StoneRhino
Individualist Consortium Empire Research
|
Posted - 2007.11.29 14:52:00 -
[1]
Something I am sure some of you are failing to mention in your crash posts is that you run a media player in the background. For example, winamp. And I KNOW you are listening to your music.
I seem to have spotted a few things that will easily trigger a BSoD and the results are repeatable as well.
Soundcard: First-gen Audigy
First, load up 2 instances of eve with sound. Wait 5 minutes. If you have not crashed by now, sitting in station, you will within the next minute or two. Load up winamp. If you have a playlist of over 1000 songs, start at the top of your list, hit play, then keep advancing thru the list with the next button. You will find very quickly a nasty lockup will occur.
A single instance with sound does not cause this problem. Thanks for fixing it that guys, please keep up the good work.
This leads me to believe that: 1: Eve may have a problem dealing with allocation of sound channels. This includes the use, release, and reinit of a sound channel for the purpose of playing a sound. 2: Multiple eve clients may be attempting to grab the same sound channel for the purpose of playing a sound, thereby causing said conflict and crash. Usually a Bluescreen of death with a "Bad_Pool_Caller" error pointing to the soundsystem drivers.
Reducing the acceleration levels will help. Possibly up to a point, will have to check that out, but it will negatively affect other games that do use full acceleration features such as eax.
I Propose that CCP puts a selectable limit on the number of sound channels available to eve as this sort of restriction on simultaneous sounds might force eve to better manage its resources.
Just as a general idea, here is where I am coming from. Said Audigy card has 64 audio channels available. You are running a 7.1 piece audio system. This, in the driver's mind is 8 channels of audio it must process. With just one instance of winamp, you can chew off 8 of those 64 channels. Thats 56 channels. Eve by default on startup will look for 16-24 available audio channels. How do i know this? because my onboard sound only has 32 channels available to it. with winamp running, eve freaks and pops up a message stating there are insufficient sound channels available. Back to the story. so each instance of eve chews 16, two instances, thats 32 channels nuked just sitting in station. 56-32=24 channels. Fast forward winamp a few songs and boom, you're out of sound channels in an instant.
|