Sound Stuttering and then System locks

Since RC21 or so this has been increasing in frequency to the point where it is almost happening every second game now. Not quite sure why this is happening as it seems that it happens all over the place, on all maps. The sound just stutters in an infinite loop, can't alt-tab, can't do anything besides power down and restart. Don't think I can get a crashlog it doesn't even crash it just locks the whole system..
Anyone else going through this?

Specs: ASUS A8N-E Mobo, AMD 3200+ , Nvidia 8800 GTS, 1 GB of Corsair Ram, WD SATA HD.

 

Same story, I believe it is due to onboard soundchips

 

This used to happen to me a lot if it is the same thing. I would play any Source engine game and at some point I would get locked up, sound looping, but the frame would change every 10 seconds or more (if you moved your mouse in frustration, 10 seconds later you would be looking where ever your mouse ended up). I found turning down all the video settings helped as it was most likely an insufficient amount of RAM (I recently reformatted my hard drive and now I am able to run it just fine). I would try turning down the video settings just to see if it is the same thing. and if it helps.

 

hmmm, interesting.. ya I've had some thoughts about the lack of ram playing a part.. Well that and that empires is a huge memory hog and basically with only a GB of ram if there is anything else is open bad things do start to happen.
I also have an onboard sound card as well, so who knows..

 

Jebus this is my crashing problem exactly.

1 gig ram , onboard audio...

I miss the days of dos5.0 + win 3.0 when a simple boot disk with a skeleton autoexec and tweaked config.sys that I understood how to edit.

I know theres a way to get windows xp to not run some of processes...wc edit or something like that?
Anybody know what I'm talkin about?

 

I get the same problem in all Source games... Valve hasn't fixed it for 2+ years, don't hold your breath.

As for changing the processes that run at startup, Start -> Run -> msconfig

 

I'm runding an SBLive card and I still experience random bouts of sound looping throughout a map, but haven't had the sound looping deathbomb crash that kills XP in a few RC's.

nhammen has a point about it being native to source mods, i got the same type of behaviour playing hl2:episode one

momo, i miss the dos days, too, but then i wouldn't be able to post while waiting thru the map load! :D

 

The ram thing is WRONG.

I have 526 MB Of ram, And empires runs fine and dandy. Forget the ram bit.

 

Thats very interesting. Hd space ? Onboard audio?

allright so today I had a talk with my personal pc guru , decided to turn video card features down, Filtering went to trilinear , antisomething or other went to off.
Card supports DirectX 9.0.

Fortune hit, Cyclopean the map that always locks up , played it for about 2 hrs with a small 3-3 grew to 5-5 tank wars.
This is exciting cause it usually never makes it that far. It did however crash at the very end. 99% of the time it dosn't leave crash dumps.

Is there something I could run in the background that would give me a sort of crash log that might find the cause of this?
<shrug>

 

What kind of sound looping are you talking about?
Looping while it loads heavily (and fps lock up for a moment) is normal.
Looping of a 1-2 second sequence while the game crashes (combined with hd loading heavily) is normal.
Fast looping of a <0,5 sec. sequence, forcing a reset is called a freeze.
Theres most likely some sort of conflict/problem with the drivers.
Does not necessarily have anything to do with the soundchip.

Or even a new kind of sound looping?

 

...if you wanna blame audio, start comparing chips. I ran Emp fine with my onboard Realtek TrueHD for a bit in Vista.

I would sooner blame your PSU. Check to see if it is having trouble keeping up during games. If nothing else, start empires with no sound.

 

It is in the area of < .5 sec looping to freeze.
I checked out steam and found a thread about this. There were a few commands listed there to run in launch options.
One about heapsize one to force a lesser direct x.
Did that and actually made it through an entire cyclopean w/o a crash not even at the end. Very exciting. But then it crashed on Glycen city. so phak.

 

That could also depend on how much HD space you have. If you don't have enough memory space, windows creates its own little area on your HD that attempts to perform the same task (although it's much much slower). But if you don't have much HD space left, then when you try to run a memory hog like Empires, it probably wouldn't go over very well.

Of course this could just be me launching to conclusions.

 

i just had this same problem with RC23(no probs before) my PC is quite powerful(C2D E6600,2GB ram 667,GF7900GTX 512MB) im not sure what was cause because i had some problems with connection maybe some kind of lag spike that causes Emp to lock up
or maybe its sound card because i use onboard AC97

 

Happened to me too, I had to restart my PC.
Also, sound was kinda jittery.

Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit

 

The idea that onboard sound is causing the freezing came from Valve. That has been their hypothesis for quite some time... They haven't achieved any results by looking at this idea...

 

So onboard or not the problem is still occuring.. I would be willing to wager that we all have more than sufficient space on our hard drives( at least 10 gb free on that hard drive where valve in installed)

What are the command lines that you ran momo?

 

never had problem with only 2GB of HDD space but now i have 16GB free

 

Just had a crash like this...and that made me think - I've seen a sound loop crash around3 times now - not really close though. I can play for long periods of time and not see it.

 

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=589094&highlight=Force+Direct

I have not changed the config files or whatever... that sounds like something perhaps one of the gurus that are familiar with optimizing steam for empires could figure something that would work. I know nothing of these things.

This is what I did. -heapsize 786432 -novid +map_background none
-dxlevel 81
I have no idea if the 1st command works or if the 2nd command is useful for empires since that was for hl2:ep1.
the dxlevel 81...thats supposed to force directx 8.1 instead of 9.0 (assuming thats what your running)
I got most of my information from those steam forums.
I Also ran dxdiag in startmenu and on the sound tab I turned the acceleration to none.

To trouble shoot if its sound they (peoples on the steam forums) recommend -nosound as a command to cut the soundcard out of the equation , play the game and see if it fixes it.

I should have changed these settings one by one to test just which one fixes the problem but <shrug>

I'mma hopefully get some good playing in tomorrow and see what happens.