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Forums > Quake 4 Forum

Q4 crashes/freezes with openAL on (38 comments)

( Forum: Q4)

Posted by c1 @ 11:16 CST, 23 January 2008 - iMsg

Hi there

I get randomly freezes/crashes when I play with openAL turned on and i am not going to play without them! I am getting those freezes since PR 1.3 because i bought q4 when pr 1.3 was released so i dont know if those crashes/freezes would have appeared with PR 1.1 or PR 1.2.

I've already contacted activision support, but they couldn't find a solution (btw they asked me a lot of senseless things)

I've used all avaible beta drivers from creativ-labs for my x-fi but no success.
I've changed the pci slot of my x-fi because of IRQ issues but still freezing.

The funny thing is activision said they had not run into this issue with anyone else. The ones who plays pickups will know that i am not the only one.

And I've found this: Quake4: Random pauses occur during gameplay, but may its a different issue, which is caused by q4 and not by nvidia.
(source: ttp://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/163.75/163.75_WinXP_ForceWare_Release_Notes.pdf)

my system is:
e4300 non-oc
GA965-S3 (with latest bios: F12)
2 x 1024MB DDR2-800 MDT
Nvidia 6600 GT (with latest driver: forceware 169.21)
X-FI Music (with latest final drivers: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic, Platinum, Fatal1ty and Elite Pro Driver with OpenAL support 2.09.0007 and the openAL drivers from the openAL homepage)

Does anyone know a solution?

sorry for my english

Edited by crazyONe at 11:17 CST, 23 January 2008 - 11534 Hits

<< prev Q4 thread || next Q4 thread >>

<< Comment #1 @ 11:44 CST, 23 January 2008 >>

By

AnthonyJ

Freezes will be kinda hard / impossible for me to debug. Crashes... what sort of crash are you talking about? Do you get an Access Violation? Does either the Q4Max exception handler or the q4 crash log capture anything?

If so, get me the details and I'll see if theres anything I can figure out. Probably not, but worth a look at least.

I think its highly unlikely the issue is new to 1.3 since OAL was always flakey.

I'm not surprised Activision support couldnt help. They didnt even know that the correct fix for "q4 doesnt find any servers" is either "set net_master0 to the IP address" or "update to q4 1.4.2"

Edited by AnthonyJ at 11:46 CST, 23 January 2008

<< Comment #2 @ 12:05 CST, 23 January 2008 >>

By

c1 - Reply to #1

I dont get crashes. I wrote crashes/freezes because a lot of people cant differ between them. Unfortunately q4 never wrote a crash log or sth like that. Where can i find the q4max exception handler?

When i get a freeze i can quit q4 by the taskmanager and start q4 again but its really annoying.

AnthonyJ I really appreciate your goodwill to help but i guess its just a q4 bug.

<< Comment #3 @ 14:13 CST, 23 January 2008 >>

By

AnthonyJ - Reply to #2

The result of the q4max exception handler is the messages on the callstack that tell you to send a condump to us, stating ACCESS_VIOLATION etc. An end task wont generate one of those, and not surprised it doesnt trigger id's one either.

If you can reproduce it reasonably easily (I guess you must if its that annoying), I'd run with developer 1 and logfile 2. That'll get you a qconsole.log with a lot of stuff, and you never know maybe a warning or two related to sound just before it hangs.

One possibility is that its an SMP issue. You could try setting q4 to only use one of your two cores - I dont just mean r_useSMP 0 (although set that anyway), but setting cpu affinity. You can do this via taskmanager, and I think arqon created a nosmp.exe forq3 which you could use too. I realise losing r_useSMP would be a pain, but if this is a thread-safety issue in OpenAL then its possible it can be resolved with other methods

<< Comment #4 @ 23:04 CST, 23 January 2008 >>

By

arQon - Reply to #3

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN
#include <windows.h>

int main(const int argc, const char* argv[])
{
if (argc < 2) {
std::cout << "Usage: nosmp <program> [command line] \n";
return 0;
}

std::string s;
s.reserve(200);
for (int i = 1; i < argc; i++) {
s += argv[i];
s += ' ';
}

STARTUPINFO si = { sizeof(STARTUPINFO), NULL, NULL, NULL };
si.cbReserved2 = 0;
si.lpReserved2 = 0;
si.dwFlags = 0;
PROCESS_INFORMATION pi;
CreateProcess(NULL, const_cast<LPTSTR>(s.c_str()), NULL, NULL, FALSE, 0, NULL, NULL, &si, &pi);

