minutes and still nothing happens. When I do the task master it has [not responding] next to WinSPMBT. This has happened in both windowed and full screen. Occasionally this does not happen, but 9 out of 10 times it does. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

BTW I'm running Windows 98, PIII 550mHz

I'll assume the download version game ran fine, sound and all?

[If you did not try out the download game first - then try running with all sound off, including the interface click (page 2 of game options). I'll assume you have DirectX installed, but even so - start->run and entering dxdiag as the program to run there to test your DirectX settings may help]

Then I would try deinstalling, then reinstalling the CD version.

If this still keeps happening then
1) Deinstall, and then run the windows scandisk utily to defragment the drive, it will also find any lost clusters. Reinstall. Retry.

2) Same again - but this time try a surface check on the drive for any bad disk clusters. That test can take overnight to run, and on modern drives it is rare to find bad clusters.

3)If that has not sorted the problem, I would suspect a bad CD - return to shrapnel for a replacement. [ You can skip straight to this test by trying the installlation on a different machine - a friend's say - and if it works there, your box is the problem, if it fails, then it is likely a bad CD ]

Cheers
Andy

21sec · #63 October 31st, 2005, 02:36 PM

The download version had the same problem, but not as frequently. I turned off mouse click and was able to load a scenerio, but it froze almost immediately. I have since turned the sound fx off, and have not had any problems. Time to break down and get a new system though

Nerfix · #64 October 31st, 2005, 04:12 PM

The game crashes so much it's practicaly unplayable...

It happens both on windowed and fullscreen mode and quite often in deployment mode, though I have seen the game irritatingly often crash mid-game.

DRG · #65 October 31st, 2005, 04:35 PM

Quote:

Nerfix said:
The game crashes so much it's practicaly unplayable...

It happens both on windowed and fullscreen mode and quite often in deployment mode, though I have seen the game irritatingly often crash mid-game.

Read through all the posts in this thread and the "XP sound problems thread" and you should find the solution to your problem. The game is stable on 99% of the systems. You don't tell us what your OS is or your graphics card or if you are running it DirectX or GDI mode or even if you've tried any changes so we cannot help you beyond suggesting you read these threads to discover the solution. The first step would be press Start then Run then type DXDiag and see if there is a problem with Dx on your machine. Then check to see that you are using the most up to date driver for your graphics card. Those two suggestions have helped a lot of people get the game running

Don

Grey_Wolf · #66 November 1st, 2005, 04:30 PM

I had the game crash on my computer at home, but I swapped out the MP3's for WAV's and it's been rock solid ever since.

On another note, loaded the game onto my laptop and never had the game so much as flicker.

Cheers,
Wes

Guderdian · #67 December 14th, 2005, 07:29 AM

Downloaded WinSPMBT. Patched to 2.5. Managed to get it to work (XP). Can play scenarios without any problems. But when I want to go to the editor or play a battle the programm will crash to desktop. Before it crashes I very briefly can see the programm trying to build up a screen that is not the one it should be as shown in the game manual. (It includes a lever to select the type of battle instead of an arrow bar)

Anybody knows the problem and how to fix it?

Greetings

Guderdian

Mobhack · #68 December 14th, 2005, 10:25 PM

Quote:

Guderdian said:
Downloaded WinSPMBT. Patched to 2.5. Managed to get it to work (XP). Can play scenarios without any problems. But when I want to go to the editor or play a battle the programm will crash to desktop. Before it crashes I very briefly can see the programm trying to build up a screen that is not the one it should be as shown in the game manual. (It includes a lever to select the type of battle instead of an arrow bar)

Anybody knows the problem and how to fix it?

Greetings

Guderdian

Never heard of that one, at all. There is no "lever" to select the battle type. (See the game manual, "scenario editor) link for the correct picture).

The only thing I can think of is that you have a corrupt download or that you have installed an old SHP file from some other SP-series game into yours?. Or that you have some disk file problems.
- try downloading the files once more
- but before that, run the scandisk utility on your hard drive to fix any lost clusters, etc and then try reinstalling from the zips you already have once it has fixed any disk errors.

What are your system specs?. What version of DirectX etc?.

Did you download using some sort of "download manager"?.
What file size (exact byte count) for the files? (I don't have the install packages on this machine, but Don does and can check these for correct size - wrong file size=a corrupted download, for sure).

Cheers
Andy

Pepper · #69 December 14th, 2005, 11:17 PM

I'll add my info to this thread...

I have 2 different hardware profiles set-up on my machine (running win xp sp2). The first is normal and it loads all the various services that run under Windows. The second profile is my "gaming" profile that turns off pretty much every unnecessary service (if you scroll down to the chart called "power user" here http://web.archive.org/web/200411280...servicecfg.htm you will see which services I turn off).

When I play SPMBT under my gaming profile, it works like a charm, the only exception being an occasional blink that very infrequently sends me back to the desktop (but game is still running fine, must just hit the button again -- equivalent of alt-tabbing out).

However, if I play under my normal hardware profile, almost every time the game at some point flashes in a highly pixalated and weird color scheme. All smoke changes from the white/gray to colored pixels that look quite kaleidoscopic. Sometimes the entire screen changes to that state, sometimes it just remains the smoke, the text and the borders.

As noted above, I am using Win XP (Home) SP2. My vidcard is a Radeon X800 (AGP). My drivers and Direct X are all up to date and operate fine.

It appears quite strongly to me that the problem is one of these services that is running. While its not a problem for me (I simply reboot into my gaming profile), I would be willing to provide further information if you think it would help you troubleshoot the issue.

Mobhack · #70 December 14th, 2005, 11:42 PM

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