Crash on galaxy generation

We'll look into this. Thanks for the log files.

In the meantime, could you send us the output_log.txt file on your Surface Pro? The log can be found in C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\LocalLow\Praxis Games\ISG\

Thanks!

\Edit: Could you also try and update your graphics card driver to see if the problem persists?

 

If updating the graphics card drivers doesn't solve it try to force open gl mode. Right click on the game's shortcut icon and add the following to the Target. The -force-opengl line must come after the executable path like this:

Example: "<your_path_here>\ISG_pre-alpha_11_unstable_64bit.exe" -force-opengl

If that fails or doesn't solve it, try this:

"<your_path_here>\ISG_pre-alpha_11_unstable_64bit.exe" -force-d3d11 -force-gfx-direct -force-d3d11-no-singlethreaded -force-feature-level-11-0

Let us know.

 

Ok, thanks. The error with the forced OpenGL was kind of expected, just wanted to confirm.

The output log I see in your latest attachment is from running with the OpenGL forcing. Could you send an output_log.txt when running with the flags of the second option, just to check if something was different when using those flags?

The crash seems to be about trying to read from or write to a virtual address for which the game has no appropriate access.

I understand from reading in several places that it is common to have these kinds of errors if your Windows is not up to date. Could that be the issue?

 

The file downloaded through space sector is the same installer.

Analysing the logs with and without the extra d3d flags seemed to have produced the same results. So, it's something else.

Could you try with this flag -force-d3d9

\Edit What's your graphics card model?

\Edit2: By the way, I have an Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics card that runs the game fine (your card is also of the Intel HD family). And, my Intel HD 4000 drivers are quite old (21/12/2015 driver version 10.18.10.4358). I have the latest updates of Windows 10 though, can you check you also have Win10 updated on your side? This seems to be a system related issue, involving your card's specific model, drivers (old or new) or the fact Windows may not be up to date. Let us know how it went with -force-d3d9

\Edit3: Also, if it's not too much to ask, and the above doesn't solve the issue, could I ask that you rollback your Intel HD graphics card drivers? You could just update later and that will give us a bit more information to work with regarding the Intel HD card family. I ask this of you because I saw a much older driver for the Intel HD family in 2 computers I have access (around 10.18.10.4358), while I see you have version 20.19.15.4331 Usually latest is better but with Windows updating stuff regularly and knowing how the Intel HD family has caused me issues in the past it would be worth a try, in my opinion. Thanks.

 

Too bad. Thanks for trying. We suspect the error may be related to memory requirements. I have an Intel HD 4000 and 4600 in two different systems, and they both work although the driver version is much different (lower) from yours (10.18.10.4358 here, while you had 20. something). We know of other players playing with Intel HD cards, so it must be something specific in your system.

We did a huge memory optimization to the game and the new version will also have slightly different graphic settings. We're going to allow the system to choose the best graphical API possible instead of forcing the system to use DirectX 11. The hotfix will be available very soon (we expect to release in a few days tops).

If that does not work we'll try something else.

Do you have your windows updated? I read that having an outdated windows may also cause problems with drivers. I know I had issues with my integrated card (Intel HD 4000) in the past with dual monitor support and when playing youtube videos (the system would crash when watching videos in fullscreen).

Don't worry Mezmorki, we'll sort it out. Thanks for your patience. I know you can play in another system but we'll do our best to support you in playing the game in your surface pro.

Looking forward to read your impressions on PA11.

 

Let us know if the hotfix has solved the issue in your Surface Pro. If not, please send us the output_log.txt. Thanks!

 

I think the problem may be lack of memory to run the game.

Analysing one of your crash reports I see this:

ISG [version: Unity 2017.4.3f1 (21ae32b5a9cb)]

d3d11.dll caused an Access Violation (0xc0000005)
in module d3d11.dll at 0033:7ac61634.

Error occurred at 2018-11-04_072744.
C:\Games\Interstellar Space Genesis\ISG_pre-alpha_11_unstable_64bit.exe, run by kiley_000.
82% memory in use.
8113 MB physical memory [1418 MB free].
10824 MB paging file [1573 MB free].
134217728 MB user address space [134208310 MB free].
Read from location 000000c9 caused an access violation.​

So, judging from the values above, it seems you had 1.4GB RAM available physical RAM plus 1.5GB from disk paging file (disk space), for a total of around 3GB of available memory. PA11 Unstable took around 4.5GB of RAM to run the game, between VRAM (graphics card) and RAM (rest of the game's data). I saw you had 8GB of RAM in your system but didn't check that you had almost all RAM in use by other processes.

Now, PA11 Unstable Hotfix should be taking around 3.0 to 4.0GB of memory, depending on the operating system and video card installed. So, if nothing has changed you'll probably still get a crash with those numbers. However, if you try to free up some disk space or try not to have as many processes consuming RAM on your system I think you'll have enough combined memory to run the game.

Let us know how it went.

 

Thanks for your help in solving this problem. So, it doesn't seem to be lack of memory to run the game. DXD9 flags also didn't help. Some people say that to be a viable workaround in solving this kind of errors, but no luck there either.

No lack of disk space, drivers are updated, windows is updated. Worked in PA10 but doesn't work in PA11.

We did change the Unity version between PA10 and PA11, and I read that there seems to be issues with some Intel HD cards running the game with more recent Unity versions (but not the latest). Something about the system not being able to load too many textures at once, which can overwhelm your Intel HD 4400 memory, or Unity isn't doing the same memory management it once did for some of those cards, or we're now putting more textures into memory at once than before.

The game does run in Intel HD cards. It runs on Intel HD 4000 and Intel HD 4600 but I don't have reports of people playing the game successfuly with an Intel HD 4400, like yours. It may be a local problem. Or, it may not and may be representative of a larger group of systems.

I see three possibilities to try and solve this. There is a fourth, but I would not go there yet if we can.

a) Moving to a new Unity engine version may solve the issue, and there are indications that it might.

b) We could try to free up memory in the process of starting a game so that not as much is allocated at once and perhaps systems like yours can handle it better that way.

c) We're currently working on further optimizations to memory utilization, and that focuses in reducing texture sizes, so it's possible that this optimization task may solve the issue, or at least bring us closer to solve it. These texture optimizations will be available in the next build, to be released soon.

d) Not preferred solution: - change textures to not use some properties we need for some cases (I think this could technically solve it, but I feel it would be a workaround, so we should try to first solve it with a), b) and c).


So, at the end I believe this is a memory management issue, by Unity, the way we use textures and their sizes and quality, and something in the type of system of yours that doesn't like that. I'm positive that this will be solved in the near future, and I suspect this type of error would show up much more in case more people were exposed to the game at this stage.

So, for the time being I suggest we wait for option c). In the meantime, we'll discuss the possibility of sending a special build your way so we can try option b) and see if we can solve it by going in that route.

Thanks a lot for your time Mezmorki.

 

Excellent! The issue was about some textures that were not in the correct format allied with too much memory being loaded at a single time (during the galaxy generation).

Looking forward for your thoughts!