Crash to Desktop

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 2:40 am

I've often read the posts about the "Crash to Desktop" and said, "Huh?"

Well, it just happened to me, and I think I know why.

I read about a person playing as a Nos who got Doris (the diner lady) to croak from a heart attack, so I put together a Nos character to see it for myself. She croaked. From a heart attack. The theory is good.

That is unremarkable, but then I went into the raw Doris Dialogs to see how many different dialogs Doris had when she croaked. I played all of her MP3s to see what happened on each of them.

Then I went into the game for a different purpose, and as soon as I got to Doris the first time, I crashed to the desktop. I tried again, and it happened again. I rebooted and it happened again. I was getting a code 5 access violation on the MP3 player each time. The game couldn't play Doris' dialogs. The dialogs that I had coincidentally played in Windows Media Player recently.

The solution was to back up my current game, uninstall VTMB, re-install VTMB with all appropriate patches, restore the saved games, and resume. It worked just fine.

From this, I deduce that futzing with the game files can lead to bizarre problems with the game. From that I presume that, if you want to futz with the game files, make copies of them elsewhere and futz with the copies. Even if all you want to do is play an MP3, copy the MP3 elsewhere and play the copy!

I had a 300 minute tirade about His Holy Billness set up for this, but let's just let that slide, OK? The rule is that Microsoft Software is not amenable to VTMB when used out of context. Don't try to use them in combination.

Anaximander · Post by **Anaximander** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 5:09 pm

I think you've hit the nail on the head. I opened up the folder with the licensed MP3's in it one night and listened to the first few bars of "A Smaller God," which is played on the radio on the beach in Santa Monica. After that, I crashed every time I tried to set foot in the beach. I also had to reinstall to fix it.

At the time, I didn't make the connection between listening to the MP3 and the game crashing. Good catch, yrth.

Lestat · Post by **Lestat** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 2:41 am

I think it depends on the programme though. I used Mucismatch, which came with my laptop, and no crashes happened to me.

Red_X · Post by **Red_X** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 8:44 am

Thanks for the heads up, my game has been crashing all the time when I try to use my Tremer character. It made me so made I stopped playing, all try this when I get home. It just goes to show you how touchy games can be,

All post if it works for me or not I have tried almost everything.

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 5:26 pm

Something just occurred to me. I was using Windows Media Player (natch), and doesn't it create 'discography' or something of any files you play in it? Five gets you ten it's locking the file in the discography. You might be able to avoid a re-install if you stop the game, find that discography and remove those MP3s, and then re-install. That didn't occur to me the other night.

Lunaida · Post by **Lunaida** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 3:43 pm

My game crashes one out of three times whenever I want to load the Downtown district , and when it does load it takes an awful amount of time

MalaksBane · Post by **MalaksBane** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 4:46 pm

MS 0wnz your files, your computer and soon enough they'll own you and your family. Would wish he got bitten. On second thought, he's probably a Ventrue already.

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 8:00 pm

[QUOTE=MalaksBane]MS 0wnz your files, your computer and soon enough they'll own you and your family. Would wish he got bitten. On second thought, he's probably a Ventrue already.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, well, that gets into my tirade about His Billness and how he believes he can suss the needs of everybody in the world, like nobody has any independent thought. That is far outside the scope of this forum, and if you get me started, I can run for ten years. For the purpose of this forum, suffice it to say that VTMB and Micro$oft don't seem to play well together.

MalaksBane · Post by **MalaksBane** » Sat Nov 19, 2005 10:16 am

Well, now I am seeing crashes too.

And something odd, a bunch off recent saves are no longer named like Vampire-NNN.sav
but instead like sm_warehouse.HL1 (and .HL2 and .HL3) ... after the area's and there's a whole lot like the last ones (one for each area) with the same filetime.

Janmanden · Post by **Janmanden** » Sat Nov 19, 2005 3:54 pm

Huh? I am still playing unpatched (I like having the RMB bound as 'use' key) and unless provoked my game never crashes...apart from that one incident in each game where I have to use the console to escape the Society of Leopold.

I did notice some things that really made my game unstable like: unpacking the *.vtm files, task-switching, background hogs running (scanners, updaters) and low memory.

Adding another ½GB of RAM to a total of 1GB RAM really decreased loading and transistion times. Having CacheMan running in the background doing memory recovery every 15th minute also seemed to add stability. Bloodlines really covers a multitude of vampirism...sucking time, memory and system resources...

I haven't had any problems with MP3's, but I wouldn't be surprised if WINAMP modifies the ID tags or makes some slight info adjustments to any files it touches.

MalaksBane · Post by **MalaksBane** » Sat Nov 19, 2005 5:29 pm

Yes it does, apparently (I don't use it), that's what the old rockband found out.

I wasn't really complaining about the crashes (never had many), just pointing out an oddity surrounding their occurance, perhaps someone encountered a similar thing.

