[EM 2.808] Game freezes every few seconds *FIXED*

[cikame]

Hello, i have an issue in single player where about every 3 seconds the game pauses for 4 seconds, if i attempt to move away from the starting space station with all the ships around it the regularity of the pauses seems to decrease, but never going away completely.

I have tried the game on both a HDD and an SSD, run the game in compatibility Windows XP, used both the planetary generation settings, put all graphics options on low, nothing has any effect on the pauses.

This is my first time playing the game so i haven't had it running properly before, my PC specs will follow, please help me out the game seems awesome from what i have played.

Windows 7 64bit Pro
i7-3770K 3.50ghtz
16GB RAM
GeForce GTX 680
gfx card driver is the latest official, 335.23.

[Vice]

That's a new one I haven't heard of before, must be a specific system issue. A couple of guesses on possibilities that come to mind include:

- Something may be conflicting in the system at set intervals, possibly input, possibly audio related, possibly something else. Check your device manager and see if you have any exclamation marks next to listed devices and check for possible conflicts between devices.

- Watch for any activity light for your hard drive. Perhaps something is tasking, loading, saving, or updating at certain intervals that is intermittently causing the pausing on your system. Check for any other background programs/tasks you have running in the background and shut down as many non-essential ones as you can. Then test the game for any changes. If the problem goes away, gradually turn on each of the tasks one at a time to find out which one was hindering your system's performance.

- With the game running, open the task manager and observe resource activities, see if you can narrow down what is happening during the 4 second pause (particularly what your CPU, network, and memory resources look like during those intervals).

If the problem persists, I'd likely need more information on the system setup you are using. Follow the steps here to send me a msinfo report: http://www.starwraith.com/evochronmercenary/faq.htm#8

[Marvin]

Auto updates can ruin your day ... and many programs default to that option. Some of them require you to run the program as administrator before they will let you permanently disable auto-update from within the program. I also run msconfig to search out and disable any auto-update I find.

[cikame]

Hello, sorry about the delayed reply, after work i tried the game again and it was still pausing, so i took it off my ssd and re-installed it to the standard hard drive where it continued to pause, restarted the PC and now it's fine :S.

Somehow during all that i seem to have completely fixed the problem, for now at least, maybe a process in the background wasn't running after i restarted which means i could run into the issue again, if i do i'll look for it.

Sorry for taking up some of your time with this, if it helps i just played for 3 hours straight and loved it, accidently got a friend to purchase it too.

[Vice]

Glad you got it sorted. I'll mark it fixed for now, but if it surfaces again, we'll pick up where we left off and try to pin down what the cause is/was.

[cikame]

Well, 2 days of smooth gameplay and suddenly my issue has returned, i'm sure if i restarted once or twice it would go away again but that's not much of a solution, the only thing that has changed as far as i can tell is that my Steam is currently downloading games, pausing the downloads doesn't clear the problem.
I tabbed out to look at my processes in task manager and the only thing that happens when it pauses is Evochron's CPU usage goes down to 0.

Please let me know if you want me to send you my msinfo report as you suggested.

Thanks again for any help.

[Vice]

Yes, I'd be interested in the report. Also, try this. When it happens again, right click on the Steam taskbar icon and click on Exit to shut it down completely. Then launch the game directly from its \\steamapps\\common install folder (you can also optionally download and install the direct download version of the game as well). See if the behavior changes when Steam is shut down entirely.

If it does, then something Steam is doing may be bringing a conflict or resource problem on your system to the surface. It may not be directly related to Steam, but instead might be a conflict Steam has with something else running on your system, or some other conflict/resource problem related to something the Steam client is trying to do on your system that merely brings the problem to the surface.

[cikame]

Ok i sent the report to you, i did try running the game without Steam but the issue persists, i can't experiment any more tonight so we'll see what happens when i turn the PC on tomorrow.

[PaulB]

Well, 2 days of smooth gameplay and suddenly my issue has returned, i'm sure if i restarted once or twice it would go away again but that's not much of a solution, the only thing that has changed as far as i can tell is that my Steam is currently downloading games, pausing the downloads doesn't clear the problem.
I tabbed out to look at my processes in task manager and the only thing that happens when it pauses is Evochron's CPU usage goes down to 0.

Please let me know if you want me to send you my msinfo report as you suggested.

Thanks again for any help.

I can't recall if you posted that you were on a laptop or not or what your Internet connection is but I'll tell you my experience.

Dell Precision M65 intel dual core 1.86ghz
4Gb Ram, nvidia fx 350m
Win XP Pro
Internet = wireless:
(1) tethered Verizon mifi 2200 Hot spot to USB port
or
(2) Internal wifi card wireless access to untethered mifi 2200 as a Hot spot router.

