Ep. 203 crashes all the time

edited March 2008 in Game Support
Hi,

(Sorry for opening another thread. I first thought the Sam and Max forum would be the right place for this.)

I've owned and played all episodes of season 1 and 2 without major problems, but this one gives me constant trouble! As soon as I visit 5 (sometimes less, sometimes more) locations, the program terminates with a "low virtual memory" message. (Which should be close to impossible with 1.5 gigs of RAM as compared to the 120 megs of the game.)

Also, this episode was the first one that actually forced me to lower the resolution to 640x480 in the office already. Usually, 800x600 or even 1024x768 worked flawlessly.

Any issues known so far?

My machine is a Sony Vaio V505DP (Centrino 1.6 GHz, 1.5G RAM, Radeon Mobile 9200).

M

Comments

  • edited February 2008
    I got that ALL the time, with all the games, every time there was a scene change. I had to save before I tried to walk through any door. Usually after a few crashes the next place would finally load. I thought it was just my computer.

    This season has been worse, though. I can't get anything to come up after I get into the castle. The doors close behind Sam&Max, and it crashes. I should have said something before, but for me, episode 201 crashes right after the credit sequence. I was going to wait for the disc version and see if it worked any better, but I really want to play Raving Dead!

    I'm running these on an AMD Athlon, 1.10 GHz, 256 MB RAM and Radeon 7000, though.
  • edited February 2008
    Here's some info, hope it helps:
    AppName: sammax203.exe AppVer: 2008.2.5.5905 ModName: sammax203.exe
    ModVer: 2008.2.5.5905 Offset: 003fd70a

    And here's another one at Offset: 001a55a4... (entering Sybil's)
    And yet another one at Offset: 003fd70a (entering the dungeon)
    Offset: 003fd70a (entering Stinky's)
    Here's another one that happened without a scene change (while pulling the gun): Offset: 001ea04e
    Offset: 001a55a4 (entering the dungeon)
  • jmmjmm
    edited February 2008
    Matthias_H wrote: »
    I've owned and played all episodes of season 1 and 2 without major problems, but this one gives me constant trouble! As soon as I visit 5 (sometimes less, sometimes more) locations, the program terminates with a "low virtual memory" message. (Which should be close to impossible with 1.5 gigs of RAM as compared to the 120 megs of the game.)

    The game download size is around 120 MB, but that doesn't translate into memory usage.
    S&M Ep 203 max memory usage is around 900MB
    Try cutting down the number of running processes before launching S&M.
    octochan wrote: »
    I'm running these on an AMD Athlon, 1.10 GHz, 256 MB RAM and Radeon 7000, though.

    Time to upgrade your RAM (And from the looks of it, your PC)

    To both:
    Windows and every running application uses some memory. Even if the system moves most of the "inactive" data to disk space (the swap/page file), there is still some data that won't.
    If you can, close all the applications you are not using before starting S&M (Including background processes like System Indexing)
  • edited February 2008
    Hi,

    thanks for your advice. I am talking about a freshly installed, cleaned up Windows with nothing running except a virus scanner (and some of the Windows standard stuff, of course).

    As I said, this is the first of all episodes so far where this happens. Because of the reproducibility, my guess would fall on a memory allocation bug or something similar.

    M
  • edited February 2008
    Matthias_H wrote: »
    Also, this episode was the first one that actually forced me to lower the resolution to 640x480 in the office already. Usually, 800x600 or even 1024x768 worked flawlessly.

    I want to add that I got constant problems with the game suddenly stopping up completely, and then nothing happens for a little while before the game suddenly resumed. This especially happens when I change locations. Also, this is the first episode that I have noticed issues with regular slowdowns when moving(you see the walls are jumping a few cm at the time, instead of moving smoothly). There were some similar issues with the first episodes of season 1, but nothing like this.

    I bet this issues is related to your issue somehow, except that my computer is strong enough to pull through it without permanent brain damage. My computer is more than good enough to run it though, since I got a AMD Opteron 185(Dual core, each is 2,6 Ghz), 4 gigs of ram(3 gigs visible in Windows XP), running Windows XP SP2, NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT, 30 GB Windows partition.)