DWORD dw, dwAffinity;
GetProcessAffinityMask(pi.hProcess, &dwAffinity, &dw);
dwAffinity &= 1;
SetProcessAffinityMask(pi.hProcess, dwAffinity);

WaitForSingleObject(pi.hProcess, INFINITE);

return 0;
}

Edited by arQon at 23:05 CST, 23 January 2008

<< Comment #6 @ 09:22 CST, 24 January 2008 >>

By

c1 - Reply to #4

sorry i dont have a program to use this code

<< Comment #7 @ 10:20 CST, 24 January 2008 >>

By

AnthonyJ - Reply to #6

http://www.promode.org/arqon/nosmp.exe

<< Comment #17 @ 02:23 CST, 4 February 2008 >>

By

xgo - Reply to #4

powershell version :P

if($args.Length -le 0) {
write "Usage: nosmp.ps1 <program> [command line]"; break
}

$p = [diagnostics.process]::Start($args[0], $args[1])
$p.ProcessorAffinity = 1

<< Comment #5 @ 09:21 CST, 24 January 2008 >>

By

c1 - Reply to #3

okay you will get the next qconsole.log when the next freeze happens
and i will play with one core via taskmanager and r_useSMP 0

btw the freezes happens with r_useSMP 0 but at that time i didn't assign q4 via taskmanager to use one core.

<< Comment #8 @ 10:24 CST, 24 January 2008 >>

By

AnthonyJ - Reply to #5

The freeze sounds like a "deadlock" to me, which is why I suspect SMP stuff. When it dies, see if task manager shows you're at high CPU usage (which would suggest a run-away loop) or if its actually really low even though Q4 has hung (which would indicate it is a deadlock).

My theory is that OpenAL or the implementation in Q4 isnt properly thread safe, and the potential for two OpenAL calls going on at the same time could cause this (unrelated to the threading in the renderer activated by r_useSMP).

I dunno how much the process cpu affinity will help when its disappaering into the OpenAL -> soundcard driver layer though, but seems worth a try since it helped with q3's issues with modern OpenGL drivers

Edited by AnthonyJ at 10:27 CST, 24 January 2008

<< Comment #13 @ 19:09 CST, 25 January 2008 >>

By

c1 - Reply to #8

its low cpu usage. I've done a screenshot if you wanna see the taskmanager by yourself then give me your email adress

qconsole.log

btw this log was catched at this night but I've changed the date on my computer because of some annoying time reminder
hope it may help

edit: I've paste the qconsole.log again to ensure that all lines are avaible

Edited by crazyONe at 08:14 CST, 26 January 2008

<< Comment #15 @ 04:27 CST, 26 January 2008 >>

By

AnthonyJ - Reply to #13

I think you missed the last few lines of the stack dump there. Its probably not important but if you still have them, paste them.

I suspect you have s_useEAXReverb 1. If so, try it on 0.

I see this is a crash tho, so maybe not related to your freezing issue.

<< Comment #16 @ 08:11 CST, 26 January 2008 >>

By

c1 - Reply to #15

i dont think i forget the last line, but maybe i had
nethertheless here is a 2nd one but unfortunately with s_useEaxReverb 1

qconsole.log

im going to change eaxReverb to 0 now
btw I have pasted the first qconsole.log again

Edited by crazyONe at 08:15 CST, 26 January 2008

<< Comment #18 @ 05:22 CST, 7 February 2008 >>

By

c1 - Reply to #15

i didnt get any freezes/crashes since I've changed s_useEAXReverb to 0 :)
it seems that solves this issue. Thank you so much. You are the man AnthonyJ

<< Comment #19 @ 06:20 CST, 7 February 2008 >>

By

AnthonyJ - Reply to #18

\o/

Go EAX.

<< Comment #20 @ 12:04 CST, 7 February 2008 >>

By

hemostick - Reply to #19

You have won a creative x-fi soundblaster card ! =)

<< Comment #21 @ 12:09 CST, 7 February 2008 >>

By

AnthonyJ - Reply to #20

Just what I've always wanted!

<< Comment #9 @ 12:23 CST, 24 January 2008 >>

By

dradik

Yeah, I thought everybody had this problem so I didn't post it up. :)

<< Comment #10 @ 06:21 CST, 25 January 2008 >>

By

zuphrin - Reply to #9

Got that too. And I got some weird beep sound which comes up when I am in windowed mode and press alt+tab.
I'm already playing without OpenAL for some while...

<< Comment #11 @ 10:32 CST, 25 January 2008 >>

By

Erk

I get freezes with gray screen when using vid_restart since 1.4.2, did not get them before 1.4.2 even with r_useSMP 1.