Obviously my system is old - circa 2001 or 2002
In SP with no internet access I get fialy good (for me) EM performance except when a Planet or somthing "heavy" is in view then the FPS drops to 4-8 but I do not get any skips or anything usually. Flying down to a planet's surface is really kinda laggy - just kinda slow - but no pauses or skips.

Now, If I try to get Online with tethered mifi 2200 via USB in SP or MP I get a consistent, short skip or jerk every second or two - and I'm sure that's the result of the cpu swapping between the EM and Internet processes. There is just not enough CPU and GPU power to handle both.

And if I get Online untethered using internal wireless to access the mifi 2200 this skip or jerk is much less UNLESS I open Internet explorer and for instance, access the mifi 2200 router page os I can monitor it's status or do anything else Online.

So, If you have a more powerful computer (CPU & GPU) and you have a decent Internet (Cable, DSL, etc) and NOT via USB port then I don't think you should have your problem.

Try EM in SP with NO internet and see how it does. That will tell you if the problem is Internet related or not.
Internet via USB is ALWAYS a bed idea and less reliable and should be avoided if you have a choice of ethernet or internal wireless card to an external device, aka router, switch, cable modem, etc.

With my fx 350m in SP I get 5 - 20 fps depending on what's in my range of view. I have no antivirus or anything like that running that could affect system performance.

Paul

[Vice]

Ok i sent the report to you, i did try running the game without Steam but the issue persists, i can't experiment any more tonight so we'll see what happens when i turn the PC on tomorrow.

Thanks, I received it and have sent a reply with some ideas to try.

[cikame]

Alright, i disabled the audio devices you asked me to one by one with restarts in between but even with them all disabled the game kept freezing, i also tried it with AVG disabled but that had no effect, uninstalling AVG also has no effect, i've switched to another anti virus for the time being.

I feel like i should mention the freezes occur only during gameplay, the only places where it doesn't happen is the main menu and in the escape menu, but that's probably obvious, also i'm currently playing a variety of games, Black Flag, F1 2013, Euro Truck 2, FTL, BF4 and more with no issues, whatever it is seems to hate EM specifically.

[Vice]

Is your system overclocked? If so, have you tried setting the clock rates back to default to test for a change in behavior? When the pausing occurs, does the sound pause also (sounding like a stutter), or just the display and the sound either just holds or stop entirely? Have you tried driver updates for your Realtek audio device?

[cikame]

I have not overclocked everything is default, when it pauses the audio holds to whatever was playing, usually the sound of the thrusters until the pause ends, i updated the Realtek driver to the latest to no effect.

Persistent issue this.

[Edited on 4-24-2014 by cikame]

[Vice]

And mysterious. I wonder if it might be related to temps, have you cleaned the system recently with a can of compressed air?

Another suggestion to try, disable the Realtek audio device and leave the Nvidia audio device active, see if the behavior changes at all.

[Edited on 4-24-2014 by Vice]

[cikame]

RIGHT, discovered something interesting. I decided i'd try to capture my issue using fraps and stick it on youtube so i only set it to record at 29.97fps, during the recording the pauses stopped completely, so i put v-sync on to lock it at 60fps and reloaded the game, pauses have gone.

I can't believe after all that just limiting the frames sorts it out, the downside of course is that v-sync emphasizes any hitching, but that's totally fine with me since that should be fairly rare on my rig.
Still have no idea what's causing this though, sorry i didn't leave v-sync on when i started i'm a PC gamer after all.

Edit: Temps are fine, no dust, i used to work in PC repair.

[Edited on 4-24-2014 by cikame]

[Vice]

Interesting, thanks for replying with the result. I take it you used the game's built-in locked Vsync screen mode option? Or did you apply it through the Nvidia control panel?

I'll keep this in mind in case anyone else reports the same issue. Very strange that a no-vsync mode would have troubles on your system.

[cikame]

Yeah i'm using the games own v-sync, i could try Nvidia's adaptive mode later if i need to.

So i'm a little picky when it comes to frame rates, i don't let games run riot since rendering super high frame rates increases power usage and heat production, but i usually don't like v-sync due to the possible hitching i mentioned and mouse input lag, so i do the next best thing which is use Nvidia's frame rate limiter set to 118fps (i did turn off the limiter during our testing), i used to limit to 70fps but that created input lag in CS:GO.

Ehem, right, with that out of the way, again thank you so much for your time and patience in helping me. Whatever this is, it hates frame rates of 100+.

[picommander]

cikame, what you got there looks like a decent machine, clearly better than mine and mine is already running EM with full details in 'silent mode'. Suffice to say it's running smooth under all circumstances. So my bet is that your system is just underchallenged with EM and produces insanely high (and unnecessary) fps, resulting in heavy temperature stress for your system or at least your video card. I had a similar effect with another game a while ago. FPS should never go through the roof, makes really no sense (anything above 60 fps that is). Would at least very well explain why v-sync seems to solve your problem.