Problem with D3 v1.4

[mistercool2]

Howdy folks. This is my first time here and if I'm in the wrong forum I appoligize.

I recently started playing Descent 3 v1.4 (so far just the single play) and it runs great, but after an hour or so it gets jerkey and hard to control. The afterburner spits and sputters and my weapons don't work right, especially the vauss cannon and it seems to be worse on certain levels. Also, it keeps getting worse after a few hard \"fights\", especially if I get killed. The only solution I have right now is to restart my computer.

My computer is new with Windows XP, a 75 gig hard drive with 66 gigs free, a 2000 MHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor, I gig of ram, 256 meg MSI NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT video card, an older True Color 32 Bit Plug and Play Monitor - 800x600 resolution.

Thanks

[DCrazy]

To be honest, that could be anything. I remember having similar issues at one point in the distant past, but I can't remember what fixed them. It could be:

a) D3 bug
b) Bad RAM
c) Overclocked processor
d) Flaky USB driver
e) Bad video drivers / card
f) Random memory corruption...

The list goes on.

[grizz]

Make sure your antivirus isn't trying to run or update in the background.

[Foil]

Actually, that sounds a lot like an issue I had a couple of years ago. It turned out to be related to the audio card / audio drivers I had. The heavier the action (i.e. the more concurrent sounds), the worse it got.

You might try updating the audio drivers, and/or setting the \"# of sounds\" option (in the D3 menu) up to the maximum, to see if that helps.

[Testiculese]

To add to Foil, run the game with -nosound and see if things are better or the same.

[Krom]

and or update all your drivers, sounds like an issue possibly unrelated to descent3

[Bet51987]

Hi,

With a lot of help from my D3 and local friends, I got rid of my \"stuttering\" problem which caused my game to be choppy enough to actually stop a number of times during a game. After tryng the -nosound option, try this....

1. Download \"Enditall\" here. Its free. http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Reviews/r91.html

2. Then use its \"Killall\" feature. It will kill all processes not needed to keep windows running. (Don't worry, they will come back when you reboot)

2. Then, do a CTRL-ALT-DELETE.

3. In the dialog box select \"PROCESSES\"

4. Right click any process you recognize as not being related to windows, like MIM.exe, and click on \"end process\". Before I play D3, I get rid of McAfee so I get rid of anything starting with an \"M\"
(Again, they all come back on reboot)

5. At the bottom of that list is something called \"System Idle Process\". Keep staring at it for awhile and see if it's changing a lot. Mine says 97 to 99% idle when I clean everything out and stays that way.

6. Go into a Multiplayer game and see it it cured your problem.

Over time, I narrowed my problem to Musicmatch and McAfee as the bad guys. I run smooth now.

My bet is that you have a process problem.

Good luck

Bettina

[Top Wop]

1. Download "Enditall" here. Its free. http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Reviews/r91.html

Unfortunately the DL link on that site doesn't work.

But here is a mirror!

[MD-2389]

4. Right click any process you recognize as not being related to windows, like MIM.exe, and click on "end process". Before I play D3, I get rid of McAfee so I get rid of anything starting with an "M"
(Again, they all come back on reboot)

Be VERY careful when doing this. If you don't know what a program is, run an internet search on it first before clicking on "end process". If you stop the wrong process, windows will blue screen on you. (case in point: Warlock ending an instance of svchost.exe. 5 seconds later, I saw him drop off of ICQ because he got the blue screen of death. )


Now, do your symptoms occur in any other game, or just D3?

[mistercool2]

Be VERY careful when doing this. If you don't know what a program is, run an internet search on it first before clicking on \"end process\". If you stop the wrong process, windows will blue screen on you. (case in point: Warlock ending an instance of svchost.exe. 5 seconds later, I saw him drop off of ICQ because he got the blue screen of death. )

<I have no intention of messing with Task Manager, however I did install EndItAll and all it did was close my anti-virus program(Panda Internet Security) and one other - problem not solved.>

Now, do your symptoms occur in any other game, or just D3?

<I have Quake III Arena which doesn't seem to be affected and Ricochet Extreme(breakout style game with really cool graphics & sound)which gets a little jerky AFTER D3 starts messing up.>

[Foil]

Before blaming it on D3, you should seriously try to narrow down the problem:

Try the -nosound switch (this will tell you if it's sound-related)

Try OpenGL, Direct3D (this might help tell you if it's graphics-related)

Jump out to Windows and watch the processes in Task Manager for a couple of minutes (you don't have to do anything, just observe) - see which processes are using up CPU power while D3 is running. Normally the only things using more than 1% CPU should be just the 'idle' process and Descent3 ('Main.exe').


Just FYI, in every single case I've ever seen or heard of when D3 was stuttering or performing poorly, it was because of one of the following:
- video drivers
- audio drivers
- other software (mostly spyware/malware, but often things like anti-virus and firewall apps, too)
- faulty hardware
It's never ever been because of D3 itself.

[Bet51987]

I have no intention of messing with Task Manager

It won't hurt your computer. If you get the "blue screen of death" just reboot. The procesess will reappear and you will know not to end that one again. (Svhost...all of them) give me no problem so you can leave them there.

