Supreme Commander: FA Crashing

NachT

NachT

NachT

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The game crashes / closes after playing it for about 30 - 50 mins. It does this 90% of the time, I've only managed to have a proper game of it and end a level once.

I thought it might have been Vista 64, so I booted into XP 32bit I also have on the same machine, installed FA and it still crashes.

All my drivers are up to date, FA is at the latest patch 3599 I think it is?

I'm clueless as to whats cause it to crash / suddenly close. It's even given me a BSOD twice.

No other game does this, just FA.

My specs are:

E6600 @ 3.4GHz
8800 GTX
4GB RAM
EVGA 680i motherboard
 
Do you use XFire? If you do, turn it off. That caused problems with me.

Is your system stable? How about temps? Is the game crashing, or is it a BSOD?
 
Are you playing multiplayer, skirmishes against AI, or the single player campaign? If it's skirmishes then SupCom/FA both have issues where they crash when there's too many units (because of the application address space 2GB limit), but that should only happen when there's tons of units, high unit limit and a long way into a game, not after 30 mins. If it is that then there's a fix by MadBoris which you'll find on GPGnet forums.

Otherwise I would suspect some mod as the cause, maybe do a fresh install, uninstalling and deleting all the games folders (including the one in your docs folder).

If none of that works maybe something is overheating or you have a faulty stick of ram. Temps are easy to check and there's free mem check programs available.
 
fish99 said:
Are you playing multiplayer, skirmishes against AI, or the single player campaign? If it's skirmishes then SupCom/FA both have issues where they crash when there's too many units (because of the application address space 2GB limit), but that should only happen when there's tons of units, high unit limit and a long way into a game, not after 30 mins. If it is that then there's a fix by MadBoris which you'll find on GPGnet forums.
Click to expand...

AH so that's what I might have been in my old Vista x64 install, it was super duper stable in XP but always crashed after about an hour of playing in vista.
Ty will take a look for that fix for vista :).
 
Here's the link-

http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=2382

It happens in both XP and Vista, but it will happen sooner in vista. This fix is for SupCom, it modifies your SupCom exe to make it '3GB aware' (application address space, as opposed to the default 2 GB) and then you add a couple of values to your windows boot.ini to make the OS '3GB aware'.

However GPG included the fix in FA so you don't need to modify your FA exe, but you do still need to do the boot.ini fix. Just go into 'control panel -> system -> advanced -> startup and recovery -> edit' and then add the values

/3GB /Userva=2900

so the last line becomes

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /FASTDETECT /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /3GB /Userva=2900
 
3gb?
I use 4 gb though in Vista...

But the last time I played it in vista it was normal supcom though not FA.

And my xp only sees 2 gb of RAM when I enable memory remap in bios ( which is needed else I only have 3 gb in vista)...
So is there any point in doing it for xp since i have 2gb only there anyway?


This is my current boot line :

Code: 
;
;Warning: Boot.ini is used on Windows XP and earlier operating systems.
;Warning: Use BCDEDIT.exe to modify Windows Vista boot options.
;
[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WININT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WININT="Microsoft Windows XP Professional Intel" /FASTDETECT /USEPMTIMER /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /KERNEL=KERNEL1.EXE
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional SiS" /FASTDETECT
 
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Application address space isn't the same thing as either memory or swap file.

To be honest you should read MadBoris' post and the instructions that come with the download, since it explains it much better than I can. The instructions I posted above were actually XP only, I've only ever used this under XP and didn't realize the procedure was different under Vista. He gives full instructions there for both 32 and 64 bit Vista, and he also links to a Microsoft Vista hotfix that helps with the problem. MadBoris knows his stuff, he wrote the SupCom Core Optimizer and other SupCom/FA tools.

Still surprised you're hitting the problem 30 mins into a game - you must have tons of AI and be using a big map. Of course another way to avoid the crashes is stick to 500 unit limit, 20*20 or smaller maps and one or two AIs maximum.

You might also like to consider using Duncanes FA stock AI fix which fixes some memory leaks with the AI, stops the sim-speed slowing down so much, and makes them play more intelligently (warning: the AI is also harder) -

http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=23929
 
Last edited:
Thanks for all the replys guys, I don't use XFire.

I'll try out all those hotfixes and things then try and have a game! :)


I was playing on the biggest map with a unit limit of 1000, with 8 plays on skirmish.
 
I had a problem very similar to this in Vista 64.
My Supcom and FA seemed to run OK in XP (but didn't play for that long) but would crash randomly in Vista 64 after between 10 and 30 minutes.

I tried all the hotfixes and the 2gb RAM fix and none of them worked for me.

Are you overclocking your video card at all?

If so revert back to stock and see if that fixes it. If it does try lowering your o/c until it's stable.

This worked for me - basically my o/c in Vista was too high - either the drivers or Vista itself seemed to need a lower o/c.

V.
 
seems to be a lot of problems with both flavours of vista (32 and 64) and 4gb of RAM, I just upgraded from a totally stable 2GB to A now crashing only in games 4GB (and only mass effect so far but havent tested that many) will try supcom tonight have iit installed but not played while having 4GB.
 
After reading the last few pages of that thread it seems like there's issues with FA crashing in Vista on big maps with lots of AI which aren't fixed by the MadBoris tweak.

TBH though there's no point playing 80*80, 8 AI, 1000 unit limit anyway since even if it didn't crash it would unplayable. I'm not talking about framerates but simulation speed. An hour long game would actually take 5-6 hrs to play, everything would be moving in slow motion and build times would be 5-6x normal, even on a quad core. I've had this happen with just 2 AI on an 80*80 so god knows how bad it would be with 7-8 AIs.

I would definitely try Duncanes AI fix and make sure you have vista SP1, but apart from that there's nothing you can do really (except switch to XP 32 bit and then do the MadBoris fix) apart from play smaller maps, less AI and smaller unit limits. TBH a 500 unit limit should be enough for any sort of game, you just (destroy and) replace your T1 stuff with T2 and then your T2 stuff with T3.

One more note, if you have a 32-bit OS and use the /3GB enabler, it makes some source games unstable (esp HL2 EP1).
 
FA seems to be much more stable on Vista.

I had the >2gb issue on Vista 32. Oddly, increasing the size of the pagefile seemed to sort it. Can now do long Skirmish's on 81x81 maps with 4 AI and 1,000 unit cap using mods and Sorian AI.
 
FA is already large address aware (unlike old supcom) so can access more than 2gb, if you have 64 bit it wont crash untill it tries to steal space from the os.
 
Just done some testing of my own, FA latest patch, Vista 64 + SP1, 4GB ram, 80*80 map, 8 random supreme AIs with me observing, and I let it play until game time reached 55 mins at which point the memory usage was 2.1 GB and it hadn't crashed. So I'm not convinced there's any problem with the game under Vista 64 afterall. I would look into temperatures and check your memory, assuming you have the latest FA patch and SP1.

Just for the record by that time the sim speed was -5 and it was taking roughly 5 second for 1 second of game time to pass (E6750@stock)., which made it pretty much unplayable.
 
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