Video freezes, sounds and game keep playing?

HeatSurge

Has anyone experienced this bug where the video stops, but the game actually keeps working "underneath?"

I've had this happen a few times today; really annoying. I can't reproduce it, but it seems to always happen in high-movement situations, when there's a lot of stuff happening in the game already (late-game).

The symptoms are: video freezes on the frame, no movement, no refreshing, no anything. However, you can hear the game sounds underneath and if you jump/move around etc., you can hear the game is working fine. In fact, you can actually pull the console with ` and type "quit" and the game exits gracefully to desktop without a crash notification. However, the video is stuck to that frame where it has frozen until you quit the game.

Has anyone else had this happen to them?!?

Win7 x64, GTX 480 latest beta (310.33 I think?), i7-920, everything updated.

Bicsum

Maybe the graphics card driver crashed.

HeatSurge

I've had that happen, and usually in that case, the card downclocks itself to some "safe" frequency permanently. That's not the case though, I can restart the game and it works fine again (after quitting).

I really have no idea why this happens...

IeptBarakat

Try looking at the "log.txt" file in the "C:\Users\Name\AppData\Roaming\Natural Selection 2" folder the next time it happens.

It overwrites itself every time the game launches, so be sure to look at it before you play again.

Once you secure that, remove the chat from the log and paste it up in here or give it to a developer with the necessary info and I'm sure they'll look into it.

HeatSurge

OK This has been happening (completely randomly by the way, sometimes I'll play fine for a couple hours, sometimes it'll happen after 45 minutes etc.)

It's not consistent and honestly it happens rarely enough to not be overly annoying. It really is annoying when it happens though, because I've found it usually happens in two situations:

- When I'm commanding scrolling fast around the map late-game.
- When I'm near exos which are firing.

I don't know if it has to do with particles or some kind of video memory overflow or something with the constant texture caching which occurs, but again what happens is the game continues to play underneath while the video remains static.

I'm making this post because I found a hilarious "workaround" for the problem, at least for me. I can alt-tab out of the game, and then alt-tab back in... and it actually works (lol?). That is, unless it crashes with "engine is in a situation from which it cannot recover," since the game absolutely hates alt-tabbing unless in ready room or main menu. So, if it doesn't crash on alt-tabbing, when the "frozen video" occurs, I can alt-tab out and back into the game.

Even funnier, I'm not sure if it's placebo or not, but when the game video "freezes" and I alt-tab out and in, it starts working a lot more smoothly compared to right before it was about to crash.

My video driver in windows isn't crashing (video clocks stay up, no "windows has recovered" errors, nothing out of the ordinary), the card is well-cooled and I really don't think it's the problem.

So... I honestly think it might have to do with either something that happens around exos (particles? textures?) or just some weird caching problem or maybe some weird nVidia driver problem.

Here's a log below. You can see the "device lost" stuff, and then back to normal when I alt-tab back in...

<a href="http://paste2.org/p/2453349" target="_blank">http://paste2.org/p/2453349</a>

As I was searching for my own thread around the forums, I found some other people with the same problem, so I don't think I'm alone. I think people just aren't reporting as much, since the game tends to crash infrequently, once in a while for no particular reason and I'm guessing people are just like *sigh, another weird crash, oh well*.

Anyway, I'm hoping for magical fixes with 229 tonight. I'll keep you updated if I discover something more. I'll also take a screenshot of the video memory usage when this occurs again - maybe it'll be helpful to trace this problem.

By the way, you can move this to tech support if you'd like.

DrNo

The exact same thing has happens to me, at least 10-15 times the past 7-8 builds.
Mostly its late game and its often when alot of action is going on.
I havnt tried the alt-tab you mention, but i will next time it occurs.

ATI card with latest drivers, and i have upgraded the drivers shortly after they releases.