CMSF crashing off saved games

[MrSpkr]

I have been running CMSF for some time with no problems. In the past few days, however, I have had CMSF crash when I try to load single player saved games, whether large campaign scenarios or smaller scenarios like USMC Blues for Allah. Has anyone else had this problem? My computer actually shuts down. I am running Windows XP SP3 using an Intel 2.16 GHz processor and 3 GB of ram. I have an nVidia GeForce Go 7600 video card and am using the 8.4.5.4 driver.

Thanks!

Steve

[MikeyD]

My computer actually shuts down.

Wow! That's an odd occurrance! Just recently I got an "out of menory" error message when I quit out of a huge map scenario then restarted a huge map scenario. I don't think the game thoroughly flushes old blocks of data. Something that would run fine at startup might clog the machine halfway through the evening.

You might want to try this. If you want to play a savegame you know is a monster try quitting out of the game and restarting first. It might flush out leftover chunks of data and not overload your ssystem.

Just a guess.

[BFCElvis]

Yeah. Really odd. Any shot at emailing one of the saved game files? I have a similar rig (except 2gigs of RAM instead of 3).

[Redwolf]

Does it just reboot or is there a Blue Screen Of Death?

[MrSpkr]

Elvis- check your email.

Redwolf -- No BSOD; no reboot. Just shuts down completely.

[Redwolf]

Redwolf -- No BSOD; no reboot. Just shuts down completely.

That's a very unusual thing to happen and normally cannot be triggered by a userland application.

In general, these are heat problems.

How long does it take until the thing shuts off, from opening CM:SF?

[MarkEzra]

Redwolf may be on to something. I had a video card fan stop working that created the same symptoms. Pretty easy to check out

[BFCElvis]

MrSpkr, email received and returned.

[MrSpkr]

I'm now seeing it occur from freshly started games. I ran memtest to check the memory; it seems okay (though the extended tests take FOREVER). Heat has always been a problem with this rig, but I haven't seen this particular ideation occur. I've noticed that it started happening in the last two weeks, and may be tied to my upgrading to Direct X __ (whatever the hell number it is at now).

I have run this rig using a linux boot (UBUNTU 8.04) and have not had any of these problems, so I don't think it is hardware related.

Also, I updated the nVidia drivers, but now I get a weird error message every time I boot up about some sort of rundll error. Sigh.

Finally, Elvis -- will send a turn shortly.

Steve

[Schrullenhaft]

Overheating definitely sounds like the most likely culprit, especially the response that your system has - shutting down.

If you just load up CMSF and have it sit on one of the screens without loading a scenario, do you eventually get the same response ? I can't remember off-hand how many CPU cycles CMSF takes up. I remember the old CMx1 series running the CPU at nearly 100% while it was running in the foreground and CMSF may behave in a similar way. If that's the case then your CPU (or GPU) is potentially overheating. A key to discerning this is to see if CMSF locks up after being on/loaded for a certain period of time. If you're getting fairly consistent times on the shut down then overheating is your most likely culprit.

This can be a common occurrence with laptops since a number of those designs don't really dissipate heat very well - especially heat that is constantly being generated by the CPU and GPU running at near full throttle. A memory test probably won't stress the CPU enough to cause it to heat up sufficiently to duplicate this problem. A 3D test may do that however (something that could stress both the CPU and GPU).