I found that I could have saved myself weeks of frustration if I did this first. Anyway, hope you get if fixed and meet me in a game.

Bettina

[Krom]

Svchost.exe is an essential process to windows, all of them. There are others as well, spoolsv.exe is required for printing to work, winlogon.exe, lsass.exe, csrss.exe, ctfmon.exe, services.exe, smss.exe are all required or harmless processes that you shouldn't stop. Rundll32.exe is also usually required, but sometimes a dll running under it can be causing problems, usually it can be ended without crashing the system, but expect some things to stop working (or rundll32.exe to restart quickly) if you do.

Surprisingly explorer.exe is actually not required for the system to remain running... but having it stopped will make windows rather difficult to operate.

[MD-2389]

I have no intention of messing with Task Manager

It won't hurt your computer. If you get the "blue screen of death" just reboot. The procesess will reappear and you will know not to end that one again. (Svhost...all of them) give me no problem so you can leave them there.

I found that I could have saved myself weeks of frustration if I did this first. Anyway, hope you get if fixed and meet me in a game.

Bettina

No offense Bet, but you need to leave the tech help to people that know what they're talking about. The "just kill it and see what happens" approach is rather stupid. This is exactly why I said to look on the internet to see EXACTLY what the program is. Just killing things left and right is ASKING for windows to crash.

[fliptw]

two things: one, your card is stupidly overpowered to play D3. two, so is your processor. there is nothing you can do about that.

the first thing you should try is setting main.exe's processor affinity to a single core.

the second thing is use nvidia's control panel and globally set the multi-display performance mode to single display.

also, get the latest drivers for your dual core from amd

[Bet51987]

No offense Bet

I'm not offended at all. I just wanted to offer what worked for me... and yes, doing it that way crashed my system a dozen times while stopping each program to see what it did but each time I just rebooted and windows came back up as normal.

After that, I configured "enditall" with the names of items to kill each time I want to play D3 and it does it perfectly. I end up with a very short list of processes and my game runs smooth now.

Some processes, like Mcaffe still pop back in and I stop them manually. Anyway... sorry for butting in.

Bee

[Krom]

Killing all extra processes is a band-aid solution that shouldn't be employed outside of emergencies. Instead one should uninstall the extra programs they don't need or never use, and prevent them from starting up again. Also disabling unused or completely useless unimportant features such as adobe quick launch or quicktime tray task or the winamp agent.

Odds are if you don't know what a tray icon does, or why it is there, or if you never actually use the program you should uninstall it. Doing so will also greatly accelerate the speed that windows will start up, I have cleaned out someones start up entries and had their computer start up and be usable taking less than half the time it had before.

Other things to get rid of would be \"PC optimization\" software, or memory defragmenters, any program that promises a xx minute/second PC tune up, registry cleaners, etc. Most programs like that are pointless, actually make things worse, or are outright scams.

[Foil]

Krom is absolutely right. Rather than killing processes, the programs really should be uninstalled.

A quick way to get an idea how much \"junk\" is on the computer is to take a look at the system tray. For most people, it's full of a bunch of crap but they don't realize those programs are bogging down the system because they're so non-intrusive on the screen.

Instant messengers, media players, \"quick-launch\" tools, \"system maintenance\" tools, whatever... if you're not actively using them, get them uninstalled (or at least set them to not run at bootup).

[Duper]

really, with that system, runing background programs shouldn't be an issue.

Back to and original suggestion.

What sound are you running? Have you defraged lately.

[Foil]

Actually, background programs can be nearly as bad for power-systems as for older ones.

Regarding defragmenting, it would help the game and level load times, but even a badly-fragmented drive wouldn't cause poor performance once everything is loaded.

I'm still betting it's a driver issue (my guess is the sound drivers/settings).

[MD-2389]

Ok, I want you to try these command line switches:

-nosound -nonetworking -nointro -framecap 0 -pilot x -nopentium3 -width y -height z

-pilot x (Where x is the pilot you use in-game)
-nopentium3 (Disables SSE processor functions in the game, like motion blur, sparkles, etc)
-width y -height z (Where y and z would be the resolution of what you have your desktop set to.)

If you're not familiar with where to place these, double-click the Descent 3 icon on your desktop, click the Setup button. Then click the Misc tab. There will be a text box called \"Command Line Arguements\". Simply type, or copy and paste, them there. Then click the OK button.

If it still studders, try updating your graphics drivers from the nVidia website.

[mistercool2]

two things: one, your card is stupidly overpowered to play D3. two, so is your processor. there is nothing you can do about that.

the first thing you should try is setting main.exe's processor affinity to a single core.

the second thing is use nvidia's control panel and globally set the multi-display performance mode to single display.

also, get the latest drivers for your dual core from amd

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

I am now running smoooooth as silk, my weapons are more accurate and effective and I haven't had to re-start my 'puter(to fix D3)since yesterday. I am happier than the proverbial pig!

I hope everyone that replied to my "problem" will see this cuz I want to thank all of you. It's really great to find people that are so eager to help.