Crashing sessions at launch

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iluvseq
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Posts: 25
Joined: Sat Dec 18, 2004 8:15 pm

Crashing sessions at launch

Post by iluvseq » Tue Mar 13, 2007 8:43 am

Often when trying to open multiple sessions of EQ1, new sessions crash. Sometimes it's a second session, sometimes I can open two and a third session will crash, sometimes I get lucky and can open three but a fourth session will crash.

There seems to be a link between the amount of time IS has been running. If, for example, trying to bring up a second session crashes, if I camp out and completely restart Inner Space, I'll be able to bring up two sessions no problem.

Also, the problem only seems to exist when I attempt to launch new sessions after I've already logged in to EQ. For example, I was able to launch four sessions just now by launching all four sessions prior to logging in ANY session (ie: run the session to the login screen then launch the next one).

Crash reports have been sent.

Lax
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Joined: Fri Jun 18, 2004 6:08 pm

Post by Lax » Tue Mar 13, 2007 3:44 pm

It's actually an EQ crash. WinEQ 2 detects the crash and notifies you instead of letting the game crash, because WinEQ 2 is specifically built for EQ1 and a few other, specific, games. IS on the other hand is as neutral as possible, with no special coding for any specific game.

The reason it crashes is that Direct3D does not have enough remaining physical memory on your video card to create a new display context. When EQ calls the function in Direct3D to create the context, EQ is not checking the return value or checking whether it actually successfully created it, it is simply assuming that it worked. Then, when the display context isn't there, EQ just crashes, end of story.

You could get this same problem by launching EQ without IS. Log into one, run around in one zone, log into another, run around in one zone, and log into another, run around in one zone, and you will get the exact same scenario. The game, the longer you have it playing, is loading more and more textures into that physical RAM on the video card, and some into system memory.

To get around this issue, with IS or WinEQ 2 or without any of them, you either need to increase the amount of physical RAM on your video card by purchasing a new one, decrease the amount of video RAM in use, or simply launch all sessions in advance, so that they have the physical RAM before it is used for textures (which can be put in shared system memory).

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