Crashing DURING or FROM alt-tabing?

[Kuplo]

Im curious if Tilted Mill can say that there are known issues FROM alt-tabbing or DURING alt-tabing, in that when you alt tab is there a known problme of it crashing right then, or from alt tabing then later in the game you may experience crashing?

I alt tab a couple times during my game play (actually I use the windows key, but I believe it's really the same thing), then some random time later my game will crash, but after running it for more than 4 hours after alt tabing to the desktop seems like a long time for it to have been attributed to the alt tab problem.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled everything twice now and I still get random crashes at times. Sometimes bring up the senario goals, other times it seems just totally random.

[R*Driver]

Might be a memory swapping issue. Do you have lots of RAM? Some programs don't like sections of them swapped out which can happen if some RAM needs to be shuffled in and out of the virtual memory file. If that ain't it, maybe its a video driver issue.

[sitearm]

Kuplo: I have same experience and question ;)

Not a showstopper except that I DO jump back and forth saving screenshots for storysets etc. So when my gut says "you've alt-tabbed enough you'd better stop" it's a slight hinderence on creative flow...

Im curious if Tilted Mill can say that there are known issues FROM alt-tabbing or DURING alt-tabing, in that when you alt tab is there a known problme of it crashing right then, or from alt tabing then later in the game you may experience crashing?

I alt tab a couple times during my game play (actually I use the windows key, but I believe it's really the same thing), then some random time later my game will crash, but after running it for more than 4 hours after alt tabing to the desktop seems like a long time for it to have been attributed to the alt tab problem.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled everything twice now and I still get random crashes at times. Sometimes bring up the senario goals, other times it seems just totally random.

[Kuplo]

I've got 1GB of ram, a p4 2.8ghz with HT. ATi Radeon 9600 256mb memory on the video card. Hard drives have been defragged every day when they need them according to Perfectdisk that runs nightly.

Cotn really isnt using that much ram to begin with, the most I've seen it go up to lately has been 400MB according to task manager, so Im not sure why it would use virtual ram at all, from what I understand of it, virtual ram is only used when real ram gets too low, since I have 1GB of ram, it shouldnt use any virtual ram as I understand it.

I wish I could pinpoint when this happens, perhaps today I'll try to play for 4 hours without alt tabbing and see what happens with that.

[Keith]

Kuplo, to answer your first question, yes, they do acknowledge problems with ALT+Tab'bing and the game. They even say so in the README.TXT file KNOWN ISSUES section:

Alt-tab'ing in and out of the game can occassionally cause graphical glitches and/or instability on some systems.

It may not be a issue on some high end system with plenty of RAM but on middle and lower end systems it could be a problem is my guess.

[Peregwyn]

On a related note to alt-tabbing, today I had a crash when another running program had a window pop up to alert me to an error.

It was just the Firefox browser telling me that the page I was on didn't refresh properly and timed-out. COTN crashed immediately instead of switching to the browser, which other games will do.

I don't know if this matters or not, but I run a dual monitor set up and when gaming, I'll often have the browser up on the other monitor to watch a football game play-by-play or something.

Peregwyn

[Geofferic]

I'm getting a CTD when Yahoo IM pops a message up.

I don't get a CTD with the messages that 'scroll up' in the system tray, like the gmail alert for example.

But the CTD with Yahoo IM is consistent and as far as I can tell, happens everytime a new Yahoo chat window pops up.

[sitearm]

I get XP interruptin' me in CotN asking me about sticky keys when I press <shift> "too many times" (actually am checking who's moving into a house).

Very annoying... need to turn it off somehow...

...Yahoo IM pops a message up...

[Geofferic]

That's one othe accesibility dealies in Control Panel. The icon is a dude in a wheelchair.

If it's still giving you trouble, you can go to add/remove programs and there's a windows components tab, and then just uninstall the accessibility options.


I get XP interruptin' me in CotN asking me about sticky keys when I press <shift> "too many times" (actually am checking who's moving into a house).

Very annoying... need to turn it off somehow...

[sitearm]

Geofferic: Thank you! Will do :D

accessbility dealies in Control Panel... you can go to add/remove programs...