Anyone else having problems? The game keeps restarting my machine at random when I play. I tried posting on their support board, but was sadly ignored. I really enjoy the game, but it seems I can’t really play it like this, it happens at least once every two games. My drivers are all up to date, etc. Does anybody have any ideas? I want to recommend it to my friends, they keep asking about it, but I can’t do it in good conscience as long as it keeps doing this!
Mark L
A game can not restart your computer (hard restart). At least not unless they deliberately try to do that, and even then, XP might not let it.
You almost certainly have a driver issue, or a hardware issue - those are the two things that cause Windows to puke and hard-restart.
Besides drives, you should also check if you are using directx version 9.0c.
Random reboots are the new version of the BSOD, I’m pretty sure XP now defaults to a setting that just restarts the computer rather than showing you the error.
The best way to find the culprit: Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer… Check application and system, and while you might not understand the error, that’ll usually tell you what driver freaked out.
Yeah you can also turn off the auto reboot on blue screen error. That way when it happens you’ll be able to see what is actually blue screening.
Control Panel > System > Advanced Tab > Settings button for Startup and Recovery > Uncheck Automatically restart.
This only for Win2k/XP. 9x/Me will happily give you the blue screen as everyone here has experienced.
Its odd, I just got dumped out of a game due to an error, but didn’t save the message. I’ve had a few crashes when closing the game, but never had one boot me out of a match. First time :(.
It was a good match too.
However, I have to suspect one weird thing: I was playing a player who seemed to have WAY more resources than is possible. He is supposedly a very good player so perhaps he has a better build than me, although my build skills are honestly pretty good. So I wonder if there’s some kind of map hack (to find lair gold) or resource hack out there?
This is the second game I played vs him where he seemed to exceed the potential econ curve. He claimed it was due to finding large quantities of lair gold, but I do that also, and still his econ just blew me away, and he field armies of troops way more expensive than I’ve seen at those stages of the game.
Of course, maybe he’s just better than me :). But I fought off a nasty attack that cost him WAY more resources than he should have been able to afford, and then I crash and get booted. Its suspicious to me, but maybe its just coincidence.
Also, this player has like 70 wins and 14 disconnects which makes me wonder about him in general…
Dan
Hmm, did you manage to get a movie of your first game with him? That’d be a pretty easy way to tell.
Unfortunately, Kohan 2 isn’t a centralized server game (right?), which means that people are going to be able to do all kinds of crazy hacks.
Hmm, I sat down and made a list of the companies he had, and looked at the reference info. On further consideration I am not sure if he was cheating. It is mathematically possible to support the forces he had, but I don’t know if its mathematically possible to earn the gold to buy all the stuff in the time that passed.
He had a total of 2 long shades, 2 short shades, and 4 short beasts by minute 12. The total cost of his army in upkeep is 28 mana and 16 iron. To support this would require 2 towns and a village, with 2 black smiths and a mana forge, and 2 mana stones (with one of them upgraded). Total cost of all the buildings and units (including settlers and city founding and upgrades) is about 1900 gold. Assuming 200 gold earned in the first five minutes, 300 in the next 5, plus the starting 500 he had about 1,000. So he needed to find 900 gold in lairs. Weak lairs yield 50, medium lairs 75 and tough lairs 100. So in the first 10 minutes he needed to find some combination of 9 to 18 lairs. That’s about double the best I’ve ever done in 10 minutes.
Maybe it’s mathematically possible ifyou dont support your troops and take the gold hit. But with an upkeep of 16 iron and 28 mana, hoo boy. Even a 1/4 deficit would be -51 gold per turn which would essentially cripple you at that stage.
I’ll have to experiment. Maybe its possible. But it seems pretty damn hardcore if so.
Dan
MarkL, your problem sounds like a bad driver/conflict between the video card/driver/directx and windows. The steps would be to move to the latest version of DirectX and the latest version of your graphics card driver. Also, run some tests to see if there aren’t any problems with your card. I recently had a swap out a 9700 PRO out of my work machine because it had gone bad and I was suffering exactly as you are now (while my colleagues with 9700s were all playing away)
Sharpe,
Its possible but unlikely, because they would have to be able to spoof the checksum checking between wads. Hmm, actually, someone was telling me about a hacked exe that allowed you to cheat in Multiplayer. This could be that case, in which case, your crash is probably due to bad data flowing through the system from the hack. Argh!
