I'm about 90 minutes into first play of The Bloodiest Day battle (Union side), and about ten minutes ago most of the troops on both sides stopped firing at each other. Since I'm guessing that a Sudden Peace Breaks Out function doesn't exist, it seems something is wrong. The target lists show the units believe enemies are in range, but they're not shooting, and none of the confederate units are shooting. A few regiments here and there are still firing (interestingly including all of the units armed with repeaters) and chewing away on confederate regiments which are just standing there being shot to pieces.

I tried exiting a few times and reloading the save game to no avail. I've tried moving units around, again no effect.

Anyone seen this or have any ideas?

WOW! This IS a first. I've never seen anything like that. Have to get away from NapMod and play it.

Jack

Is this an army vs army scenario? If so, that behavior shows up when there are too many troops involved in combat for your computer to handle. Everything just grinds to a halt. The only solution in that case is a bigger and better computer.

This is normal for the long range repeaters since the Rebs don't have the musket range to fight back. However, they should automatically lie down...not that it helps much (this issue is submitted).

Also, check the ammo levels, maybe their ammo supply is zero, which would be about par for 90 minutes of play.

Still, probably MTG's observation, not enough CPU or memory strength.

I was concerned about this when I designed the scenario, but my old machine, dual 2.8 with 3GB of Ram, including the dual Graphic Cards, handled it. They stuttered at times, but kept on afightin'.

Thanks guys for the suggestions, but so far none make much sense. My machine is an i7/950 with a Nvidia GTX270 card and 8GB RAM which can drive Skyrim at near max settings. My OS is Win7 x64 Pro.

I'm also an experienced player of these games going back to 2nd Mannassas, have played the hell out of all of them and have checked all the obvious things (like AI on/off, ammo, etc). Besides in my experience troops in range of enemies with no ammo will at best proceed on an orderly retreat regardless of what you tell them to do, if not break and start running for the next county.

What I'm seeing is a few dozen Union and Confed regiments standing nose to nose at <150 yards and doing nothing at all, in a couple of cases Confederate regiments are getting chewed to pieces by US sharpshooters without the slightest apparent concern. I currently see no Confederate regiments or artillery firing, and only about 10% of the Union regiments are firing.

I can send the saved game to someone if they're interested in taking a look.

Even though your specs look fine, what you describe is the classic behavior of too many men on the field. If you are running in windowed mode with a lot of other processes going on in the background, you may be limited to smaller oobs. Try this, play in full screen mode if you are not already doing so. If still no joy, choose a sandbox game with army vs army size. If the game once again freezes, then you'll have to determine what is hogging all your resources.

Although I am by no means ruling out your assessment MTG, I have played the game on several different machines of varying performance levels, and have never experienced an issue like that. I'd be curious to see a saved game.

Vossiewulf - Can you please zip one up, and email to sowsupport at norbsoftware dot com with a detailed description of the problem, which units to select etc. Thanks.

Edit - Better yet, what RebBugler said... Send the saved game to him.

I would like to check out a saved game. Select one of the units within engagement range that is not engaging and save.

Zip and send saved game to prkeen at drumsandbugles dot com. Thanks!

Save game sent.

Received and replied...yep, we've got an ugly to solve here. Hope it's an isolated issue. Probably along the lines of what MTG reported, but we've never seen it in a scenario, just in an overwhelmed sandbox BIG army vs army situation. Thanks

Any word here? Wondering if it's going to be something that's likely to be fixed soon, or not. I'm guessing not as that seems to be the kind of thing you'd see running up against some fundamental architecture issues.

I've started the Confederate army version, will see what happens, no problems with any of the Antietam corps ones I've played so far.

So, I'm assuming the replacement scenario I sent out to you was a no go?

V,

If you haven't already, try uninstalling the game and re-installing it. Make sure you deactivate it before you do. Don't just delete it because you'll lose your settings.

B

In addition, before you re-install Antietam deactivate all mods. We've seen some anomalies when patches are installed with mods activated, this may happen with battle packs also. No need to delete them, just click off the yellow boxes and select the check at the bottom.

