game freezes after loading from opponent's pc

[monty12]

Hello everyone,

I looked for a problem similar to mine without finding anything, so I apologize if I missed the answer somewhere.

I play CMBO against my neighbor on a tcp/ip connection. He plays on a windows XP laptop (pIII 1GHz, 512MB, radeon 7500 mobile card) with a wireless connection, while I play on a Win98 system (pIII 450, 640MB, GeForce 4200Ti card) with a cable modem.

His computer never freezes, but mine tends to lock up, usually after hours of play. It always freezes at the same place - the red bar moves all the way across the screen, loading the results from my opponent's comp. My game then freezes, still displaying the "loading" bar. He gets the "movie" from last turn's orders, and then the game autosaves. Restoring from autosave only duplicates the freeze. This seems to happen more often as the scenarios get larger - we seldom have trouble on smaller maps with limited numbers of units.

I think my drivers are up to date, but will check them again tonight. The desktop is a Dell, and I followed the troubleshooting guide and upgraded the BIOS. This upgrade seemed to work until last night, when I froze at the load bar, on turn 19/20 of what was looking like a nice win for me, grrr...(it's a campaign though, "Rest of the Red Devils" I believe).

Thanks for any suggestions!

[Schrullenhaft]

I assume that this problem only happens when you are playing via TCP/IP with your neighbor and not when you're playing solo, is that correct ? If so, then you may be running into a particular bug that exists in CMBO. When crews are captured, the 'processing' machine will display the movie, but the 'receiving' computer will crash when attempting to download this movie. Autosaves from the 'processing' computer (your neighbor) will probably always result in this crash.

The solution (if I recall correctly) is to play a few PBEM turns with the autosave file on your computer. You'll basically lose the last turn of plotted moves, but you should be able to continue the game. Once the captured crew is seen in a movie (and assuming more don't get captured) then you can proceed via TCP/IP.

CMBB & CMAK don't have this particular problem.

[monty12]

Thanks for the explanation! Too bad they didn't patch this problem, it happens pretty often.