hl2 freezes upon joining VIPER

Yeah game freezes up as soon as I join VIPER server. I'm posting in these forums cause I kinda don't think its the servers fault. I joined a random server with 4 people in it, and can create servers myself without freezing, but when trying to join VIPER with either 30 or 50+ people I haven't been able to.

It brings up the motd and even html, and I can see the game, and also hear a split second of sound looping. I've tried waiting it out but its pretty well frozen, using 800,000K of memory when I finally close it via task manager.

I'm downloading the installer again right now to just reinstall it, so maybe that'll do it. Until then :confused:

edit-- Whoops I didn't mean VIPER, I meant Empires Main Server.

 

meh, reinstalling fixed it. Go figure.

 

Scratch that, its not fixed. Did for a second though, oddly.

And this time it crashed on VIPER, so its def not server related.

 

I had the same thing on an older computer, switched the GPU and everything worked fine.
Can you play any other fullscreen 3D games?

 

Yup. And switching the GPU will not be happening lol. GTX 275 oughta be able to do it. I'm leaning towards it being a memory thing, like the overflow problems you can get in commview sometimes by switching across map into a busy area.

But who knows.

 

I've got what may be a related problem with bigger servers. I can get in, but after perhaps 20s the game trips my router and disconnects. I've got port forwarding setup, so this shouldn't be happening...? It got much worse after 2.25 to the extent that I've pretty well quit. I'm running an i7 / 6Gb / GTX275.

 

I get the same bugs:
On canyon, if there are more than 4 people, the sound loops half second chunks.
Once the serve gets over 30 players, the game gets laggy/low fps/high loss and choke.
Somewhat related, I have noticed a similar sound loop in other source mods. Normally after the server loads, the motd comes up and a custom soundbite plays, and hl2 almost crashes.

 

This sucks man, I can't play empires. Does anyone have annny ideas?

 

Oh, I know this bug. Do you guys by any chance run IDM (Internet Download Manager) ?

 

Not me.

 

Huh, I just connected to a game. I'll post again if it doesnt work later on.

 

Then I don't know. Jephir used to get this bug all the time, until he fixed it. I got the bug all the time, until Jephir helped me fix it, and I've helped like another 5 people fix it, and they crashed in exactly the same way.

Do you use a download manager at all?

 

No never. And while I got it working that once, it hasnt worked after that.

 

Does it just freeze hl2 (recursive aliases may cause this...), or does it actually crash your system ? You could check the system logs, it there's anything logged about what caused the crash, see google to find out how to view the logs for your win version.

 

Any kind of Internet Explorer plug-in or extension can cause problems with the Empires MOTD on certain servers. The usual culprit are download managers but anything can cause the problem. Try disabling your IE addons and see if that solves it.

 

That's for IDM anyway.

 

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "freeze" maybe crash? But usually when I connect to VIPER I have wait about 5 minutes when it says Retrieving server info but on eth0's server that's not running source mod I can connect under a minute.