Tip WORKAROUND - Crashing in Caves, Padres, etc

John Foulroberts

John Foulroberts

Admin
Hey everyone,

As some of you may know, I've had it bad with crashing on my main computer. I was unable to enter Padres or ANY cave - and any other loading screen would be a hit or miss. Sometimes it would take 3 tries for me to successfully log in as well.

For reference, here were my specs BEFORE I performed what I'm about to tell you:

i5-4690k OC'd to 4.4GHz
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1070 (stock speeds)

Quite obviously, my PC is more than capable of handling the game, right? Maybe a little too good...

I had noticed that folks with lower-end or older hardware seemed to not have any of the problems that I was experiencing. Weird, right? So, I took to some experimenting. Maybe it was my GPU? Using Gigabyte's overclocking utility, I downclocked my card to as low as I could get it. Still no dice. Crash city. I also thought about swapping in my old 770 to try a completely different card, but I never got around to doing so - so scratch that.

After trying that, I decided to load up TLOPO on my work laptop, which is a Lenovo X1 Carbon with an i5 2nd gen processor, running at about 2.8GHz. Loaded TLOPO flawlessly. Was able to go into caves and such and do everything I wanted to do.

Come today, @Rich Fireskull suggests downclocking the CPU on my main PC. He noted that his machine clocked at 3.4GHz ran WORSE than his machines in the 2GHz range... which MATCHES my observations with my work laptop. Gears start spinning now.

Now, this fix that I implemented is VERY technical for most users. Not everyone will be able to perform this fix. In fact, I don't think any pre-built branded machines will be able to do this. If you have built your own computer and know that your motherboard and CPU have overclocking support: I fixed this issue by going into the BIOS and underclocking my CPU's core multiplier to 26 (which equates to 2.6GHz).

After setting that value, I loaded up TLOPO. I was able to go to Padres and go into any cave I wanted to. In fact, I've been in game for over a half hour now, going in and out of caves and have not crashed yet.

Essentially, you need to severely gimp your system. It's likely Panda3D's fault, since when I crashed previously I received no traceback (when you receive a traceback, it's TLOPO's fault). I will be putting in a word through to the Panda3D developers about this so that they can potentially sort this out.

I will be testing this further to see how high I can set my core multiplier without crashing... but for now, if you know that you can modify your CPU's frequency and you're above ~3.4GHz and crash like crazy, consider underclocking. It'll make a difference.

Thanks for listening. Thought I'd share this find! Let me know if you have any questions.

JFR
 
I hope that helps some folks thank you for the tip! I had no problem getting into the Cursed Caverns before the last update, but now I crash on load in screen to the cave. I can't get in there for a week now, and I try multiple times. It seems to be where all the good loot is hiding.
One friend told me he doesn't crash if he turns "on" the fancy load screen to get in there. Another friend says to run Tlopo as Admin as he does, and he crashes much less now.

I've tried those things and it didn't help me, but I'm willing to keep trying for the sake of science.. and loot.
 
An interesting idea, but most likely case specific. I have 2 pcs running this game, a labtop with i7 at 3.4gh and a nvidia 740(2 gb vram) and 8 gb ram, and a desktop with an i7 at 3.9gh with a 2 gb vram nvidia card with 12 gb ram. Both run perfectly (windows 10). We've had 3 hour uninterrupted simultaneous sessions about 60% of the time (activities include caves and land battles, but typically sea battles and porting often), with the other 40% of the time crashing once during the session due to porting at port royale or comparable port. It's typically safer to port at Cuba or outcast; ports that are often unpopulated and not memory-straining.

I feel that crashes are often settings-related for most users. Had success with a guild member turning off all sound and music and TURNING VSYNC ON. Those two things seem to make the most difference. We feel the sound is a major contributor to memory errors, our tests show dramatic improvements with it all off (sound is not being correctly garabage collected, this can be seen in cmd).

We currently hold a sneaking suspicion that animations are also not being correctly garbage collected, such as the hit flashes that result from damage; however this is not able to be tested.
 
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i have a g3260 at 3.3, but doesnt support overclock,, i meant the mistake and didnt buy a g3258 but how can i underclock? Is it still in bios?
 
Shamus The Brute said:
*Don't ye pirates think the problem with TLOPO crashes/lag is due to incompatibility issues pertaining to now higher-end tech. machines?
Click to expand...
This is what is being observed, yes. The TLOPO team will need to "modernize" compatibility.

divine said:
i have a g3260 at 3.3, but doesnt support overclock,, i meant the mistake and didnt buy a g3258 but how can i underclock? Is it still in bios?
Click to expand...
Depends if your motherboard supports modification of the core multiplier. Even still, that chip has a locked multiplier, so I don't think this would be possible in the first place.

You could try a hacky fix with the minimum and maximum processor state values in Power Options. This will limit what clock speeds the processor is allowed to reach. Modify the two percentage values. You can check what frequency your processor is running at in Task Manager.
563cf42352f26ab1c26970a4782af8fb.png

(I underclocked my chip to 3.2GHz in the BIOS before I thought of this solution, so that's why it's so low at 90%)
 
Well, if the team does decide to overhaul it, I suggest that they convert to 64 bit. That's what 90% of machines are running these days, and the game would extremely benefit from the unlimited RAM usage instead of the 2gb cap with 32 bit
 
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