Good advice. Thanks RB

B

Vossiewulf - See Williams reply in this thread:



If you load your saved game from the main menu, does the problem still occur?

Haven't tried the replacement scenario, can't remember what I need to do with them to get them to show up. Tried moving it around a few places but not showing up in the additional battles choices.

I'm not running any mods, before playing Antietam I started with a brand new install of the latest version (1.4?), since I'd rebuilt my machine since I last played.

I've been playing the Confed Army scenario last few days with zero problems, now four hours in. So either the problem I saw was triggered by a transient set of circumstances or it's something about that scenario in particular, since I'm playing another one of the same scale without problems.

[quote="Little Powell" post=47833]Vossiewulf - See Williams reply in this thread:



I'm almost certain I did and the problem was still there, but I'll try it again. However it went off the rails during normal gameplay, I hadn't loaded any saves when it went bad the first time, so whatever the problem is would have occurred anyway.

Bad and worse news: I tried loading this save from a fresh game session, no effect. RB, did it make any difference for you?

The worse is the None But Heroes Are Left game is now crashing SOW, although it's proceeded fine almost five hours in now. It crashes consistently within a minute or so of loading the save.

Vossiewulf wrote:


Please try the scenario I sent you in a mod form, build the following structure: Mods/Antietam Mod/Scenarios/The scenario I sent. So, you're making two folders named Antietam Mod and Scenarios, place the scenario in the Scenarios folder...activate Antietam Mod.

RebBugler wrote:


About two hours in with no problems, but I got five hours into the None But Heroes before it started crashing. Will let you know if I make it to the end.

Good to hear. When I designed and tested this scenario I also had Bugles and Flags, BloodBath and the Antietam Flag Mod enabled, but that was when Antietam was in mod form, not the battle pack configuration it is now. And that was on my old XP system. I never experienced an AI shut down indicative of your issue.

If you make it all the way through in mod form with no issues maybe we can narrow down this ugly. Possibly to the battle pack install configuration settings.

Thanks for reporting your progress with this. NSD is dedicated to a bug-free environment, and we will leave no stone uncovered in this quest.

I manage a fairly large development team and my days largely consist of 5 digit bug numbers. So yes will help out as I can. About 3 hours in now and still ok.

Ended that successfully around 3 hours and 45 minutes in with McClellan having a 30k victory, only Stuart remains as a coherent force on the Confederate side, and he's about to get mooshed if he doesn't run away.

So something definitely different between the two. It would be useful to try the first one again to see if the failure reoccurs and reoccurs at the same time to help localize it. The save should be useful to debug the state it's in but it may not tell you how you got there.

Also there's the crash in None But Heroes five hours in, not sure if you have another version of that for me to try. I can send you that save too, that crashes reproducibly on my machine.

Thanks for the second version, it was fun to get one of these all the way through.

Vossiewulf wrote:


I would like to see this save since it is my scenario. I have never seen another report of this scenario crashing so there must be something amiss on your machine. Just thinking out loud here but I would also like to know what RebBugler did to his scenario that got it working for you.

You can send the save to: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

LP, we corresponded via email and I sent the scenario at issue to V. Played in mod form it was fine, so possibly something in the map pack is changing the scenarios.

Thanks V, glad this worked out, maybe LP will accommodate with his scenario also. I stay off other folks turf as much as possible. Each person on the team is responsible for their own stuff...and Norb owns it all.

RebBugler wrote:


Yeah, that kind of thing doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling. If his save crashes for me, I'll get a report in for Norb so he can run it in the debugger. Thanks.

Little Powell wrote:


Sigh. The crashing save was the autosave and like an idiot I forgot to copy it to something permanent before trying RB's mod scenario, sorry. The last permanent save I have is from about 40 min before it started crashing, I'll see if I can play it again from there and see if it crashes again.

This was totally different from the problem I had with RB's scenario, where the AI went brain dead. The None But Heroes problem was a good old fashioned fatal CTD.

LP, I picked up the last save I had of None But Heroes and have proceeded 45min or so past the point where it crashed before, so whatever caused that (although reproducible with that one save) is not a consistent issue, so I don't think you need to sweat it.