Crashing when calling for fire support (CMSF2)

[Harbin]

Hi all. Just asking for some help in trying to find out the cause of this issue. CTD specifically when attempting to call for fire support, with the crash happening immediately as I lay down area or linear points on the map. 

This occurs with the HQS 3.3 mod installed. It doesn't happen on a fresh install with no mods, but curiously enough once the mod is installed then uninstalled, the crash persists in both cases. 

This has been bothering me for a couple months now. Initially this happened with me on Black Sea, whereupon installing it on drive C:/ solved the issue for some reason. Asking other players on the Steam forum and the subreddit (I didn't have access to this forum at the time) revealed no particular link to install location given that some users have it on other drives without issue. Black Sea has so far been stable, but now Shock Force 2 is unstable. 

Calling for fire support at any point in the game results in a crash 100% of the time.

I've been trying to research this issue for a while now but haven't quite come across any solutions. 

I'm on a PC with an AMD R5 3600X CPU, 5600XT GPU, 16gb RAM, with Shock Force 2 having been installed on E:\ and later, D:\ drives inside their respective Steam subfolders (e.g. D:\Steam Library\steamapps\common\Combat Mission Shock Force 2)

 

This is particularly perplexing since I can't quite figure out why the crash happens or what could be causing the crash if the mods I've installed haven't caused anyone else any problems. 

 

Any thoughts regarding this issue? Apologies if this is my first post in the forum, this is really my first dive into the series.

 

UPDATE: I've moved the install into C:\. No change. Reinstalled three times as well with same results: Adding HQS 3.3 into the Z folder causes a crash. Uninstalling HQS 3.3 and running a battle also causes a crash upon calling for artillery. So far I've added the Shock Force 2 folder and its executable into both Windows Defender and MalwareBytes exclusion lists, having the executable run in compatibility mode for Windows 7 (even experimenting with Windows XP SP3), disabling full screen optimization, changing settings in the AMD Radeon app, disabling in-game VSYNC, Anti Aliasing, and maintaining Balanced graphics settings, all to no avail. I'm just stumped. How could installing HQS 3.3 cause a crash? Additionally, how does uninstalling it and running the game still cause the crash even if the Data folder is totally cleansed of mods? I'm not even sure how my Black Sea install managed to become stable - it just happened one day. 

Edited February 26, 2021 by Harbin

[Schrullenhaft]

Do these crashes occur regardless of which side you are playing ? It seems strange that during the plotting of a fire mission is when you get the crash. I'm not specifically aware if a sound is associated with any of that process (other than the radio chatter for the fire missions - afterwards). Until this point all of the sounds play fine within the game as far as you're aware ?

Is your extracted folder for the HQS 3.3 mod located within the 'Z' folder that is within the 'Data' folder of the game ? Or is it located within the User Data/Mods folder (within the Documents folder of your user account) ? If it is located in the latter location, you may want to create a 'Z' folder within the game directory's 'Data' folder (if you haven't created one already) and put the mod there. So in the case of CMSF2 from Steam the location would be (that appears to be on your D:):

D:\Steam Library\steamapps\common\Combat Mission Shock Force 2\Data\Z\HQS 3.3   (or you may have it in the 'HQS CMSF CMSF2 CMBS CMA\HQS 3.3' directory).

The main game folder location shouldn't really be an issue as far as I'm aware and it shouldn't be necessary to move the game around. As long as it is located on a drive that is always present (preferably not an external drive that may get disconnected).

I guess the really strange thing here is that the game continues to crash after the mod has been removed. The game has been completely exited before the mod is removed, correct ? By removing these mods you have either deleted them or moved them completely out of any game directories, correct ? I wouldn't imagine that Steam would somehow be caching any of these files so that they somehow remain present even after they've been deleted/removed.

You can play the mod sound files without problem outside of the game, correct ? Do you know what sound chip/card you have in your computer and what driver it may be using ? I don't know of any specific audio chips/cards that would be incapable of playing these sounds within the game. Looking at one of the wav files,  'American adjust fire out 0' it has a 44100Hz sample rate, 32-bit (float), Mono. I don't know if editing/resampling these files to be 16-bit or 24-bit PCM might help or not. I'm not sure of the exact data on the original files, so such editing/resampling may make no difference.

[Harbin]

Yes the crashes do occur regardless of which side I'm playing. It definitely is strange and I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out why. And yes, the extracted folder is within the Data folder, so that it's under D:\Steam Library\steamapps\common\Combat Mission Shock Force 2\Data\Z\HQS 3.3 as prescribed. One thing that, for one reason or another, gave some stability to it for both titles was uninstalling, running the games once, and installing the mods. I say some stability since the longer the game runs, the higher the chances a crash would occur under the same circumstances. 

Regarding the audio chip/card question, I don't have any dedicated soundcard. Only the one that came with the Asus B550M-Plus motherboard. Other than that I am running and AMD 5600XT GPU. 

I've still had some fun with these games though. Some thirty hours each, but I concede it's rather frustrating and puzzling. Specially when I forget to save between turns.

Right now I have both games on the main C:\ drive SSD. 

