PR v0.7 - System Freeze/Lockup

[[R-DEV]Jaymz]

Do not post in this thread unless this is exactly what happens to you.


1. You're playing for a while.

2. There are no noticabley bad performance issues.

3. All of a sudden, your screen freezes still and you hear the last few audio events constantly in a looped playback state. Background applications (such as Teamspeak) still function perfectly but alt+tabbing and ctrl+alt+del do nothing.

4. The only way to resolve what happened is to manually restart your computer.


If this has happened to you in Project Reality 0.7, please post in this thread with your system specs to help us resolve the issue.

[hall0]

1. You're playing for a while.
Played for 2 hours

2. There are no noticabley bad performance issues.
Just some of the start of the map Fools Road

3. All of a sudden, your screen freezes still and you hear the last few audio events constantly in a looped playback state. Background applications (such as Teamspeak) still function perfectly but alt+tabbing and ctrl+alt+del do nothing.
Yes

4. The only way to resolve what happened is to manually restart your computer.
Yes.

PC:
P4 2,66 Ghz
RAM: 768 MB
Video: ATI 9600XT 256MB
Sound: SB Audigy 2
Windows XP

I know its not the best PC but PR runs good with middle Settings.

I had yesterday two freezes on Fools Road. On this two times i was in a british APC and Scimitar and the Militia attacked us. The drive used smoke than the freeze. TS was still running but i could quit PR.

[unrealalex]

1. You're playing for a while.

2. There are no noticabley bad performance issues.

3. All of a sudden, your screen freezes still and you hear the last few audio events constantly in a looped playback state. Background applications (such as Teamspeak) still function perfectly but alt+tabbing and ctrl+alt+del do nothing.

4. The only way to resolve what happened is to manually restart your computer.

Yep, check on all 4, happens to me once in a while still.
It was happening to me in 0.6 too, I made a thread about it on 12/20 before .7 came out.

Specs:
C2D e6750 overclocked to 3.4Ghz
2GB Crucial Ballistix Ram
P35-DS3R Motherboard
evga 8800GT 512mb manually overclocked
Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer Sound card.

Processes that run in the background during play: RivaTuner and Daemon Tools. RivaTuner is for the graphics card fan monitoring and overclock and Daemon Tools is for holding the mini image of BF2.

The villain
I strongly believe the issue is Punkbuster. I used to have exactly the same problem in BF2/PR and Call of Duty 4 a while ago, but it happened way more often. The problem was identical in every other way though, totaly random freeze, sound loops, can only reboot. Both of these games used PB. What happened was Punkbuster does these checks into your computer and sometimes programs running in the background, like Rivatuner, conflict with it. The developer of Rivatuner released a version that let you enable settings that prevent PB from conflicting with it. I turned these settings on and did not freeze in this manner in CoD4 ever again (and not in PR for a while).
Here's what Evenbalance has to say on the issue.

My computer locks up or "chugs" sometimes while I'm playing with PunkBuster Enabled, what can cause this?
PunkBuster "pushes" hardware and the Windows Operating System more than most software and uses functions in the Windows API (low level functions) that aren't used by most other programs. As such, there are a few cases where using PB can actually expose flaky hardware or other situations that don't cause problems for other software. Here are a few things that have helped other users make these problems get better or go away completely:
• Make sure you are using the latest version of PunkBuster (the latest version is always on our Download page) - also this link may help manually update your PB to the latest version when necessary
• From the game's main screen, press the tilde key (the ~ key) to bring down the console and enter the following line (without the quotes): "/pb_system 1".
• Never close other programs from your Windows Task Manager before playing the game, either leave them running or close them through the proper interface - killing a process doesn't always work completely even if it stops showing in the Task Manager and renegade threads seem to conflict with PB more than other programs that may be running in memory. There is a free utility that some players use called EndItAll to close all extra programs before they play to avoid software conflicts, crashes and lockups. You can get it from here.
• Check the add/remove programs list in your Control Panel and uninstall any programs that you don't use or that you don't know what they are.
• One program that seems to conflict with PB more than others is Norton Anti-Virus. If you have it installed, try uninstalling it to see if the lockups go away. Some players have reported that when this is the culprit, they can reinstall Norton Anti-Virus and the lockups don't come back.
• Other background programs that seem to conflict with PB for some users are Sound Blaster Live software and helper programs that come with video cards (especially ATI keyboard shortcut programs).
• Some players discovered that they had a computer virus and that the lockups vanished after it was fully removed.
• Experiment with the pb_sleep setting ... try setting it to 20, 250, or 500 to see if that affects your game performance. A few players have reported that all the problems go away when they "tweak" this setting.
• In extreme cases, a few users have reported that replacing their RAM (memory) or video/sound cards fixed the problem.