App-switching, background downloads, none of these apply, but bloodlines does suck up resources, lots of them. And time, ahum.

Lucita · Post by **Lucita** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 2:34 pm

[QUOTE=yrthwyndandfyre]Something just occurred to me. I was using Windows Media Player (natch), and doesn't it create 'discography' or something of any files you play in it? Five gets you ten it's locking the file in the discography. You might be able to avoid a re-install if you stop the game, find that discography and remove those MP3s, and then re-install. That didn't occur to me the other night.[/QUOTE]

Yep....that's the main problem with the MP3 Bug.

mr_sir · Post by **mr_sir** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 10:54 am

mine crashes every now and then but i just put it down to the fact that my pc is getting on a bit now so its specs are not the best in the world. only happens when the game tries to do too much at once, such as feeding while having several disciplines running and getting a humanity or masquerade violation at the same time. it just can't cope with all that going on at once lol. also noticed its only certain areas that cause crashes. i get a lot in the warehouse area, every now and then downtown (usually if the game has been running for a long time) and every so often in places where there are high numbers of enemies and traps etc. such as the ming temple (only happens very occasionally though).

the mp3 thing is right cos i looked at the mp3 files once and ended up having to reinstall as it crashed whenever i spoke to the taxi guy.

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 6:29 pm

Similar problem

I've had that, too, but only in the last level of SOC when I'm getting grenaded. I call it a "graceful failure to desktop", because it is kind enough to give me the error "Too many flying/colliding entities" before it drops me out, so at least I know *why* it happened. Hey, it beats a kick in the teeth!

zimman · Post by **zimman** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 4:28 pm

dang

ah, now i see what my problem has been. i got curious as to some of the other dialog options, made a new char, and now anytime i talk to most of the npcs, it exits the game. its quite annoying. so there is no way to fix it other than uninstall/reinstall?

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 8:49 pm

[QUOTE=zimman]ah, now i see what my problem has been. i got curious as to some of the other dialog options, made a new char, and now anytime i talk to most of the npcs, it exits the game. its quite annoying. so there is no way to fix it other than uninstall/reinstall?[/QUOTE]
If you go into your Windows Media Player and delete the MP3s for VTMB from the play list/discography, you might be able to avoid a re-install. I haven't actually tried it myself, but logically it makes sense if that is what is locking the files.

Stars_Never_Die · Post by **Stars_Never_Die** » Thu Dec 29, 2005 12:26 pm

[QUOTE=yrthwyndandfyre]I've often read the posts about the "Crash to Desktop" and said, "Huh?"

The solution was to back up my current game, uninstall VTMB, re-install VTMB with all appropriate patches, restore the saved games, and resume.

[/QUOTE]

Maybe I'm just stupid...but how am I supposed to make a back-up?

(Yeah, I'm bad with computers and my English sucks, sorry)

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Thu Dec 29, 2005 1:31 pm

[QUOTE=Stars_Never_Die]Maybe I'm just stupid...but how am I supposed to make a back-up?

(Yeah, I'm bad with computers and my English sucks, sorry)[/QUOTE]

By default, the program installs at:

C:\Program Files\Activision\Vampire - Bloodlines\Vampire

(You may have elected to install it elsewhere).

There is a folder there called "SAVE". Copy the contents of that folder to another location, and to restore, just copy the copied files back into that folder. You can actually save multiple games easily by finishing a game, exiting VTMB, renaming the "SAVE" folder to something else, like "Tremere1", creating a new folder called "SAVE", and starting a new game. If look inside that folder, you'll notice a number of files that are recognisable, like the quicksaves, level saves, and so on, so you might want to conserve disk space by, for example, deleting the quicksave files. Whatever is in the SAVE folder is your current game.

tandres · Post by **tandres** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 12:08 pm

haven't played with the mp3 files

when i am trying to leave the crypt after going down into the warrens it keeps on crashing to desktop. i don't know how to fix it

yrthwyndandfyre · Post by **yrthwyndandfyre** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 6:28 pm

[QUOTE=tandres]when i am trying to leave the crypt after going down into the warrens it keeps on crashing to desktop. i don't know how to fix it

[/QUOTE]
I'd go with the uninstall/reinstall as a first shot.

Seeing as how there are a number of potential bits and pieces of clean-up that might need to be done before and after an uninstall, I think I'll sit down and write a pre-and-post apocalypse tool that can be used to back up your game saves (handy in any event, but especially for a re-install) and manage the backups.

It will also have an option to rummage around in your system post-uninstall and do a little ritual clean-up of the mess the uninstall leaves behind so you can get a clean re-install. It shouldn't take long - maybe a few hours. I'll try to have a post here by the end of the weekend (Jan 8, 2006) with link to the download. It'll be a self-extracting zip of a conventional InstallShield setup with a standard Windows interface, c/w help. Nice and vanilla. (English only - sorry, but I'm not yet a polyglot).

I'll keep everybody posted.