What I do find suspect right now is the fact that the crash doesn't actually happen when you expect a sound to be played, which is to say at the end of plotting fire support. Rather the crash happens in the middle of the request, e.g. after selecting an artillery asset to use and clicking on the map to place the fire mission. So it's very odd how HQS is somehow influencing this behavior. 

The only thing I suspect, although rather flimsily, is my GPU considering AMD's drivers themselves are pretty bad. 

[Harbin]

Bump. What course of action could I possibly undertake? 

EDIT: Need to clarify one thing. Are both CMBS and CMSF running on DX9 or thereabouts? I'm starting to suspect it's an AMD GPU specific issue. I've just recently seen instability in other games such as FF XIII with regards to older DX versions. 

Edited March 3, 2021 by Harbin

[chuckdyke]

1 hour ago, Harbin said:

Bump. What course of action could I possibly undertake? 

EDIT: Need to clarify one thing. Are both CMBS and CMSF running on DX9 or thereabouts? I'm starting to suspect it's an AMD GPU specific issue. I've just recently seen instability in other games such as FF XIII with regards to older DX versions. 

According to 'The Few Good Men' website it's the Terrain. The 'Terrain' in SF or SF2 is a lot less demanding. 

[Harbin]

1 hour ago, chuckdyke said:

According to 'The Few Good Men' website it's the Terrain. The 'Terrain' in SF or SF2 is a lot less demanding. 

The terrain is what's influencing the crashes? I have both SF2 and Black Sea. Under the same use cases they both crash with similar frequency, at least under balanced graphics settings which I use.

On fresh installs without any mods I've played about 12 hours with no crashes. But with HQS, it'll crash when interacting with the UI for calling fire support. It occurs erratically whether in tiny or small quick battles or huge battles. In in some cases even clicking on, say, an observer section on the map. So I'm curious how terrain would play a part in the issue since fresh installs with no mods work fine. 

 

[chuckdyke]

39 minutes ago, Harbin said:

The terrain is what's influencing the crashes? I have both SF2 and Black Sea. Under the same use cases they both crash with similar frequency, at least under balanced graphics settings which I use.

On fresh installs without any mods I've played about 12 hours with no crashes. But with HQS, it'll crash when interacting with the UI for calling fire support. It occurs erratically whether in tiny or small quick battles or huge battles. In in some cases even clicking on, say, an observer section on the map. So I'm curious how terrain would play a part in the issue since fresh installs with no mods work fine. 

 

The opinion was (not mine) that there is less involved when you create a desert map. I never experienced a 'crash' ever. I never installed a 'mod' btw. They may make the game look prettier, but I personally see no need for them.

Edited March 3, 2021 by chuckdyke
wording

[Harbin]

I see. I appreciate the input.

[Harbin]

I found a reference to atioglxx.dll in the event logs. However searching for this particular issue here on the forums don't really have any recent information on it. Any tips on how to go about this issue? 

 

CM Black Sea.exe

0.0.0.0

5ff4a1f0

atioglxx.dll

27.20.14535.3005

602d3b44

c0000005

007742e9

37e4

01d71025a3965d09

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Combat Mission Black Sea\CM Black Sea.exe

C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\u0364232.inf_amd64_ac01b1fb8d253d0b\B364161\atioglxx.dll

6719d23d-cc5d-448a-b576-8213fa8d9030

[Schrullenhaft]

The CM series uses OpenGL 2.x as its graphics API. The reference to the 'atioglxx.dll' in the Event log is the AMD OpenGL video driver. In the past AMD/ATI drivers have had occasional issues with CM, but I wasn't aware of any specific ones lately. The AMD drivers do result in a slower load up time for CM (when you initially load a scenario/campaign), possibly due to some OpenGL calls being executed in a less optimized manner compared to Nvidia. But within the game I don't think that there's a too significant a difference in performance between Nvidia and AMD on somewhat equivalent hardware.

I'm awaiting a new Ryzen 7 5800X CPU to test with my computer that has a Radeon 5700XT and see if I experience the same issue as you did with the HQS mod. I don't know the exact AMD driver version you're running (27.20.14535.3005), do you know what the version is ? 21.2.3 appears to be the latest and 20.11.2 is the latest WHQL driver.

In your particular case I'm not sure why the crash may be happening with the HQS mod, but the Event log seems to indicate an issue with the AMD OpenGL video driver. Do you use HDMI pass-through for your audio (something that might happen hooking up the computer to a TV via HDMI, etc.) ? Even if it was HDMI pass-through I would assume another driver (for the AMD HDMI audio) would be listed. Perhaps there's an issue with the AMD OpenGL drivers and the resources needed for the high-def audio files that ends up crashing the AMD video drivers. I'm not sure at what point the audio file may get called up to be played back (though I would assume it would be at the time you've finished all of the steps for calling artillery).

Is there a specific point in calling for artillery support that the crashes happen ? Does it consistently happen while defining the target graphically on the screen or do you get further into the process before it crashes ? I assume this will happen with the very first plot (in other words, not random), is that correct ?

I'll need to test this with an Nvidia system too and see if the problem is at all similar or if it is strictly limited to the AMDs.

Edited March 3, 2021 by Schrullenhaft