Crash towards the begining of Ep1?

[elkinm]

I am still in the first level. After I make and go across the energy bridges, and keep going and see two striders going and then a drop ship with a strider crashes and Alyx says "Did you see that?"

After that she goes into the room around the corner and pushes some button, there is a loud sound (which repeats) as the game crashes. I have had many crashes to the desktop when entering a new preloaded zone with lots of action but usually, reloading the game gets me past that point, not this time.

I have the latest ATI drivers (X800XT) and updated game. I have an Nforce2 and using its audio incase that is the problem. I have tried lowering the audio quality with no effect.

In the game, I loaded without the startup video or the 3D background and I set heapsize to 256 with no effect.

Anybody know how to fix this, or at least get past this point

Thanks.

 

[Black Op]

You should try to verify the integrity of your EP1 cahce files. Perhaps you may have recieved a bad file.

 

[elkinm]

Done, checked, defragmented, updated. The files seem fine.
Any other ideas?

 

[elkinm]

Reading online I discovered the obvious looping audio problem and the fix by disabling audio acceleration.
Disabling acceleration definitely fixed the stuttering and most of the typical crashes.

But, unfortunately when I go to that room with Alyx after the drop ship crashes I still have a screen freeze and a crash.

As far as the looping crashes, is there any way to automatically disable the direct sound acceleration when I launch the game, instead of manually doing it?

 

[Dirk Pitt]

Could you possibly get a screenie of the point where you crash? as close to the problem as you can get. That way we can load that point up and see what it's trying to load that gives you such a hard time.

 

[Przemek]

I suffer from the same problem. I even reinstalled WindowsXP and it was fine long enough to let me finish the game. But when I was replaying it with commentary turned on, the looping sound crashes returned.
I solved this problem temporarily by installing a trial version of Windows 2003 R2 on a second partition. It works fine, with sound acceleration on maximum, with no problems... Windows 2003 has prefetch turned off by default (only boot-time prefetch works, if I recall correctly), maybe that's what's causing the problem? You can always try clearing the Windows\Prefetch folder...

Also, try deleting the Soundcache folder located in Steam\SteamApps\[your_user_name]\half-life 2 episode one\episodic\maps - maybe some cachefile got corrupted during extracting from the GCF.

 

[Tyguy]

First time I palyed Ep 1 it crashed twice at the beginning, and now periodically throughout the game......very annoying

 

[Black Op]

First time I palyed Ep 1 it crashed twice at the beginning, and now periodically throughout the game......very annoying

I experierenced random crashes too until I updated my video card. Try doing that yourself.

 

[Przemek]

Ugrading is not a solution if the game performs fine, but crashes. It's a problem with hardware or with software. Since other software does not suffer from similar crashes, it must be Episode One's fault.
I hope Valve finds out what causes this problem and manages to fix it. Let's hope it won't be similar to the case with stuttering - even though Valve did all they could to fix it, some people still experience it.
For example, I have no stuttering in any HL2 games, but in CS:S (HDR maps) and DoD:S (all HDR) - yes...

 

[elkinm]

The stuttering problem was fixed by disabling audio acceleration. But the crash still occurs with no stuttering or looping at this one point.

When I played HL2, I had stuttering and looping, but never a real crash. I did have a 9800Pro and for some reason it may be more stable which is strange.
In HL2 I had a problem when I was supposed to be knocked out before I met Alyx, it black screened (I died from being hit by combine batons to many times) and when the door opened it froze. Easily fixed by quickly running through the first level without problems. I can try running through from the beginning, maybe with cheats and see what happens, but a real fix would be best.

I will get screens up when I get to the gaming PC.

On a side note, anybody ever try jumping on top of the drop ship before it crashes? Seems like a really cool ride.

 

[elkinm]

Here are some screenshots on ImageShack.

Explosions when entering the area.

I have crashed here a couple times to.

Drop Ship Crashing

Around the corner to the room.

In the room

Room right before crash.

Something is supposed to happen I assume, but it crashes the system.
I did try deleting the sound cache folder, and I noticed that I had many more crashes right afterwards, like the crash was caused when cashing files from the GCFs. Once, before the drop-ship appeared, the screen froze, but managed to recover in a second or two.
My guess is that something big happens and it is to big to extract quickly and causes repeated crashes.

 

[Tyguy]

i just played through half of the game without a single crash, so go figure.....I assume its something to do with the game and not on my machine....From what im reading, alot of people have the problem......

And i notice that the flashlight doesnt cast any shadows!!!!! Something they might want to think about for the next episode.....good graphics only get u so far.....

 

[elkinm]

i just played through half of the game without a single crash, so go figure.....I assume its something to do with the game and not on my machine....From what im reading, alot of people have the problem......

And i notice that the flashlight doesnt cast any shadows!!!!! Something they might want to think about for the next episode.....good graphics only get u so far.....

Can you post your specs. Specifically your video/audio cards and drivers used. Maybe that has something to do with it.

Thanks

 

[Tyguy]

ya, i got 2 gigs of ram, geforce 9700, 300 GB hard drive, not sure what sound card.....athlon 4400 dual core....all up to date

 

[Dirk Pitt]

Actually, I tried to play ep1 on my girlfriends comp with a FX5900U in it, and it would do the exact same thing. kept crashing in the same spot. I updated to the 91.xx beta forcewares - turned her agp arp. size up from 8 to 128 megs - and it was problem solved. no so much as a jitter.

 

[Kingreaper]

i just played through half of the game without a single crash, so go figure.....I assume its something to do with the game and not on my machine....From what im reading, alot of people have the problem......

And i notice that the flashlight doesnt cast any shadows!!!!! Something they might want to think about for the next episode.....good graphics only get u so far.....

The flashlight's shadows are invisible to you because the flashlight is at the center of your vision, AKA, the shadows are blocked from your sight by the same objects that cast them

I'd've thought that was obvious.

 

[elkinm]

Actually, I tried to play ep1 on my girlfriends comp with a FX5900U in it, and it would do the exact same thing. kept crashing in the same spot. I updated to the 91.xx beta forcewares - turned her agp arp. size up from 8 to 128 megs - and it was problem solved. no so much as a jitter.

Do you know which one actually fixed the problem. The drivers or the higher AGP aperture, or both. Maybe a new driver set will fix this problem.

I tried starting from the beginning only to be plagued by constant crashes. When it exited, I noticed Kaspersky (trying it out) was busy. My guess is that when the cache files were extracted, kaspersky scanned them, locking them from the game causing a crash. Disabling Kaspersky allowed me to play the game without any crashes or slowdowns. But it still crashes at the exact same spot.

Anybody else notice problems like this with Kaspersky or other virus programs. Kaspersky is good at killing viruses but it really sucks as a program and seems to kill the system and other programs as well?