Game Crashes and flashing screens

[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.

[dita]

Playing WinSPMBT (the cd version) since it arrived. No crashes until today. Playing a email game, ended my turn and whilst watching the opponents artillery land (not fast artillery) get a windows error message "WinVFX8.dll" performed an illegal operaion! Send/not send to microsoft?

Unfortunately, I have no other info, I could attach my turn file to this post (Obviously, I`ll need to post the password for the file as well) I`ll happily do this is it helps.

[DRG]

I would suggest if this is the one and only time your computer has crashed while a game was in progress then perhaps it was something else running in combination with the game that caused a conflict which caused the crash. Computers are not bullet prove. Things happen. Once in awhile mine won't load all the background programs at start up and hangs up. It happens. There is nothing to debug unless this happens every single time you try to end your turn.

Don

[dita]

Thanks for the reply, thats what I was putting it down too, just an unfortunate series of events that led to the one off crash.

[Mobhack]

As it is WinVFX that crashed

a) It is an external library, that handles all the GFX. So I cannot debug or change it any. (I do have the source, but the main code is in Microsoft assembler, and the version of MASM is old, and seems no longer obtainable).

b) If it is WinVFX that is dying, that points to something to do with DirectX, or your video card etc. Possibly video RAM left locked by a previous game?

One point to mention with DirectX, is that it is often not a good idea to play game A, then attempt play game B in the same session without first rebooting your PC.

This is especialy true with any game that crashed - which I find a common occurence with Civilisation IV (or whatever the latest version is), it is crash city with ATI based cards it seems! . Even with a 128MB card, it crashes with a complaint about "insufficient video RAM". When it does so, it seems to have left all the video memory on the card locked, and so other games (or anything else wanting to use accelerated graphics) complain. Any save game will then load and usually play OK after a reboot of the PC, so I suspect a leak where parts of the VRAM (or off screen RAM used for video work ?) are being left locked, as this one appears towards the end of long sessions of play usually.

I also find that it is best to reboot the PC after a session of Sims2 as well, crash or no crash, if wanting to play another game.

Just as a matter of interest - had you done any graphics card intensive stuff or directX or video media (e.g. playing video will use DirectX or Directshow/play with e.g windows media Player thingy) in the same session (since reboot) before loading up that game that crashed?.

Any media players active in the background (Including say a streaming video web page)?. It is not the best of ideas to try any sort of directX game with a media player session (or web page with streaming stuff) in the background. They may well reserve VRAM even if "idle". So both applications will be "fighting" for the same resources most likely!. (and a streaming webpage will probably not be idle, even if minimised to the task bar). Possibly includes RSS feeds and so on.

Cheers
Andy