Kaybeebiscuits
07-23-2010, 01:10 AM
Hi all,
I have been playing Heroes 5 inclusive of the original version (up to version 1.41), Hammers of Fate (latest version), Tribes of the East (3.1, latest), and I found the game to be extremely stable to date.
After having played the entire campaign in the original, the ones in Hammers of Fate, as well as a few popular and very well-tested custom maps made by expert map editors in Tribes of the East, the game crashed only a few times, but got out of hand recently when I played my own custom maps which I have made personally.
Here is the summary of some of the known crashes I have experienced, my own solutions, and problems which I cannot fix.
(1) In the original and the first addon (Hammers of Fate), the game crashed only twice in all my weeks of gameplay in finishing all the campaign missions, and was remarkably stable. It crashed only once during a battle, and another during an AI turn. I didn't do anything about these random and spontaneous crashes because they were so incredibly rare, that they do not disrupt the gameplay at all. We are taking about only 2 minor, but not gamebreaking crashes in 2 months of playing the game, so it is extremely tolerable.
(2) Memory Allocation crashes. This happened once when I was playing downloaded custom maps above the extra-larger category in ToTE. It is a known problem that 32-bit applications can only utilise at most 2GB of virtual memory, and huge maps tend to cross this threshold. I have 4GB of RAM on a 64-bit OS and this can be easily rectified using the 4GB patch to make the .exe file use 4GB, instead of 2GB of RAM. This problem is universal and applies to many games like The Sims 3, Galactic Civilizations 2, Civilization 4 in ultra big maps. However, upon using the 4GB patch (use it only when you have 2GB of RAM or more), there were no more crashes relating to this issue. Heroes 5 worked well and I could play impossibly sized maps. People with 32-bit OS (the above works only for 64-bit OS) would have to solve this by using CPF explorer to modify the .exe file to enable more than 2GB of RAM and run a command as administrator (additional step) to enable more RAM for all users.
(3) Most recently, I have been trying to play-test some of the abilities of certain units and the skills of many heroes and factions, and to do that, I created 2 normal sized maps (one 4 player FFA and one 1v3 [me vs 3AI] maps) with many towns, dwellings, resources, leveling platforms for all players. All of them shared only 1 chokepoint where all players must converge, making sneaking past others impossible if you are in control of that point. They were stable at first, but later on, they crashed repeatedly and ended up showing a "HoMM 5 has stopped working" error during AI load turns. I do not have the solution to this, but this is completely breaking the entire gameplay of HoMM 5. If the crash can happen so many times, it can possibly happen on other custom maps as well. So far, most of the popular custom maps that I have downloaded (like world between worlds, and future world) have been stable, but the paranoia that it might crash ruins the feel of the game.
It is hoped that someone can offer me any clues as to how to resolve problem (3). (1) and (2) are mostly solvable, but (3) is taking the fun out of the game since I was so accustomed to making my own maps like the ones mentioned above, that emphasizes big endgame battles over the management of the economy, defence and hero leveling.
My system has no problem running this game since it is way above the recommended system requirements (Q6600 2.4ghz, 4GB RAM, 5670 1GB, Windows 7 64-bit), so I suspect a couple of possible causes: (1) A possible incompatibility with Windows 7 64-bit (unlikely), (2) My own map's failure to check AI passability resulting in bad pathways that might cause the AI to crash during turns (I genuinely suspect this to be the root cause, because the maps which I made had one common chokepoint as mentioned above, and the crashes happened eclectically depending on whether I blocked or unblocked the point to attack the AI directly). (3) Some serious hard and heroic AI issue resulting in bad management of troops and severe glitches (also suspected. Each of the enemy factions had 5 towns, and some of them had unusually and impossibly large armies that were far larger than what the towns can possibly support [something like an exaggerated and glitched 3000 dragons, 4500 matriachs, 1500 hydras spread across 3 heroes when it should only be a tenth of that at most considering the month and the small (compared to mine) number of towns the AI had].)
I greatly appreciate it if anyone can provide some assistance. If you have had some experience of this, please do share if you can. Thank you.