Edited by Erk at 10:32 CST, 25 January 2008

<< Comment #12 @ 12:34 CST, 25 January 2008 >>

By

dradik

Somebody posted up q4minimizer I have been using that whenever I need to use the desktop and it works great without having to alt+enter / freeze my shit up. Something you should look into.

<< Comment #14 @ 02:28 CST, 26 January 2008 >>

By

rockz '

erm..öüüää..uuh..CHEATER!

<< Comment #22 @ 12:27 CST, 7 February 2008 >>

By

wari

while we're at it, does someone know the reason for sound repeating and stuttering? It's really strange, I get a sound like "quad damage" all chopped up, played back in pieces "qu a ddam a ge e", but for the correct duration of the soundfile. Same with any other sound, it happens randomly.

<< Comment #23 @ 13:14 CST, 8 February 2008 >>

By

shqdow

without reading a single post - i'd say that the latest xfi driver causes the problem.
had the same driver and the same problem, either you download the latest beta driver (which works fine for me) or you just use the driver from your original installation cd.
both ways should solve the problem

<< Comment #24 @ 00:50 CDT, 11 August 2008 >>

By

c1

~~just wanna mention the latest x-fi driver allows to play with openAL + eax advanced hd \o/~~

Edited by crazyONe at 14:19 CDT, 15 August 2008

<< Comment #25 @ 08:16 CDT, 11 August 2008 >>

By

mnemjc - Reply to #24

Version 1.4.79 is the latest, right?

<< Comment #26 @ 10:10 CDT, 11 August 2008 >>

By

c1 - Reply to #25

the latest x-fi music driver from 30 July 08

it took a while but q4 got better sound now in general than q3

openAL + eax hd + cmss-3d + good headphones ftw

Edited by crazyONe at 10:15 CDT, 11 August 2008

<< Comment #27 @ 10:19 CDT, 11 August 2008 >>

By

f0cus - Reply to #26

eww to eax HD, but the rest is good. I don't think the dedicated sound proc on that is as good as the Xtreme Gamer (which I use), but it's a few bucks less, so it all evens out in the end.
OpenAL + CMSS3d + 5Hv2's = Win. (for gaming. I use Bose for music, but the stereo separation in the 5Hv2's makes my hd280's seem like mono by comparison, when it comes to positional audio)

Edited by focus at 10:19 CDT, 11 August 2008

<< Comment #28 @ 10:36 CDT, 11 August 2008 >>

By

c1 - Reply to #27

the extrem gamer is exactly the same as the extrem music but the music edition costs 5€ more and got the better look :)
except you got the extrem gamer fatal1ty edition. This one got x-fi ram which results in 1-2fps more than the gamer/music edition.

I can locate my enemys much better with eax hd so I like it :)

<< Comment #31 @ 18:28 CDT, 11 August 2008 >>

By

mnemjc - Reply to #26

doesn't work for me, but anyway thanks :)

<< Comment #29 @ 12:39 CDT, 11 August 2008 >>

By

c1 - Reply to #24

im sry it didnt crash for 4 days so i thought it works stable but unfortunaley it crashed today w/ eax hd :(
but... im still testing sth and it doesnt run stable with eax hd.

Edited by crazyONe at 14:20 CDT, 15 August 2008

<< Comment #30 @ 13:43 CDT, 11 August 2008 >>

By

f0cus - Reply to #29

eax is dildoes.

<< Comment #32 @ 07:29 CST, 25 January 2013 >>

By

Wolven

Did you guys still play q4?
I have found completely way to solve "waiting for authorization" problem
Google "Q4Pause.exe"

<< Comment #33 @ 07:39 CST, 25 January 2013 >>

By

Janitor III - Reply to #32

We certainly do. Look up Militia mod for Q4.

<< Comment #35 @ 11:48 CST, 25 January 2013 >>

By

palatka - Reply to #33

omg its finally happening!!

<< Comment #34 @ 11:41 CST, 25 January 2013 >>

By

p0rt - Reply to #32

download http://www.mediafire.com/?aj1he1bu37fyuip and play online and run servers without a valid cd key

<< Comment #36 @ 14:21 CST, 25 January 2013 >>

By

ProT : - Reply to #34

No linux? :(

<< Comment #37 @ 20:31 CST, 25 January 2013 >>

By

p0rt - Reply to #36

http://www.cdkey-game.com/quake-4-cd-key-p-350.html

<< Comment #38 @ 20:33 CST, 25 January 2013 >>

By

ProT : - Reply to #37

Thanks.

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