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Author Topic: OA now kills my computer.  (Read 16597 times)
Haverford
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« on: August 09, 2010, 11:51:00 PM »

Hey - thanks in advance if you can shed even a little light on what's going wrong here. I'm under the impression this is an unusual problem.

So. I've played OpenArena for well over a year now with no significant problems. Anything that's come up, I've fixed. 'Til now. =/

Before we go any further - my system specs. The computer I usually use to play OA:

Dell Dimension 8400 (late 2005 model) BIOS A07
Intel Pentium 4 "Prescott" 3.0GHz, Hyper-Threading enabled
2 GB DDR2 SDRAM
ATi Radeon X800 SE w/128MB dedicated memory
connects wirelessly to shitty aDSL, but this isn't a network problem, so networking hardware = irrelevant.

Windows XP Professional SP3 (October 2008 rev). Beyond that, it's tweaked beyond belief. However, none of my system tweaks have affected OA (or indeed anything) in a negative way. I know what I'm doing. I know a lot about computers. That's why I'm so confused...!

The issue:

OpenArena will open. I click "Multiplayer" and select a server. It connects. Takes awhile because of aDSL, but I've optimized the latency stuff pretty well (I think). I pop up in the Spectator list. Okay. I wanna join a team. Except...nothing looks right. The display resolution is great, but it clips off the screen on both sides. Should I go to "Setup" or use the console to set /r_mode, customheight/width whatever...things go to hell. The speakers emit a strange crackling sound and the machine just locks up. I mean the thing flatlines. I can't do anything except a hard shutdown, which I hate doing as I'm convinced it will only lead to more problems.

Scenario: I connect to a defrag server. I pick up a rocket launcher. I hit my bind to change weapons and the PC shits itself into frozen-mode again. Nothing I can do.

I mean NOTHING. Can't force-quit, can't open the Task Manager, can't even press Num Lock and have the little green light go on on the keyboard. Nothing at all.

In a nutshell, I can no longer play OpenArena at all. Single player works fine until I try to do something like add a bot or pick up a weapon. And should I make it as far as opening the console and changing my graphics settings, all it takes is /vid_restart and the whole setup is dead again.

What on earth is going on here?

I have NEVER had problems like this before tonight. Never. I blame OpenArena because every other program will run. And for the record, I have a pretty average graphics card and have most effects disabled in my config. The config I use without issue all the time. The same config that lets me score over 250 on a server where my ping is about that.

I'm baffled. Anyone out there more of a geek than I - HELP! Smiley
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fromhell
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« Reply #1 on: August 10, 2010, 12:18:28 AM »

ATi Radeon X800 SE w/128MB dedicated memory

Can be one unstable piece of crap, try changing your driver, 8.1 is good. avoid omegadrivers, and have a sanely low com_maxFPS
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Haverford
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« Reply #2 on: August 10, 2010, 12:27:23 AM »

Thanks, but I always use 125 FPS despite being able to achieve 500+ at times.

You're actually the one who told me directly to use things like /r_detailtextures 0 and the like - I've always been really careful about graphical tweaks but I suppose I could do a driver re-install. Good advice, thanks. Smiley

I noticed that my system purges the registry on an almost daily basis - now I'm getting the feeling something was deleted/moved that maybe shouldn't have...
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fromhell
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« Reply #3 on: August 10, 2010, 12:40:31 AM »

X800 should not be effected by r_detailtextures at all, it's most likely your GPU fan.

You should also check for malware too, but please don't blame openarena for this problem as it doesn't have any functions that are named "KILL_SYSTEM_YEAH_DIE_SYSTEM_DIE" , though I did see an infected copy of OA once making the rounds on rapidshare. All it added was an infection and a setup program
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asking when OA3 will be done won't get OA3 done.
Progress of OA3 currently occurs behind closed doors alone

I do not provide technical support either.

new code development on github
Cacatoes
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« Reply #4 on: August 10, 2010, 04:49:43 AM »

About the sound issue, did you try to use OpenAL (that means installing the library) or on the contrary switch to SDL (OpenAL off) ?
Aren't there valuable infos in your console log ?
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Haverford
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« Reply #5 on: August 10, 2010, 06:48:25 AM »

fromhell, when I said I "blame" OpenArena, that ought to have been construed as "I blame myself" because everything goes fine til I play OA. It's never given me any problems before.

Although, now you mention it, I have had similar problems with Doom 3, Quake 4, Half-Life 2, and their ilk, although as I recall they've never shut down my computer entirely. If it really is a GPU issue then I'll be kinda peeved - that's something I could "blame" OA for, meaning "blame myself because I play it so damn much."

Cacatoes, I'm almost positive I have OpenAL installed but even so, it appears it wasn't enabled in my CFG.

As for console logs, I wish. The computer doesn't keep any for applications outside the system folder. =/
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Gig
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« Reply #6 on: August 10, 2010, 07:12:34 AM »

Nothing in your_openarena_installation_folder\stderr.txt ? Your user should have the rights to write there...
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Haverford
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« Reply #7 on: August 10, 2010, 08:02:05 AM »

He (me) also has the rights to install system monitoring/optimizaition programs that prevent such files from being written to (or delete them after the fact).

There is an stderr.txt, however, but it's not updated for some reason.

At any rate, I've temporarily solved the problem by playing on the user account I use to run my server. Things are a bit strange with the settings, for instance, I need to use a mouse sensitivity of 3 and cut the pitch/yaw down to 0.017, and need to auto-adjust my monitor every time I load the game. Beyond that, no snags.

