I can consistently crash the game so I need to reboot to play again

[silverkitty23]

...by loading this save and hitting "next turn". The "AI Turn..." adds 3 dots and then the program freezes. It doesn't crash to desktop, it just hangs. Killing it from Task Manager (even with admin privs) doesn't make it disappear, so I have to reboot to even start up SiS again

http://silverchat.com/~silver/sis/TinkerSave3-3.zip

[silverkitty23]

My guess is: you're gonna load it and hit "next turn" it's gonna work just fine, but since it freezes rather than crashes properly, I don't know how else to give feedback that might determine what's going on

[bjg]

Killing it from Task Manager (even with admin privs) doesn't make it disappear

If you can call the Task Manager your computer isn't crashed. Inability to kill the process makes the situation fishy because it shouldn't be happening on a "healthy" system. Are you killing the process or the application? Did you try the "End Process Tree" option?

[silverkitty23]

I call it crashing because the game crashes in such a way that I can't properly use my computer until I reboot. Yes, it's a stretch. Yes, technically the OS is running, but since I have to reboot, it's a dead system. But I'm not here to nitpick over vocabulary - can you just pretend I wrote whatever term you'd prefer in the title and move on?

End Process Tree doesn't do the thing. Quitting Steam doesn't work (Steam won't do anything because it thinks SiS is still running). "tasklist" shows the process but "taskkill /f /pid X" (where X is the number I get from tasklist) says the process doesn't exist and won't kill it. I've done a full memory check (the one where you reboot: mdsched.exe ) and it didn't find anything wrong.

Could this be because of my anti-virus software? That's the only thing on the system I'd call "unhealthy", but it also claims to have a "game mode" that causes it to get out of the way for certain white-listed apps, and I did add sis64.txt to that list.
Could it be because I'm using win7?

[bjg]

Yes, End Process Tree doesn't do the thing.
...
Could this be because of my anti-virus software? That's the only thing on the system I'd call "unhealthy", but it also claims to have a "game mode" that causes it to get out of the way for certain white-listed apps, and I did add sis64.txt to that list.

This is a behavior of a virus. Why did you have to add sis64.exe (it was .exe, right?) to any white-lists to start with? Did your anti-virus block it? How did you know that your copy of sis64.exe is safe to white-list?
Anyway, your system doesn't seem to be "healthy".

[silverkitty23]

Steam verifies the integrity of Stars in Shadow, as for game mode:

game_mode.png (186.85 KiB) Viewed 26301 times

It seemed like the thing to do since Avast auto-detected all the other games. Avast didn't block it, but didn't auto-add it, either.

Avast seems really keen on trying to upsell me to their extra-fancy edition. I don't like it, so I'm kinda hoping it's a problem so I have an excuse to replace it with another anti-viral

[sven]

My guess is: you're gonna load it and hit "next turn" it's gonna work just fine, but since it freezes rather than crashes properly, I don't know how else to give feedback that might determine what's going on

It does indeed work just fine for me when I hit next turn. However, it is interesting that this is a galactic council vote turn, and we have had bugs in those parts of the code in the not to distant past. If the patch for said bugs hasn't made it out to your machine for some reason, it could explain the error.

Have you tried a reinstall? (I might even go so far as to make a local copy of your save games, then delete *everything* in Stars in Shadow/ before asking Steam to reinstall the game.)

[silverkitty23]

I just hit uninstall. Installing now. According to Steam, I'll have to get back to you in an hour

[sven]

Avast seems really keen on trying to upsell me to their extra-fancy edition. I don't like it, so I'm kinda hoping it's a problem so I have an excuse to replace it with another anti-viral

I suppose it's *possible* that Avast is causing the bug. We could imagine, for example, that Avast's heuristic engine is suspicious of certain kinds of Lua VM activity. SiS actually has a custom Lua VM, so one could imagine a situation where a relatively harmless piece of VM activity inside SiS would trigger a bug somewhere in the guts of Avast's analyzer, causing your whole machine to lock up as you've described.

