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Great game, but freezes/locks up on 4 different PCs

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Jun 6, 2012
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  • Naval War: Arctic Circle
I love this game, it reminds me so much of Strike Fleet back in the commodore days.

Unfortunately like others I've had problems with it freezing on nearly every single mission. I have 3 gaming PCs and an Asus i7 gaming laptop with all of them running windows7. I've been able to complete maybe one mission in 5 without having to cntrl alt delete out after lockup on all the systems I have, and also a neighbours crappy older PC. I've read that this bug isn't reproduce-able at the dev offices, which sounds strange as I have a variety of pc s with both the latest nvidia and ati cards, and i7 cpus, all with current drivers which I use to play aces high and some other high end simulations, and I have zero trouble with any of these half dozen games. I've tried every sound and video resolution, sound all off, playing in a window, like every combination of variations to try and make this work. It's so frustrating mainly because I see so much potential and the game is so good, that it sucks having the 4th mission in the soviet campaign lock 23 times in a row when I get so close to victory.

Here's to hoping it can be fixed.....great game, and a superb game once it works. I won't be a guy crying over 20 dollars, even broken I have received full value for that price, and having worked in the industry long ago, I know what the devs have done in creating what can possibly become a masterpiece of balance between Harpoon and Fleet Command, and I thank them for creating something that the masses will never appreciate like us sim geeks.

I won't bother posting logs etc, as like I said I have tried with similar results on all my different boxes, and I'm sure the dev team is getting sick of seeing them posted. The answer is out there, and I can't wait for the day we get to hear it.
 
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Same problem with my brand new pc and even in my 4 years old pc. Don´t know why developers say this problem only affects "a very small minority of players". I hope devs solve this situation.
 
Damage said:
Don´t know why developers say this problem only affects "a very small minority of players".
Click to expand...

Hey, whadda ya think? They really have no idea... I´m afraid that this "minority" will never get the chance to play the game. So many players report that bug - I can´t believe that it didn´t appear on the PC´s at the devs office. It´s something like a big big mystery. Some kind of "X-Files" maybe. ;-) Anyway, we´re still in hope to have it fixed some day.
 
Today I stumbled onto something. Unity player (which is a called NWAC.exe) has some command line parameters. I created a shortcut on my desktop, changed in compatibility tab to launch it in Vista SP2 compatibility mode and added -nolog parameter. And - surprise, surprise - I was able to finish my test scenario, where there was a moment with over two hundred planes in the air, 6 ticos and two 45s shooting at incoming over four hundred missiles with 4 kirovs defending from full salvo coming from the other side with S-300s (add to this some AMRAAMs and R-37s and you'll have the picture). I repeated the scenario 5 times and only had a little stutter when Hawkeye turned radar on and detected hundreds of vampires incoming.

There is definitely buffer overflow problem in the code, cause now I can get the freeze bug as well but it is scaled to much later stage (400 F35s launching 800 JSMs), when normally I couldn't finish scenario with 12 ships and 100 planes on both sides (two ACs vs SAG and two airfields).

My system is I5 2.66GHz, 12GB RAM with Win7 64bit.
 
I tried the proposed "-nolog" work-around solution on my XP Home and it did appear to help for awhile. I managed to play most of the North by Northwest scenario with the same performance seen pre-1.0.5.6 [The game slowed down and stuttered a bit, but kept running.] Unfortunately, in the end, the time compression went berserk and would run up and down the scale of its own accord and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
 
On my computer, the NWAC.exe file is located in this folder:

C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\naval war arctic circle\

Do a Right+Click on it and create a shortcut.

Do a Right+Click on the shortcut and select Properties.

Under the Target slot, enter: "C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\naval war arctic circle\NWAC.exe" -nolog

Then run the Shortcut. If your NWAC.exe file is found elsewhere, modify these steps to accommodate the differences.
 
Guess what - the well known freezing seems to be gone. But now the whole game locks up after some time, so that only the "Strg-Alt-Esc" can be used to exit the game... Tried this two times, with similar effects...

Seems we found a new issue the devs have to deal with. I´m curious if they can´t reproduce it this time.

Nonetheless, it was a great feeling seeing the game run as it should for longer than i had experienced so far... :)
 
Herman Hum said:
I always thought the Freezing/Lock-up bug to be one in the same.
Click to expand...
No, unfortunately not. The "old" freezing sees the graphics freeze, e.g. there´s no more movement on the map. But the game itself runs on, you get messages if units are destroyed etc. And at the end the mission will be finished at all... In my newest experience the complete game / PC locks up. Nothing more works... One time I had to use the powerswitch of my PC to exit...
 