Question, now that I think about it: what exactly does /r_smp do? I was told it "uses multiple processors to render" and perhaps that's the issue, as I have only one physical processor core "treated as" two virtual "cores"...as opposed to my late-2006 MacBook that has a dual-core processor (which is 1GHz slower and deals with my 64MB shared system mem...yeah right, no OA on that for me plz)

Ugh, you'd all wanna slap me for this, but I could post a list of all the system tweaks and optimization measures I've run that I think could negatively affect OA...but then you'd just say "well there, you've solved your own problem, don't do all that stuff...!"

Whatever. Having a user account just for OA is probably a good idea anyway. Absolutely no background services or any applications running on it. Tongue

so.../r_smp anybody? =/
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dbX
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« Reply #8 on: August 10, 2010, 08:39:25 AM »

r_smp is broken and does not work as it should. You should probably disable this (set to 0). It's not supported by the ioquake3 team.
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Gig
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« Reply #9 on: August 10, 2010, 09:54:49 AM »

Already tried to delete (or, better, rename!) your q3config.cfg file in %appdata%\openarena\baseoa, or the whole %appdata%\openarena folder, to have it recreated from scratch for your user? Maybe something got wrong there...
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Haverford
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« Reply #10 on: August 10, 2010, 01:58:32 PM »

Thanks for that dbX...set it to 0 and noticed no difference. Smiley

Gig, I start OA with a batch program that should automatically move and overwrite my q3config(s), since I have a slightly different one for each gametype. It usually works. It does on this other user account of mine. Perhaps I'll just have to try it on my super-tweaked account as well.   
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Haverford
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« Reply #11 on: August 11, 2010, 11:01:37 AM »

Found the problem. It's the 0.8.5 patch. Remove it from my baseoa directory, and everything works fine. Very smooth and no issues, just like before.

Cannot, however, play on 0.8.5 servers or even load the patch into any directory. For some reason though I can play on the OANAGE server which runs 0.8.5. I just have to remember not to change any settings or try and connect to another server.

A bit annoying.

And whoever mentioned stderr.txt - OA kills the computer. That means that nothing gets read or written from the millisecond it crashes until I turn it back on. Therefore, there are no error messages to report.

Seeing as I am now running OA on a fresh system (my user accounts are all isolated) I do blame OA for crashing my computer. It's quite clear.

That said, I've no plans of angrily storming off or yelling at the coding gurus. Whatever's wrong with my machine's handling of OA is not their fault, but the program's, since there is clearly some fatal incompatibility hidden somewhere that came to light only quite recently. I'm still confused, but I can't spend too much time or energy on this. =/
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« Reply #12 on: August 11, 2010, 11:13:56 AM »

Found the problem. It's the 0.8.5 patch. Remove it from my baseoa directory, and everything works fine. Very smooth and no issues, just like before.

Did you apply the pak6-patch085.pk3 only, or also the new binary (openarena.exe) which comes in the zip? You could try a new binary or a new VM (if I remember correctly OAX was updated since the 0.8.5 release).
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Falkland
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« Reply #13 on: August 11, 2010, 05:21:59 PM »

[...]
Windows XP Professional SP3 (October 2008 rev).[...]

It's windows killing your computer

I know what I'm doing. I know a lot about computers.
[...]

Then try to install linux.
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fromhell
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« Reply #14 on: August 11, 2010, 06:01:38 PM »

[...]
Windows XP Professional SP3 (October 2008 rev).[...]

It's windows killing your computer

I know what I'm doing. I know a lot about computers.
[...]

Then try to install linux.

Preaching an operating system... how "helpful". By the way, Linux has worse support for x800, so it would end up being worse off.

The reason why he has a x800 is that it was THE bang for the buck video card of 2005, held back by limitations of shader model 2.  He shouldn't have to switch to another operating system to play OpenArena.

Some useful links follow below:
http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/
http://www.techpowerup.com/atitool/ (use this to control your fan speed threshold)
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asking when OA3 will be done won't get OA3 done.
Progress of OA3 currently occurs behind closed doors alone

I do not provide technical support either.

new code development on github
GrosBedo
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« Reply #15 on: August 12, 2010, 01:26:06 AM »

Preaching an operating system... how "helpful". By the way, Linux has worse support for x800, so it would end up being worse off.

Agree. Falkland, you failed XD
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Falkland
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« Reply #16 on: August 12, 2010, 08:29:20 AM »

Agree. Falkland, you failed XD

Happy to have failed ( in this case ) ... try to re-read his post a couple of times , then try to resist to be "helpful" again .... XD
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dbX
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« Reply #17 on: August 12, 2010, 11:15:10 PM »

Seeing as I am now running OA on a fresh system (my user accounts are all isolated) I do blame OA for crashing my computer. It's quite clear.

That should not be right. You can't blame a regular program if your system crashes. Sure the program might do something quirky, but it's not a reason to mess up the system. It might be a problem with your PC, drivers or your OS (I'm not saying only Windows have problems).

You can actually blue-screen a Windows machine that has a integrated Intel card (at least some of the older ones) if you set up the projection in OpenGL in a weird(incorrect) way. This causes no problems on other(non-intel) graphics cards on which the program actually worked and rendered stuff(though in a weird way), but even with the latest Intel drivers you still get blue-screen.

Even though it was my error for setting the projection incorrectly, it was Intels fault that you can actually blue-screen a system with such stupid mistakes.

My point is, blame it on your PC manufacturer, Microsoft, ATI or whomever you wish, but you can't blame it on OA. PCs are a funny thing.
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