That's a lot of speculation though -- it might well have nothing to do with Avast, and just be some kind of low-level exception somewhere in either the game or the video driver that's proving particularly troublesome. Again, we did have a low-level exception being triggered by a bug that was recently patched, so it's plausible that what you're seeing is a manifestation of a fixed bug in a game that hasn't been patched for some reason.

But if we get into the question of *why* the game might not have been patched properly, interference from a particularly enthusiastic virus scanner does seem plausible... Um, I might consider switching to windows defender, it's free and never tries to sell you things.

[silverkitty23]

Back in September I reported issues with my graphics ( viewtopic.php?f=2&t=581&p=6473#p6473 ).
I haven't had any issues I could directly relate to my graphics card since then.
I have "simplified graphics" turned in SiS, but my computer does occasionally throw nvlddmkm.sys blue screens in other games.

So I'm probably there again - more nvidia issues, but just ones not painful enough to blue screen, leaving the task in limbo instead. Sigh. Thanks for looking at it. Guess I'll wait until I can afford a new computer.

[sven]

I have "simplified graphics" turned in SiS, but my computer does occasionally throw nvlddmkm.sys blue screens in other games.

Hrm. Yes, this is a bad sign. If we know we can't entirely trust your video driver, then it becomes relatively easy to attribute rare / very strange crashes to a hardware or software glitch somewhere in the guts of that driver.

Two other things that may be worth trying (when the Steam install is done):

You can try running sis.exe by hand, rather than launching sis64.exe from Steam. If it's a driver glitch, it may well only exist in the 64-bit version of the game. Similarly, you could try turning accelerated graphics off, and going back to running on your intel adapter. Recent experience has shown that, for reasons that remain mysterious, sis.exe is often much faster than sis64.exe when running some intel integrated systems; and in any case, if the crash goes away when you switch from the NVIDIA to the Intel driver, that would tell us that any suspicions we have re: the NVIDIA driver are that much more likely to be well founded.

[silverkitty23]

Well, yes, sis.exe (as opposed to sis64.exe) does run, and even though it's using the Intel card, it's not having "molasses UI" issues. and it did let me advance through the next few turns. So I can play, hooray

[silverkitty23]

Until about 12 turns later when I hit "new turn" and it broke again, but this time it crashed "properly"
Which is to say, it stopped responding, but when I hit Control-Alt-Delete, I was able to find that there was a new "SiS Crash Hanlder" window which just said "DBGHELP.DLL too old". But when I hit "okay" in that window, the game died and the task went away so I didn't have to reboot.

My "logs" directory is pretty small, though (since I had just erased everything right before running the game), and the 'errors' file in it might even be from this very crash (the timestamp on the error looks like it might have been from 3-4 minutes before the crash, but it's hard to tell how much time I wasted before I looked at the clock), so I've included the whole logs dir with the offending save game in http://silverchat.com/~silver/sis/crash3-4.zip

You know, it's pretty awesome that you've been helpful late on a Saturday evening, but it's also totally cool if you have better things to do for the weekend.

[sven]

My "logs" directory is pretty small, though (since I had just erased everything right before running the game), and the 'errors' file in it might even be from this very crash (the timestamp on the error looks like it might have been from 3-4 minutes before the crash, but it's hard to tell how much time I wasted before I looked at the clock), so I've included the whole logs dir with the offending save game in http://silverchat.com/~silver/sis/crash3-4.zip

Well, your logs say you just ran out of texture memory -- which is kindof expected if you're playing a larger game on an Intel card. Um, the 64-bit version is less likely to crash from out of memory issues, but, well, you know how the 64-bit version plays.

Did you try playing the 32-bit bit build (sis.exe) with your NVIDIA adapter? That might be the most promising combo...

[silverkitty23]

so, to summarize:

----------64----32
intel------1-----2
nvidia----3-----4

1 crash to dbghelp.dll too old, molasses UI
2 crash to dbghelp.dll too old (out of texture memory)
3 mystery freeze (probably texture related but in a way my video card doesn't crash properly for)
4 the last one we haven't tried

for some reason I'm not actually hopeful I think the universe is telling me to buy a new computer. Or go back to playing Dishonored 2 (which runs fine, go figure. The fancy 3D games don't crash like the 2D games do)