None of that was any help to me when I was having the problem in BF2 and in CoD4, but the new version of Rivatuner which had the "safeguards" fixed the problem, here's what the Rivatuner developer had to say

Added protective technologies aimed to jam unsafe memory scanner of PunkBuster anticheat system and this way prevent this anticheat system from crashing graphics hardware when RivaTuner resides in memory. Unfortunately new 1.7xx versions of PunkBuster client (debuted on 04.17.2007 with Battlefield 2142 client) caused major system stability issues in conjunction with wide range of applications accessing hardware via user mode MMIO address ranges. Apart from scanning executable code new PunkBuster services also fully scan data memory ranges of each process, which is critically dangerous when it comes to applications accessing hardware registers via memory mapped I/O port user address ranges. Unauthorized access to hardware mapped memory ranges performed by anticheat system's memory scanner may cause unpredictable results including hardware failures and freezing. The problem is not specific to RivaTuner and also covers wide range of ATI and NVIDIA oriented diagnostic, overclocking and monitoring tools (e.g. ATITool, PowerStrip, HIS iTurbo etc) developed by third parties as well as by certified AIB/AIC partners. The situation had been investigated with help of Battlefield 2142 gamers community and is fully documented in RivaTuner's support forums, however, many inexperienced gamers never visit forums or read documentation and still wrongly interpret these crashes as instability of third party tools including RivaTuner, hurting software reputation in different forums this way. Unfortunately, the problem is still neither fixed nor documented by Evenbalance, furthermore, the situation got critically worse in the end on June 2007 when Evenbalance launched the same unsafe PunkBuster clients v1.7xx for America's Army, Call of duty, Call of duty 2, Enemy territory: Quake Wars, F.E.A.R etc. Due to this sad reason I cannot longer wait for response and fix from Evenbalance and risk RivaTuner software reputation because of anticheat system issues. The following features are introduced and aimed to prevent RivaTuner from being improperly accessed by PunkBuster or any similar memory scanner:

When searching for a solution, I also came up with a few posts saying it was IRQ sharing causing the problems, basically your sound card could be sharing with something that doesn't like to share. While changing the sharing did not fix the problem for me, it seems to have fixed it for some other individuals. The solution was usually putting the sound card in another slot.

[[R-CON]Wolfe]

^^That someone was me. I've never saw/heard that freeze/repeating loop until PR.7. I switched "hardware/high" to "software/high" and haven't had a freeze since.

Specs:

2.2 AMD64 processor
Nforce4 Ultra mobo
2 Gig ram
6600gt/oc 128MB PCIex vidcard
15 year-old Creative EAX sound card

[BLUFOR-73]

intel core 2 duo e6600
intel p965/g965 motherboard
2 gig
7900 gtx 512 mb
creative soundblaster x-fi

[[R-CON]Hfett]

This happened to me last night
Was playing Fools Road for like 2 hours with Teamspeak On

then, the game frezed and all i could hear was the loop sound of one of my squad members on the voip

I was still able to talk/listen other stuff trough teamspeak

Could not ctrl-alt-del

Had to press the reset button on the pc

amd x2 dual core 4200+
asus a8v (or av8 cant rembember well)
7800gs agp 256/256
Audigy 2zs
2 g of ram ddr 400 kingston
320 seagate hd sata

All settings on high besides lighting wich i prefer to play with it on low
Sound on hardware with EAX enabled

Only happened last night, after the pc restart i was able to play for more hours without any other issue

[Farks]

Happend to me on Al Kufrah. Was playing as british SL, and me and my squad was defenind oil production facility. I was hurt an gave myself a field dressing, and then it happend.

My comp:
P4 3.6 GHz
1.5 GB RAM
GeForce 7800GTX
SB Audigy 2 ZS Audio
Don't remember my hard drive...

[ConscriptVirus]

happens to me occasionally but sometimes and only sometimes if i wait for like a few minutes, it goes back to normal. the times it happened was when i was driving across qinling.

Specs:
P4 3.0GHz
motherboard: intel D865GRH
2 gigs of ram
6800GT factory OCed
SB live!
harddrive 200gigs with about 20 free. and pagefile on another HD

i think it has to do with your sound settings.

http://www.tacticalgamer.com/battlef...e-problem.html

[AnRK]

All that has happened to me aside from I could still alt+tab and ctrl+alt+del, although alt+tab would change program, just showed the icons in the centre of the screen (which I could switch between) and ctrl+alt+del, got the task manager up in full but with PR behind it and the looped sound continuing so I managed to close BF2 down.

I know it's not exact but 1 and 2 and the rest of 3 are all exactly what happened and it generally sounds like the same issue. I'll post my specs a little later.

Never happened before .7 though, not in vBF2 or any other mod.

[Nibbit]

Pentium 4 3.2GHZ
Nividia XFX GeForce 6600GT (agp)
1024MB RAM
P4 Titan Motherboard

happens from time to time, I have a crappy soundcard as well, mite b the sound thingy, also, it happens sometimes when I go back to the main menu and press "disconnect" in the first 5 secs or actaully when pressing the Esc button itself.

Teamspeak still works, music as well, but I cant get BF2 shut down