QCF Design Community

I just switched computers and DD keeps hanging up on the new one. It seems fairly arbitrary - for example, I just successfully completed two runs without any issue, and just as I was about to complete my third game, it hung up.

The window says "Not Responding", the music keeps playing, but I cannot interact with anything in the game, in fact Win7 greys out the window to show me it's really non-responsive.

Any ideas on what can be the fix? I never had any such issue on my previous computer, however it is no longer operable, so I don't have an option to go back to it.

Have you checked your graphics drivers to make sure they're up to date? We've had problems with reference drivers in the past...

Thanks for the suggestion! I've just updated my new netbook's APU driver. The problem unfortunately persists.

Out of curiousity, I also tried the browser version, and I'm not sure whether I played a representative number of games, but I did not yet get this type of error. That said, I strongly prefer using the game application that I can launch via STEAM over the version I can plan in the browser, as the browser version seems to lag a bit, plus it's less convenient overall to play in my browser than to launch an application. (not to mention the cool STEAM cards and all)

I did try another thing, that I've seen in another thread, which was to erase my save files and allow syncing to repopulate them, however I did not see any effect. So I don't think it's savefile corruption.

Do you maybe have any other suggestions what can I try? I'm unfortunately not very tech-savvy...

It wouldn't be save file corruption if the game is hanging during play, that seems like a memory or video issue that means the game can't continue running... If it were a gameplay crash, you'd get that wonderful "Oh no, shit's broken!" message and we could do something about it.

The browser version being more stable means that it's probably a memory issue. I wish I knew a way to test that out easily... I'd like to try sending you a more recent build, seeing as we made the game a lot sleeker and less memory hungry to optimise it for tablets, but it's not 100% stable yet. Tell you what, PM me your email address anyway, maybe I can make something happen by the end of the week.

Also, I totally understand rather playing the game through Steam - I do too!

Final question: Are you playing fullscreen or windowed mode when it hangs?

When I got the computer, as the warranty was just expiring, I did run some tests that I've just read about in a computer magazine I picked up, including memtest, and it tested the memory modules and said they were fine... So I think (hope) that the modules are physically ok.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the offer, I'm PMing you my private e-mail address! I really appreciate your help!

I'm playing windowed.

Now that I think back, I don't know if it's making any difference, I think that whenever my game hung, I was always moving the tile selector on the map (so that the small footsteps indicating the hero's path are re-calculated constantly, showing the path, and then on one tile the selection just stops, even though I move my mouse, it no longer responds in game, keeping the little yellow frame around one of the tiles). I didn't notice crashes when I was fighting for example. Of course, this may easily be just driven by statistics, because I spend most time moving/targeting, and only a little bit pressing the spell / attack buttons...

I got it. I don't have a stable build to send yet.

Sure, I don't want to rush creativity, I'll gladly try the new version once it's shareable.

In the meantime, I do wonder if there's anything else I may try. My computer can actually run lots of stuff without issues, so I'm not sure whether a leaner, more optimized executable should even be THE solution... I don't seem to have freezes with the browser version; when ran via steam, DD application doesn't take more than a few percent of CPU or 200-300 MB of Memory (out of 4 GB)... So I assume that it's more of a clash, like an address conflict, or permissions issue, or whatnot, rather than an overall resource question. Tips/pointers still welcome!

It'll be a render-texture issue, so fullscreen and-or terrain changes are the cause of the problems you're seeing, because that's where the game interacts with render-textures. I'm not sure why or how your specific setup is having that problem with how we're doing that in Unity, but that part of the game has changed a ton while we've been updating and optimising stuff - that would be why I was trying to get you a newer build to test.