Bodenplatte nearly unplayable

[Labroisse]

Did you try running SFC /SCANNOW from the command prompt to see if any system files are corrupt?

NVM, I saw you said you tried this earlier.

[-Hawkeye-]

20 hours ago, Labroisse said:

NVM, I saw you said you tried this earlier.

As you see, it initially DID find some corrupt files and stuff....probably minor and unrelated, though.  Once it had corrected what it found, and I had installed the Visual C++ 2015/2017/2019, I ran it again; and it came up clean.

[Labroisse]

You might try uninstalling the the 2015-2019 Visual C++ and reinstalling them using the Visual C++ executables that are inside the game's redistribution folder.  That should have occurred when you reinstalled the game, but perhaps they didn't install then because you already had a newer version installed.

Anyway, worth a try since sometimes games can be finicky if the correct version of the VCC package isn't installed.

[-Hawkeye-]

Huh, I didn't know that those installation files resided within the game files; how convenient.  Thanks!

I did learn a couple of things. One, the problem is only associated with Great Battles; it does not occur with RoF, or any other normal program. So I don't believe it's associated with hardware at all.  Two, it is associated with Great Battles in general, not just FC. Three, it is not limited to the Arras map, or any specific map; or any specific plane.

I am trying to isolate what is different about my rig from most other people's, and have come up with this: one, I use G-sync. Two, I run at a higher than normal resolution: 3440 x 1440. Three, my version of Windows 10 may be newer than most: ver. 1903.

I really thought I had it yesterday....I disabled G-sync on my monitor/Nvidia CP/game, and set everything to run at a standard 60Hz refresh rate. I flew around for over an hour and had just convinced myself that the problem was fixed; I was down to about 5 minutes of fuel, and on my final landing approach.... then pfffft! Back to desktop.  Frustrating.

I will try what Labroisse suggested; and if that doesn't work, I will try running the game in a compatibility mode.  Then I may go so far as to do the Windows "reset this computer" thing, but I think to be worthwhile, you really need to clear all your programs in that process, so that the registry gets a clean start. But I will lose some expensive programs that I can't replace, if I did that.

I'm even considering just building a new computer and starting again from scratch.  Sadly, it's beginning to look like I'll be defunct for FiF / FC, before it even starts.

[Snaggle]

Luft,

winver 1909 so far no ill effects.

I flew FC at 5760x1080 \ 3840x1024 \ 1920x1080 in QM never a issue, minor shudder when new plane spawns in that was it.

[-Hawkeye-]

Going to start stress testing hardware to see if there are any weak components.

[-Hawkeye-]

My main concern is why is it showing 1066 MHz, when it should be 2133?  This memory is actually supposed to be capable of 3000 MHz.  I wonder is it throttled for some reason.  I need to look into that in the BIOS, it always said 2133 before.  Maybe I'm misunderstanding the information as presented by CPUz for memory.

I have Memtest86 and need to run those tests, but you have to create a bootable flash drive to do it.

[Snaggle]

Might be a bad chip, reseat all chips , swao slots of the chips. The random ctd you are probably on the right track!

[-Hawkeye-]

Well I got the answer to that indicated memory speed.  That speed shown above is the clock speed, not the processing speed (pretty misleading). Notice that if you double it, you get 2133 MHz, which is the standard speed it is currently running at.

Spent yesterday running Memtest86 from a bootable drive (very time consuming).  It is a very thorough process (11 tests done 4 times in sequence). It takes hours even with 16 GB and a fast processor.  I got zero errors. Definitely no problem there.

After that I ran the stress test built into CPU-z.  100% CPU usage at top speed (3.7 GHz) on all 6 cores, for 2 hours straight.  No individual core temp ever got over 42 deg C; in fact that is only 2 or 3 deg C over the idle temperatures.  No crashes obviously, but stable at 100% the whole time too.  This CPU is fine.  I might do another test today using Prime95, but don't expect any problems.

I'm going to stress test the GPU today using a program associated with MSI Afterburner.  If everything comes out good with that, I may wipe my whole operating system and start over.

[Britchot]

I'm a huge fan of Heaven for stress testing GPUs, but if you already have one, use that. 

[-Hawkeye-]

Problem solved.

The exact reason is unclear; but the overall reason was to reset/reinstall Windows using the features in the Settings > Update and Security > Recovery > Clean installation of Windows area.  This of course caused the loss of a lot of programs, so I backed up a lot of game files, downloaded drivers, made sure I had reinstallation information on hand, etc., before I did it.  The main thing I wanted to accomplish was to wipe the registry and start clean, which this did seem to do.  However, I did not need to reinstall drivers, not even the nVidia video driver, which was nice; I had no unknown devices in the device manager when it was complete.  Also after it was completed, Windows created a document that showed all the programs that had not been installed which were on the computer before; and that document even had links to each program's website for reinstallation, if desired.  It made one copy on the desktop, and another in My Documents.

Great Battles and RoF were both part of the many removed programs; so it was necessary to log into my account and profile at the Great Battles website and re-download the game client.  In doing that, I noticed a link to FAQ's for game settings, and checked that out.  Number 13 in that list made me seriously wonder if that had been my original problem:

 

So, after the game was reinstalled, I checked my game folder properties, and sure enough, this is what I saw:

 

So I unchecked the box, hit "OK", and got this:

 

Having no other choice, I hit "OK".....then a wiz-bang zippy file change wizard whipped through all of the files and folders, and completed the changes within a couple of seconds.

Then I closed the properties window, and just to check, clicked on another area, and then clicked back on the Great Battles folder properties again.  Guess what I saw?  The box was filled again!  Arrrgh!  Well I stupidly tried again, with the same results.  Then I googled the problem of Windows 10 changing folder attributes back to read-only, and one of the many things I found was this:

 

Hello!  What if that happened to my game folder when I had upgraded from Win 10 ver. 1803 to Win 10 ver. 1903?  That was about the time I noticed the game crashing issue.  In any case, I tried all three of the methods they listed in that article to cause the checkbox to stay cleared, one of which was using command-line interface employing "attrib" commands; but NONE of them worked.  What's going on here?

Then I remembered having looked into another area of Windows features once that had an explanation of checkboxes for that interface.  So I found that area again, and this is what it said:

 

Notice the difference between an actual check, and the filled box that I was seeing using File Explorer.  So I thought, even though this was not File Explorer, the same convention might apply.  It is possible that the "read only" was removed for most or many of the files, but the folder would not show the box to be completely cleared since something in there could still be set as "read only"....

In any case, when I did extended testing of the game, I had no crashes anymore.  Also, I checked with Butzzell, who had never had the problem, and his folder properties did show exactly what mine showed.

So was that the original problem?  Or was it some other issue that was corrected by reinstalling Windows?

Who knows?  

[Klaiber]

I really hope this works!  While this whole CTD has really sucked, my hope is that someone else will be able to save themselves the nightmare by following your process.

 

[-Hawkeye-]

4 minutes ago, Klaiber said:

I really hope this works!  While this whole CTD has really sucked, my hope is that someone else will be able to save themselves the nightmare by following your process.

 

I saw that you replied before I had the whole post up....I accidentally hit enter when I was trying to single space a line.  Hopefully it makes a little more sense than when you saw it.

[Klaiber]

It does make more sense now.