Thanks for the advice everyone. Unfortunately, I have both the latest video card drivers and direct x 9.0 c, so no go there. I turned off the auto restart option though, and hopefully that can give me some clues. I will post data when I get it, if any of you have the time or inclination, maybe you can tell me what it means? Thanks in advance for your help! As far as the system log goes, curiously there seems to be no mention of the Kohan reboots at all! Every other problem I encounter is mentioned, but no Kohan! I have logs from the Kohan game itself however, and I have posted these to the support board to no avail.
Mark L
edit: thanks for your comment, Aephir, I will provisionally assume it is not a physical card problem for now though, as other games and programs seem to work perfectly and I have no real way of testing that hypothesis, lacking an identical card.
Mark,
Just remember what the TG in TG_Aephir stands for (hint: TimeGate).
As for your problem, if it’s all up to date drivers and it’s not MP cheating and bad data, then you have you have flakey hardware, regardless of what other games may or may not do. It may be bad ram, either on the mobo or the vid card itself, it may be something else more subtle. The BSOD error will say exactly what driver flipped out, which will tell you exactly what’s going on.
It sounds to me like the dude is cheating his balls off. If your timeline of what he was fielding is accurate…it doesnt seem possible to have gotten that economy in that amount of time. And if he was that adept at the econ, he probably could have kicked your ass with his superior force, but he didnt? More evidence that he was cheating IMO.
Fucking cheaters.
olaf
Here is the text of the BSOD error:
Stop: 0x0000007E (0xc0000006, 0xba94886b, 0xfa01da08, 0xFA01d704)
ldiskl.sys - Address BA94886B
base at BA942000
Datestamp 40b5d727
I know this is supposed to tell me what the problem is, but it means absolutely nothing to me. If anyone has any ideas, I would appreciate any help you could give.
And with regards to Backov- I realize who Aephir and I appreciate his advice, as I do yours. I just want to see if this isn’t some kind of software thing I can work out before I look into buying new hardware, since I am strapped for cash at the moment thanks in no small part to last week’s gamepocalypse. It sounded to me, since everything else worked fine, that the hardware was ok (at least at first glance) but I am inexperienced and I freely concede that might be rubbish.
Thanks again, all
Mark L
It’s not often that a search for a file (ldiskl.sys) turns up absolutely nothing in google web or groups search, but lucky you.
However, searching for this particular stop error: 0x0000007E turns up this sorta related article:
Which doesn’t tell you much:
This issue may occur if a system thread generates an exception that the error handler does not catch. This may occur if one or more of the following conditions exist:
* If this issue occurs after the first restart during Windows Setup, or after Setup is finished, the computer may not have sufficient hard disk space to run Windows. * If this issue occurs after the first restart during Windows Setup, or after Setup is complete, the computer BIOS may be incompatible with Windows. * Incompatible video adapter drivers. * Damaged RAM. * A damaged device driver or system service.
I’d do the rounds and make sure really have every driver updated as well as your bios.
I know some players that will use techniques where they go all or nothing, that is they tend to overspend on their economy early to try and take you out, they aren’t worried about maintaining the units since their goal is to wipe you out and not have to worry about it. It is a very risky maneuver and might explain the disconnects… someone who played like this would know they were essentially beaten if their initial rush failed. They might even pull the plug after the sort of battle you described.
Thanks, Malphigian. I’ll check the bios and stuff…I know I have my video card and direct x up to date, but who knows what other stuff may be amiss.
Mark L.
Argh, twice in a row tonight I crashed out of Kohan while hosting an 8 player game. I had hosted a couple earlier in the week and it was fine. That makes a total of 3 crashes right out of the game while hosting in the last 2 days. I was so pissed (it was a great 4v4 just getting good) I didnt save the error messge. Grr. Dunno what’s wrong.
Anyone else having spontaneous crashes while playing online?
Dan
PS Apologies to anyone who got booted out of the game, sucks :(.
I’ve been getting Random reboots as well, about every hour or two of playing single player. The last crash corrupted my save file too. :x
Judging from the Event Viewer, it seems to be a TrueVector Service (part of Zone Alarm), claiming the error happened while k2.exe was attempting to access the internet… Seems strange, even fishy. Exactly why is Zone Alarm involved playing single player at all?!
Mark, are you running Zone Alarm by any chance?
In fact I was running Zone Alarm. Since I posted before I have both updated my motherboard bios and been turning off Zone Alarm, and have not crashed again…make of it what you will.
Mark L.
Zone Alarm seems to be frighteningly popular being what I consider the flakiest and clumsiest of the free/cheap firewalls. I’d recommend both Kerio and Sygate personal firewalls over Zone Alarm, and and if you can still find it somewhere, an old version (before the software got unneeded features, a horrbily bloated GUI and the free version turned into trial version) of Tiny Personal Firewall is my favorite.