I have been playing Heroes 5 inclusive of the original version (up to version 1.41), Hammers of Fate (latest version), Tribes of the East (3.1, latest), and I found the game to be extremely stable to date.
After having played the entire campaign in the original, the ones in Hammers of Fate, as well as a few popular and very well-tested custom maps made by expert map editors in Tribes of the East, the game crashed only a few times, but got out of hand recently when I played my own custom maps which I have made personally.
Here is the summary of some of the known crashes I have experienced, my own solutions, and problems which I cannot fix.
(1) In the original and the first addon (Hammers of Fate), the game crashed only twice in all my weeks of gameplay in finishing all the campaign missions, and was remarkably stable. It crashed only once during a battle, and another during an AI turn. I didn't do anything about these random and spontaneous crashes because they were so incredibly rare, that they do not disrupt the gameplay at all. We are taking about only 2 minor, but not gamebreaking crashes in 2 months of playing the game, so it is extremely tolerable.
(2) Memory Allocation crashes. This happened once when I was playing downloaded custom maps above the extra-larger category in ToTE. It is a known problem that 32-bit applications can only utilise at most 2GB of virtual memory, and huge maps tend to cross this threshold. I have 4GB of RAM on a 64-bit OS and this can be easily rectified using the 4GB patch to make the .exe file use 4GB, instead of 2GB of RAM. This problem is universal and applies to many games like The Sims 3, Galactic Civilizations 2, Civilization 4 in ultra big maps. However, upon using the 4GB patch (use it only when you have 2GB of RAM or more), there were no more crashes relating to this issue. Heroes 5 worked well and I could play impossibly sized maps. People with 32-bit OS (the above works only for 64-bit OS) would have to solve this by using CPF explorer to modify the .exe file to enable more than 2GB of RAM and run a command as administrator (additional step) to enable more RAM for all users.
(3) Most recently, I have been trying to play-test some of the abilities of certain units and the skills of many heroes and factions, and to do that, I created 2 normal sized maps (one 4 player FFA and one 1v3 [me vs 3AI] maps) with many towns, dwellings, resources, leveling platforms for all players. All of them shared only 1 chokepoint where all players must converge, making sneaking past others impossible if you are in control of that point. They were stable at first, but later on, they crashed repeatedly and ended up showing a "HoMM 5 has stopped working" error during AI load turns. I do not have the solution to this, but this is completely breaking the entire gameplay of HoMM 5. If the crash can happen so many times, it can possibly happen on other custom maps as well. So far, most of the popular custom maps that I have downloaded (like world between worlds, and future world) have been stable, but the paranoia that it might crash ruins the feel of the game.
It is hoped that someone can offer me any clues as to how to resolve problem (3). (1) and (2) are mostly solvable, but (3) is taking the fun out of the game since I was so accustomed to making my own maps like the ones mentioned above, that emphasizes big endgame battles over the management of the economy, defence and hero leveling.
My system has no problem running this game since it is way above the recommended system requirements (Q6600 2.4ghz, 4GB RAM, 5670 1GB, Windows 7 64-bit), so I suspect a couple of possible causes: (1) A possible incompatibility with Windows 7 64-bit (unlikely), (2) My own map's failure to check AI passability resulting in bad pathways that might cause the AI to crash during turns (I genuinely suspect this to be the root cause, because the maps which I made had one common chokepoint as mentioned above, and the crashes happened eclectically depending on whether I blocked or unblocked the point to attack the AI directly). (3) Some serious hard and heroic AI issue resulting in bad management of troops and severe glitches (also suspected. Each of the enemy factions had 5 towns, and some of them had unusually and impossibly large armies that were far larger than what the towns can possibly support [something like an exaggerated and glitched 3000 dragons, 4500 matriachs, 1500 hydras spread across 3 heroes when it should only be a tenth of that at most considering the month and the small (compared to mine) number of towns the AI had].)
I greatly appreciate it if anyone can provide some assistance. If you have had some experience of this, please do share if you can. Thank you.