Game always hanging/crashing

[beno1440]

Hi all, my first post in the forums and unfortunatley its 'cause the game ain't working 

I've searched for similar problems/fixes in the forums and elsewhere online but not yet found anything related to the issue I'm having which is that I can't seem to get the game to run for more than about 1 game year without it hanging indefinitely at some point or other. It doesn't appear to be happening when I do anything in particular either, occuring anytime from the New Game dialogue through to random points whilst watching some trains trundle about the map. Clicking anything whilst the game is frozen simply brings up the (Not Responding) bit on the top bar and I have to terminate the program. This happens with all paksets I've tried: 128 german, 128 british, japan and 128 japan, vanilla 64 and 128. I'm onto my second clean install, lest I got a bad download the first time or some such nonsense, of the most recent stable package from the simutrans.com site and no luck. I've tried running the game with -nomidi, -autosave 0, removing the debug mode command line params and a bunch of other things people have mentioned, but to no avail. I'm running on WinXP.

Anyone got any thoughts or suggestions? If you need more info. about the issue I'll be happy to provide since the game seems really great, if only I could play for long enough to actually get anywhere!

Thanks,
Beno

[Lmallet]

Which versions of Simutrans and paks are you using?

[DirrrtyDirk]

Let me guess... v111.2.2 Windows GDI (or which one was it that had the bug?).

If so, using the SDL version instead should already fix it, otherwise you need to give us some more information  about the exact version numbers of game and pakset, just as lmallet said.

[beno1440]

Game version is the one I got from the website the other day, 111.2.2 March 20 2012.

Paksets - no idea which versions, whichever ones are currently available for download via the website.

What is SDL?

[Combuijs]

What is SDL?

Don't worry too much about that. In this post http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=9587.0 you see there is a Windows Native and a Windows SDL variant. Try the second one (you have the first one I suppose) on a clean directory. This one might work better.

[beno1440]

Right, I'll give it a go later today and let you know how it goes, but for now thanks for you help!

[beno1440]

It works, so thanks!

Why is there a link to a buggy version still up for download though?

[An_dz]

Because it's not buggy.
It's because the first use Windows native render GDI. While second one uses SDL render.

Unfortunately your computer have something that hangs the GDI render.

[DirrrtyDirk]

As far as I remember, the GDI version actually is buggy. At least I think I remember prissi saying that... but maybe I'm confusing it with something else...

[An_dz]

Well, it works perfectly here.
Maybe in the future Simutrans may use DirectX.

[Ters]

I suspect SDL uses DirectX on Windows.

[An_dz]

From what I know it uses OpenGL.

[Ters]

Well, it is at least possible to use OpenGL with it. It seems a bit strange for it to use OpenGL otherwise, as using OpenGL then complicates and possibly slows things down. There is at least a windx5 directory in the SDL source code.

[An_dz]

I just looked at the SDL website and it uses OpenGL for 3D.
But from what I was saying, Simutrans may use DirectX natively, without SDL. As Timothy is doing with Quartz.

[Ters]

But Simutrans isn't 3D, and though I have written two backends for Simutrans that uses OpenGL through SDL, one is rather useless at the moment and the other kind of sucks. Writing a DirectX graphics backend for Simutrans isn't that hard, but there is little to nothing to gain on it compared to the GDI and SDL backends. Input and especially sound are a bit more tricky. The Quartz port is only similar to the GDI for Mac, and enables more seamless integration with the Mac UI. I don't think there is need for more integration on Windows, except possibly Metro, and DirectX won't help there.

[prissi]

The last version has experimental Multithreading with GDI, which could hang when suddenly a frame too too long to render. So it is buggy. I hopy tonight I finish the release of the next version, which fixed it (as the nightlies did too.)