Constant crashing on random stuff

Su1phur

I have just purchased and downloaded the game to play with some friends, but I can't really play even a full match because the game crashes almost every time on every single tiny thing.

I could alt tab in the main menu and crash. I could play for 20-30 minutes and then it would crash.

I have tried stuff like changing to stereo on my speaker, and lowering my resolution, but it still doesn't really work. Please send help. I have my most recent (and most successful) game log and the exception error screenshot added.

game_15041126.log

Amygdala

you got loads of "XACT" errors in your log. Those are typically a hint that you have issues with surround/stereo sound which happens to a lot of players (its an old game)
check out this thread (https://forum.faforever.com/topic/796/i-can-t-hear-some-of-the-audio-or-other-sound-issue-what-should-i-do) and/or search the forum for sound/stereo/surround issue. good luck

Su1phur

@amygdala Do I have to do that for every single audio device I have? Because I have a speaker integrated on my laptop, and my second monitor, as well as a headset that cannot have audio devices configured.

Amygdala

The one u are using i suppose. sound of the second monitor is probably not needed. The sound bug can be a bit nasty. If you struggle to solve it, you gonna find help on discord too. https://discord.gg/7GJjzHMs

Su1phur

I have crashed again, however it lasted way longer than before at 55 minutes. It failed to read memory, so I'm going to need more help.

game_15041879.log

Uveso

@Su1phur

you can read your log and search for "XACT". If you find something like this:

warning: SND: Error playing cue 1 on bank 5 [music]
         XACT: Invalid arg

Then the game is still not running with stereo sound.

Mog77a

Any way to do a hard force of stereo (if that is the root cause of this issue)? I ask because I tried (I think) everything the internet has to offer and unfortunately nothing ended up getting get rid of the XACT error. Tried the R2.82 driver and a bunch of others and that basically forced a windows reinstall with how many things broke in the end. Still didn't work. Every driver (that I could get to install successfully, R2.82 unfortunately didn't as it spit out a bunch of errors on install and more constant errors in Event viewer), onboard audio disabled/enabled, external DAC (a very old and cheap one but that's all I had), every configuration out there, bios resets, game reinstall, directX reinstall, windows reinstall, everything I could think of... Every other game that I play works just fine so it's 100% some sort of software incompatibility with the engine this game uses that I just can't seem to figure out.

Game also hangs on exit maxing out a cpu thread until the process is killed if that's relevant info.

Maybe I missed something, but I've basically given up. Could just be Windows being Windows as with a 1809 Win 10 VM all of the problems disappear, but come on. Very annoying.

If nobody has any suggestions, then a virtual machine it is.

Sprouto

Well, I've done more than my share of fixing audio problems around SCFA - and inevitably it has revolved around either an errant sound device that no one bothered to suspect (or remove) - such as those created by some video cards or multimedia monitors - OR - USB headsets with some kind of processing to simulate surround sound. Once those two sources are eliminated (and simply disabling or removing the device helps) - that generally leaves only the onboard sound or the rare discrete sound card.

Just for my interest, what is R2.82 ? And you're right - it is a software compatibility issue. SCFA was written for the XACT audio system, which, at the time, was being pushed as a defacto standard for surround sound by Microsoft. It was not widely adopted but this game was one of the early guinea pigs - and it still suffers for it today. No one has developed games for XACT audio (let alone this very early version of it) in almost a decade at this point.