Hmm Theatre of War 3 freezing in battle, had to close the program

[Life Pilgrim]

Running on Windows 7 64 bit.
GTX 560Ti 1Gb
8Gb DDR3 RAM
i5 3.33GHz

Anyone has any idea?

The game would freexe in battle about 10-15 minutes into it.

Then I had to alt-tab and close the program through the task manager since it reads non-responding on the tas manager's list.

SOLVED[for references]:
Hmm it seems the AV thought many of the game's files to be suspicious.

The problem has been sorted out.

A similar problem can also be read in 1C official forum related to freezing. In that one too the AV seemed not to like the game's files very much. That is what caused the intermittent freezes.

[Life Pilgrim]

Hmm disabling the EAX sound option seemed to have solved the problem. Fingers crossed.

It's a [surprisingly] beautiful looking game(the smoke and fire, the blood, huts, etc) and hard at the same time when it runs smooth without freezes. Hope that was the end of the freezes.

It seems you need to micromanage the units and can't expect them to be very smart.

[Life Pilgrim]

It seems I almost can confirm that intermittent freezes and or the game being totally unresponding are due to aircraft starfing the ground.


Can anybody shed a light on how this can be mitigated.

The game would have been very enjoyable if not only been for the freezes. It's truly a realistic wargame.

If anyone can help me out I'd appreciate it. Thank you.

[Life Pilgrim]

I think I solved it really this time. No more freezes even in the slightest.

I unchecked hide bodies and that was the cause of my freezes especially when the planes start starfing the infantrymen.

Checking hide bodies back solved the freezes.

Thanks God. I really like this game. It seems I had been missing much. Gameplay is outstanding!

EDIT: Ah this game is driving me nuts. Loaded another save game and the freezes are back eventually the game just stopped responding [again].

[Life Pilgrim]

I have tried turning off multithreading(hyperthreading) through BIOS, running as admin, set core to 2 instead of 4....changes numerous in game settings....all to no avail...game still freezes from time to time.

[Life Pilgrim]

Hmm it seems the AV thought many of the game's files to be suspicious.

The problem has been sorted out.

A similar problem can also be read in 1C official forum related to freezing. In that one too the AV seemed not to like the game's files very much. That is what caused the intermittent freezes.

[gooana]

Guess you sorted it.

As a general tip - I still find process lasoo the most reliable way of pushing performance up in ToW games.

[Life Pilgrim]

Thx for that. I have no problem with performance just the AV hating the game's files.

One was detected as virus by the heuristic detection.

Even excluding that one dll would still cause freezes as I concluded later that there are other files that the AV didn't like or found suspicious during game, hence the intermittent freezes.

Once this is sorted out the performance is smooth. I can play with max setting without problem.

And I must say the game is great. A classic war game brought to PC for mature gamers.
I'm hoping they'll do expansion like weather and winter terrain and adding the Chinese faction....but it seems unlikely as sales may not have been that great.

[Sneaksie]

Originally Posted by gooana

Guess you sorted it.

As a general tip - I still find process lasoo the most reliable way of pushing performance up in ToW games.

Do you need paid version features or free one will suffice?

[gooana]

Originally Posted by Sneaksie

Do you need paid version features or free one will suffice?

Luckily the free one has the gaming mode features
You do need to manually enable the mode after the trial period but that's not really a problem as it does still work as it should.

[sandman2575]

Originally Posted by gooana

Guess you sorted it.

As a general tip - I still find process lasoo the most reliable way of pushing performance up in ToW games.

i guess i've really come down on the side of the folks who say TOW2 is just terribly, terribly coded. this is a game i want to love but the performance issues are just ridiculous.

Process Lasso unfortunately did nothing for me. absolutely no discernible difference in FPS. TOW2 hovers around average 15-20 FPS no matter what I do. I can crank all the gfx setting up to max: 15-20 FPS. Switch to lowest possible resolution with gfx set to lowest: 15-20 FPS. (Ambient occlusion is the only gfx setting that has a noticeable difference of about 5-8 FPS less when enabled.)

Obviously the CPU is the bottleneck, as countless folks on these and the Battlefront/1C forums confirm. The one thing Process Lasso did confirm for me is that TOW2 uses no more than 25% of my CPU power and about 50-75% of my RAM. I disable multithreading to try to force 1 CPU core: 25% CPU usage. Keep all 4 cores enabled: 25% CPU usage. Try to set affinity to 2 cores: 25% CPU usage.

Really, really frustrating and disappointing that this game should be so badly optimized.

My specs just for the record:

Sager NP8120 (Built on Clevo X8100)
Intel Core i7-820QM, 1.73-3.06GHz, (45nm, 8MB L3 cache)
SLi ENABLED DUAL 1024MB PCI-Express nVIDIA GTX 285M's (2048MB Total) w/GDDR3 DX10
Ram ~ 4,096MB DDR3 1333MHz Dual Channel Memory (2 SODIMMS)
Windows 7 x64

Yes this is a laptop, not a desktop. However, it's a pretty damn powerful laptop, as evidenced by the fact that I can play TOW2 with max gfx settings with no real difference in game performance...unfortunately, that performance is stuck in the 15FPS area.

I'm not looking to run TOW2 at 50FPS. I'd be completely satisfied if it could play in the 30+ FPS area on average. However, FPS in the teens, dipping to single digits as the norm is just not enjoyable.

I keep coming back to TOW2 every once in a while to see if I can do something to get it to be playable. But there is no magic fix. Not Process Lasso. Not disabling multithreading. Not running in XP compatability mode. Not disabling EAX. It either runs well or it doesn't for you, and I'll be damned if it's at all connected to how good your rig is. Lots of folks have killer machines and get the same thing I do.

[Sneaksie]

I'm glad you're enjoying it. Yes, AV programs don't like ToW because of its complex structure. Parts of code are in Java, while render is C++ in DLL, and all this is governed by a separate launcher executable. AV software tend to think there is some evil intent
After setting AV to exclude game files from analysis, does the game still freeze when 'hide bodies' is unchecked?

[Life Pilgrim]

Originally Posted by Sneaksie

I'm glad you're enjoying it. Yes, AV programs don't like ToW because of its complex structure. Parts of code are in Java, while render is C++ in DLL, and all this is governed by a separate launcher executable. AV software tend to think there is some evil intent
After setting AV to exclude game files from analysis, does the game still freeze when 'hide bodies' is unchecked?

Hi Sneaksie I noticed you are from 1C forum.

The game is great minus some existing problem like rare freezes(still happens but much rarer and just for a few seconds instead freezing indefinitely) and some rare ctd like when you try to use the mission generator occasionally.

Too bad the reception hasn't gone well for ToW 3. I'd love to buy an expansion adding the Chinese, ROK(South Korea) and the British as well as adding more dynamic weather(snow, rain spectrum, fog) and as well as spring-summer-winter terrains, night battle along with more maps.

Could enjoy the game even more without its pre-existing bugs which haven't been dealt with too.

I read 1C has given up on ToW series....
That's too bad. The game captures the feel of a battle very well.