Those are the main issues:
- Graphics freezes, but you can still send commands and UI looks like it's working, but there is no display updates (game engine is still running)
- Graphics freezes and you cannot send any commands, looks like engine stops working
- Slower-than-realtime mode - when you have screen updates and input processing is like once in a minute or few minutes

The second one is easy to reproduce:
- Create scenario with 12 Nimitz class ACs with default wing onboard
- run it
- select all groups
- click air operations button (plane ;)) - it can take few seconds to open
- from left side drop down menu select F-35C
- from right side drop down menu select AttackSurface
- click on the F-35s until all of them are added to the launch queue (top window is full, botom one is empty)
- send them all to patrol whenever on the map (right mouse button drag)

Game will lock up in about 5 seconds. It's easy to observe as the CPU load will drop to 0%.
 
Okay, I've seen both behaviours. IMO, the Freezing/stuttering bug is one in the same. Sometimes, the game unfreezes after all the calculations seem to catch up. However, not in all cases. I agree that sometimes the graphics stop updating altogether.

I have also gotten the total lock-up behaviour whereby a total power re-start maybe required. Sometimes, I can shut down NWAC via the Task Manager, too.
 
Nolog is a NO-GO for me as well. :( !!

Is there anyone who is playing this game who has it work seamlessly? Like no lock ups at all, the ability to use time compression at will and have it work properly without causing freezes etc?

I've tried every variation I can think of including all kinds of graphics settings, shortcut settings in terms of compatibility with older windows versions etc etc. My asus gaming notebook, a G74sx which is an i7 2.2 ghz cpu, gtx 560 vid card and 16gb ram seems to run the game the best, but it still locks up on nearly every mission at some point, I can get through maybe half of the scenarios after a good 3 dozen attempts to secure a victory prior to a lock up or freeze of some kind. My best desktop is an i7 3770k with the fastest ATI card available, SSD drive which I've tried using with steam and NWAC, as well as just trying the 2 TB 7200rpm drive to see if that made a difference. I've tried all kinds of variations of installs, administration yes/no....I'm running out of ideas to try here....I've tried all the suggestions from the dev team regarding firewall etc, including disabling windows firewall completely on all my systems, and no joy there. I also have 2 internet connections, a 10mbit adsl and a 100mbit cable (www.shaw.ca). I've tried running the game with both connections with firewall enabled and set to let the game through, as well as the firewalls completely disabled.

Any suggestions of something else to attempt? In my 30+ years of gaming I can't remember when something has frustrated me this much, I REALLY want this game to work well, as in longer than 10-20 minutes before locking/freezing, so I can get into creating my own missions etc. There obviously is a bug someplace that is doing this, there is no possibility that this game works "flawlessly" on any machine in my opinion, as like I've stated I have a good number of gaming PC's in my home, with a wide variation of video/motherboard/soundcards, and even tried 2 older machines that friends have close by running XP and Vista (mine are all Win7 64 bit). Same result on their systems.

Is there a non-steam running variant of this game out there? I've seen it mentioned here in the forums...I'm thinking that maybe it's Steam that is the problem, or how it interacts with NWAC or something! Has anyone had any luck with this version if it's out there? I'm getting about to the end of my string. As I said, it's a good thing this game is such an incredible value at 20$, because if it was the price of say Steal Beasts tank sim or something similar at 100$, my credit card company would have stopped the charge long ago if I wasn't able to return it for a refund.


-edit - I've found that if I launch NO ASW forces particularly helo's, and don't launch a single sonobouy that I can get through a few of the missions with much less frequent freezes and lock ups. I read that tip from somebody here on the board in another thread...could the culprit lay with the bug/code issue around the asw/sonobouy's somehow?
 
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Here's another thing you can try. I have done it and it slows down the game, but seems to extend a slight bit of stability. However, I still get the problems in the end.

Set your affinity to a single processor. I have a dual core and use the Task Manager to order NWAC.exe, Steam.EXE, and any other processes used by NWAC to stick to a single processor. I use Task Manager >> Process >> Right+Click on the program and assign it to a single processor. I assign NWAC to it's own processor and everything else to the other processor.

It's a longshot. I know that multi-cores crash Harpoon multi-player sessions so it might be worth a try for NWAC.
 
In my case setting affinity to single core crashes the engine (not the whole game) instead of slowing to slower-than-realtime mode :( . I just cannot believe the game is so buggy. But hopefully as with childhood sickness it will go away ;)
 
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