[orange_sky]

Hey there.  Huge fan of FS2 and FS2 open, easily one of my favourite games.  Unfortunately, been having a heck of a time trying to get it to be stable.  It will crash every single time a beam weapon is being used.  Anything can happen in any mission, mods don't matter, it can happen in stock FS2 even without the mediavps.  The second a beam weapon is used, it will crash.

-Copy of the game is from gog.com
-nvidia 660Ti with latest drivers which are 358.50 at the time of this writing
-Moved FS and launcher folders to C:\Games
-Explicitly changed all the permissions in Windows 7 64 bit to allow anything to execute these files / "Everyone", etc.
-There are no other .vp files in the root of the game folder as described on the faq


I started from scratch two times, once using the freespace installer, and the second time downloading the mediavps and other files.  I even went through the trouble of checking their checksums to make sure they weren't corrupted.

I have tried 3.7.2 Final, 3.7.0, 3.6.12 Inferno, every single build still crashes on beam weapons.

There is only one way for me to have a workaround, to check "Disable OpenGL Pixel Buffer Objects" in wxlauncher.  Unfortunately this causes the game to be horrifically slow, it appears to render at 60FPS but it feels like the game's in slow motion.  None of the other options seem to do anything.  Thanks in advance for any tips or fixes for this.

[General Battuta]

Please post your fs2_open.log file.  Instructions on how to do this can be found in this post.

[AdmiralRalwood]

This sounds like Mantis 3130 again... is it possible a driver update brought the issue back?

orange_sky, can you try an older driver version (something like 347.52) to see if it stops crashing? Uh, you should try that after generating and posting your debug log, of course, in case it's something else.

[Cyborg17]

I thought that bug turned out to be a compiler error.

[AdmiralRalwood]

I thought that bug turned out to be a compiler error.

One thought was that it might've been related to the compiler, but experimentation showed otherwise; as far as we were able to tell, it was just a weird bug in the drivers, as a driver update fixed it for everyone except Goober.

[orange_sky]

After reading that mantis bug thread, I'm 99% sure I found the problem.  It was the "kills" hud item.  I don't even remotely know why that would cause the entire game to crash, but I removed the offending line from my hud_gauges.tbl .

not trying to brag, just letting you know where this came from.  I am a big fan of multi monitors, I have three and followed this guide:

http://www.wsgf.org/dr/freespace-2

Which recommends this and it is the offending line:

+Kills:
Position: (3618, 975)

After removing this line I have played through tons of mods, with and without mediavps, and the fs2 campaign with not a single crash for at least 5 or 10 hours of gameplay over the past couple of days.  Coming from having it crash instantly almost every time, that obviously helped in a huge way.  Thanks for the replies, I'm mostly posting this in case someone else has this problem in the future.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Okay, but... it would have been nice to know if using older drivers stopped it from crashing, because we already knew that disabling the kills gauge avoided the problem.

(Also, with recent Nightly builds, it shouldn't be necessary to use a custom hud_gauges.tbl to avoid stretched HUD with triple-monitor setups.)

[orange_sky]

Thanks for that info.  And for your records, I tried:

280.26
306.97
320.14
320.49
326.80
331.40
347.09
358.50

Major GPU-Z points:
EVGA GTX 660Ti
GK104 28nm
BIOS 80.04.4B.00.60
10DE-1183

None of these made any difference.  The crash would vary in terms of the number of successful beam weapons used, it was random but impossible to make it through 30 seconds of any mission with beam weapons with every single one of the drivers above.  Nothing worked for me until I removed the kills item, and I'll also go ahead and remove the .tbl altogether as it isn't needed anymore and obviously just causes problems.