Freezes!

[riolu]

Coming up a little rant about the performance of this game.

For quite a while my game starts to freeze for no actual reason. Sometimes when I start to write in a chat or when I try to send the message, the game just freezes.
When I try to start an official attempt - game freezes.
Map loads - game freezes.
Start rendering a replay - game freezes.

I really start thinking about stopping playing this game because I can't play for half an hour without getting a freeze at least once.
Why do the developers not focus on the performance of this game first instead of trying to release 1029 environments in 1 year and 192 useless and buggy features. Sounds harsh, but this is actually what many many players think about the situation at the moment.
And I'm not the only one who is not satisfied with the game's performance. I know quite a lot of players who frequently complain about freezes, random bugs or other crap. So it's definitely not an issue with my system but rather with the game itself.

Furthermore, when I start Maniaplanet, the sound just disappears randomly. When I restart it's normally fine again but sometimes it is still gone. I couldn't find a pattern there.
I could attach many many log-files to this thread, but I'm pretty sure you guys already know about this issue and I hope you are working on it - because this is just annoying.
Oh, and this also might explain the ultra-low activity in Maniaplanet at the moment.

Regards,
riolu

[TMarc]

The freezing issue has already been reported I think, at least there was already some discussion about it.
Good idea to raise this again.
Freezing at map load or calculation it is not really critical, but freezing at chat is ugly.

Regarding the sound, which sounds disappear? All sound and music, or just engine sound?

If it is only engine sound, then the usual recommendation is to check the audio quality (shall be set to normal instead of high), and the skins, as some skins have wrong sound files.

Other ideas:
Is it only if you restart ManiaPlanet after you have been using it a while before without switching off your PC,
or can it also happen just after you have started your PC?
Here I would suspect another application which sometimes runs in parallel and which you don't necessarily think of,
but that is using the same sound interface and potentially blocking it.

[Ozon]

Freezes in a tournament:

[TMarc]

you seem to like that gif a lot

There are freezes and there are freezes.
I thought it was obvious.

Most of the freezes happen when the user switches to another application and then tries to come back to ManiaPlanet.
But as soon as the game has finished what it was doing, and the video data was refreshed, the freezes ends, and the game continues as if nothing had happened. not critical but still very annoying.

If it is a freeze that makes the game not continue at all, and which can be resolved only in "killing" the game with the task manager (if it can even be activated) no go of course.

[tombuilder]

Regarding the freezes (if you meant hard freezes), I know, it maybe quite a unusual reason, but I drive now without a single freeze since then:
http://forum.maniaplanet.com/viewtopic. ... es#p174772
Had also freezes, mainly on starting or ending something (chat, map, run, render,...)
Just a guess!

[riolu]

Regarding the sound, which sounds disappear? All sound and music, or just engine sound?

If it is only engine sound, then the usual recommendation is to check the audio quality (shall be set to normal instead of high), and the skins, as some skins have wrong sound files.

Other ideas:
Is it only if you restart ManiaPlanet after you have been using it a while before without switching off your PC,
or can it also happen just after you have started your PC?
Here I would suspect another application which sometimes runs in parallel and which you don't necessarily think of,
but that is using the same sound interface and potentially blocking it.

All sounds disappear, so even the "plop" sound when the profile selection menu appears.
It happens in both cases, sometimes when I just started my pc, sometimes when I was already using it for some hours.
Yes, sound quality is already set to Medium.

If it is a freeze that makes the game not continue at all, and which can be resolved only in "killing" the game with the task manager (if it can even be activated) no go of course.

That's what I have to do every time unfortunately :/

Regarding the freezes (if you meant hard freezes), I know, it maybe quite a unusual reason, but I drive now without a single freeze since then:
http://forum.maniaplanet.com/viewtopic. ... es#p174772
Had also freezes, mainly on starting or ending something (chat, map, run, render,...)
Just a guess!

Going to try that, although I suspect that it won't help at all since I have plugged in an Xbox360 pad just as Bramble said in his post. Still appreciating your help

[TMarc]

Regarding your sound issues, I have no other ideas, sorry
And about the freezes, although you prefer to play with a pad, could you try to unconnect the gamepad and try if you still encounter freezes then?
Silly idea, but where exactly did you connect the pad to? A USB port that sits directly on the mainboard?
Or via some external hub (keyboard, screen, regular small hub)?
If you look in the Windows Device Manager, are all the other USB ports of the same internal hub free, or do you have other devices connected there as well?

The worst case would be a freeze caused by communication data buffer issues: where to fix? Mainboard or Driver updates? Windows USB system? ManiaPlanet?

[riolu]

Yes, the pad is connected to a USB port which sits directly at the mainboard. I'm not using any kind of hubs, etc.
It's weird since sometimes I don't get any freezes at all, but there are also days where I my game decides to freeze every 20 minutes. Guess I have to live with that

[TMarc]

Sorry to hear that.
Did you monitor the network connection by chance?
Or do you have really permanently a very good connection? DSL >8MBit/s or better?

[riolu]

Yes, I have 50Mbit/s in download and 2-3MByte/s upload consistently.