D3 and some possible stability tweaks

[Nosferatu]

Ya I know. 22 YO game.

But there are still a couple players out there. Me and Grizz for instance.

Everyone who has played has noticed the crash when there is a large amount of weaponry going off on screen.
(BP quad speed microwave is notorious for this)

If you have an NVIDIA card and turn off "Threaded Optimization" this helps, but sometimes it still happens.

I thought I would post a couple things I did in case this is/was an annoyance to someone else.

The other day I got sick of it and decided to look up the error with Event Viewer.
(click start, type event viewer, click what pops up)

Each time I got a crash there was a lot of weapons going off.

The crash was throwing an Exception code: xc0000005

I looked it up and it can be a lot of things but most notably it seems to indicate access memory out of bounds.

Windows, all the way back to the XE days has had data execution and exception violation protection to prevent viruses from using
memory out of bounds to execute code.

But D3 is not a virus. Its just a (by today's standards) poorly written game, and memory violations were not an issue back then.

First and most important thing I did was turn off data execution protection, for D3 only.
(click start, type "Advanced system", click Advanced system setting, go to the "Advanced" tab, under Performance click Settings,
go to the "Data Execution Prevention" tab, check "Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select", click the Add button
then search for your D3 main.exe and add it in and put a check mark in front of it)

This tweak will require you to restart your system.

The second thing I did was to turn off all windows exploit protections for D3 only.
(click start, type "Exploit protection", click Exploit protection, the System wide pain will be brought up by default, click Program settings,
click the add button which looks like a plus, add in D3 main.exe go down to the new entry in the list and click Edit, then turn off
all protections that are on, especially control flow guard (CFG))

I have not seen a crash since I did the above 2 security feature tweaks.
(of course there is no way for me to know if things are fixed permanently )

I just hope this might help someone who might still occasionally play D3.

[akula65]

Thanks for posting.

It might be helpful to indicate exactly what configuration you are using, as in, D3 version number, region (U.S., Australian, etc.), mods, etc. Perhaps some configurations don't demonstrate these issues.

[Krom]

IIRC you can avoid that particular crash by disabling weapon effects in the graphical settings. (It is generally fine to leave them on in single player, but one should always disable them during multiplayer since their absence is an actual competitive advantage.)

I'm not particularly confident it is actually related to DEP or exploit protection though, both of those features are more to protect against buffer overflow attacks which D3 may be vulnerable to (likely a few hiding in its code given its age). Odds are somewhat low that you are actually tripping those protections though since the usual response by the system to an application tripping that protection is to kernel panic the whole system (meaning: blue screen of death) although perhaps that has changed since it was first implemented all the way back in Windows XP.

[Nosferatu]

Actually I forgot about the weapons effects thing as well. Thats a very good point. Im probably going to leave those turned off as well.

I was talking about D3 (1.4 from CDs) Machine is freakin old i5 with 16 gig ram and gtx 1660 super

And thanks for the reminder.

EDIT: Dam now I remember why I didnt leave weapon effects turned off.
For the most part you can deal with weapons, except for cyclones. Its dam near impossible to see the missilelets without their trails.

[akula65]

Perhaps you and Grizz should try the unofficial Version 1.5 Beta patch and see if that makes a difference:
http://www.descent3.com/downloads.php#n_america

It looks like some memory leaks may have been addressed based on the issues it is supposed to fix.

Also, Thomas' Version 1.4-Version 1.5 Patch Switcher may make comparison easier:
http://www.dateiliste.com/en/descent-3/ ... tcher.html

[Nosferatu]

I have been experimenting extensively.

And I can get a crash to happen consistently now.

It does not matter what I do, if I have the game is running on anything north of 60FPS it will crash under the following conditions.

Go to Ascent in a black pyro.

Pick up the microwave cannon in the back hall.

Go down to the room just down the small ramp.

Consistently fire the microwave up the ramp and down the hall.
(The key is to get a very long distance on the microwave)

If the game is running above 60FPS (no matter the resolution) this will immediately cause a crash.

If the game is running at 60FPS it will not crash at all.

No I can not turn off weapons effects.
(I can not see cyclone mistlelets without them and immediately die if someone/somebot shoots one at me)

I really do not know what to do about this except leave it on 60FPS.
(Big UG after getting used to faster FPS)

[Isaac]

I wonder if you just need an older PC from the 2000s to run this stably, running XP? If nothing else sandbox XP and try that.

[Krom]

I think that was a bug that was addressed in the 1.5 patches, otherwise it would still do it even if you were running it on a native Windows XP system.

One thing you could test is trying a different renderer (Direct3D vs OpenGL) or a Glide wrapper (nGlide works well with D3) and see if it still happens. I think the only notable bug with nGlide is if distance textures look all noisy (almost like static on an old TV) you have to force anistropic filtering on globally to fix it.

[Nosferatu]

I think that was a bug that was addressed in the 1.5 patches, otherwise it would still do it even if you were running it on a native Windows XP system.

One thing you could test is trying a different renderer (Direct3D vs OpenGL) or a Glide wrapper (nGlide works well with D3) and see if it still happens. I think the only notable bug with nGlide is if distance textures look all noisy (almost like static on an old TV) you have to force anistropic filtering on globally to fix it.

Thanks for trying to help Krom.

But as I said I was doing extensive experimenting all weekend and I was able to reproduce it with:

nglide 2.10
dgvoodoo 2.81.3
dxwnd 2.5.98

Also I forgot to mention I do have the special 2013 (MAIN.EXE) in place from https://sectorgame.com

EDIT:

And one more little thing. I can run RAW OpenGL without a wrapper and it will crash at above 60FPS and not at 60FPS.

I think I can live with 60FPS but it is a little framey.