    It seems logical that it's a memory leak. I'll have to check out how much memory the game is using up after a while when I play the game again.
  • edited February 2008
    I confirm that it looks like to crash often. I have no trouble with any other episode (European DVD Season 1 + Telltale Episodes 201 et 202), but this one seems to be more instable. I played twice entirely the game and it crashed near the end both (not at the same place), when the game changed location... But it's not a big deal for me. I just have to reload the game and it doesn't crash again in the same moment... It's just weird...

    For information, my configuration is a Core2 Duo 2Ghz, RAM 2 Go, NVidia GeForce, Windows Vista.
  • edited February 2008
    I am also having issues with episode 203, however my crash issue is consistent and reproducible.

    I have upgraded all current drivers, as well as all XPsp2 hotfixes and recommended software/hardware updates (as far as the windows update site will tell me), and I have also updated the drivers for the ATiX800GT video card I use.

    The crash always occurs just as the title screen for Night of the Raving Dead shows up to silhouette Sam and Max in the overly elaborate execution device.

    I've tried changing resolutions, freeing up resources, and checking for updates to all my hardware with no luck. It always crashes at that spot. I checked with previous episodes (as I have successfully played through all of them just fine) and they are also now crashing at a point in time that seems to coincide with the crash point of episode 203 (after a particular amount of time leading up to the intro, the game simply crashes out with a 1000008e error).

    I do not have this issue with any other game. I've tried firing up UT2k4, DoW (any expansion or vanilla) and a few others and all work fine. The issue seems to be with S&M.

    Any ideas? Please?
  • WillWill Telltale Alumni
    edited February 2008
    Ok, first for Gamera, that is most likely an unrelated issue. With the old episodes, are they the new updated versions with the new wrapper? If so, I'm willing to bet good money that it is a SecuRom error. Make sure you don't have any sort of cd burning programs enabled or process explorer or anything like that.

    As for everyone else, I'm currently looking into the issue. In the meantime, if you are having trouble I suggest saving frequently and occasionally restarting the program.
  • edited February 2008
    Will wrote: »
    Ok, first for Gamera, that is most likely an unrelated issue. With the old episodes, are they the new updated versions with the new wrapper? If so, I'm willing to bet good money that it is a SecuRom error. Make sure you don't have any sort of cd burning programs enabled or process explorer or anything like that.

    As for everyone else, I'm currently looking into the issue. In the meantime, if you are having trouble I suggest saving frequently and occasionally restarting the program.

    As far as I know I don't have any kind of process explorer running in the background, or any burning tools running either.

    The episodes I've checked so far have all been season 2.

    They all played just fine before installing 203 and now they all fail at corresponding points in the game, as I mentioned previously.
  • edited February 2008
    Hi,

    I just noticed that the new, free version of ep104 (Abe Lincoln Must Die) suffers from similar problems, whereas the old version used to run smoothly without any crash. Hope you get that fixed until the release of ep204, since finishing ep203 under these circumstances was a real pain in the ass.

    Regards,
    Matthias
  • WillWill Telltale Alumni
    edited February 2008
    gamera009 wrote: »
    They all played just fine before installing 203 and now they all fail at corresponding points in the game, as I mentioned previously.

    Hmm, in that case, something in your system has definitely changed... You mentioned that all of your drivers are up to date, but did you try updating DirectX?
  • edited March 2008
    Short notice. DX9 updated to the latest version. 203 still crashing. Sorry. Orders. :D
  • edited March 2008
    Matthias_H wrote: »
    Short notice. DX9 updated to the latest version. 203 still crashing. Sorry. Orders. :D

    on my old computer i had a 9200 and it crashed a lot with what seems to be the same error as i remember

    but as i upgraded very soon after i didnt report it as i upgraded very soon after, maybe the engine doesn't like the card or its drivers??
  • WillWill Telltale Alumni
    edited March 2008
    Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what the solution is. The processor and the 9200 are definitely on the low end and 203 is easily the most graphically intense episode we have done yet, so it could just be that your system is being overwhelmed.
  • edited March 2008
    I haven't had any crashes, but I HAVE had some serious slowdown from time to time.
This discussion has been closed.