[TM2] Other - Game Freezes

[PsychoticFoetus]

I think I've solved this problem as far as my machine is concerned.

Last thing on Friday I disabled EAX in the sound options and managed to play for 30 minutes without a problem. I didn't want to report a solution too quickly after having thought I'd solved it before only to find out that I hadn't.

Anyway, I was away from the game over the weekend, but I've played for about an hour without problem this morning too.

So for me it seems like my sound chip is not so happy with EAX. Realtek High Definition Audio is my sound chip by the way.

Hope that this maybe helps some others.

Thank you v4nkw15h,
This seems to have fix the problem for me as well. I too have the same onboard sound chip so I'm thinking you're on to somthing.

I have managed to play for 45mins of wonderful freeze free TM2 so far today and am looking forward to this trend continuing.

v4nkw15h, I hope you get some bonus Planets or soemthing from Nadeo for finding a solution to this pesky "undocumented feature".

[v4nkw15h]

This is for sure a strange bug. Although the tweaks I found made a significant improvement to my freezing issues I have to report that they are still happening but less frequently.

I average about an hour of play before the game freezes. It is at random times but always at some sort of transition. It will never freeze mid game.

It seems it is always at a point of some form of loading. Like after a race when it's about to restart. Also it's never happened in the menus or during initial loading of a track.

It makes me wonder if power management on the laptop is turning off the hard drive and that is causing a glitch. I'll take a look.

I'm reporting back here with as much information as I can in the hope it helps to solve this issue.

BTW: I benchmarked my game and it came out at 57.9fps so it's no due to a terrible laptop.

Edit: Turns out that Windows 7 has an advanced power setting option set to turn the hard drive off after 15 minutes on a laptop but disabling that made no difference. Grrr. I'm getting an average of 30 minutes between freezes now, always as it's about to restart a track.

Edit 2: Hey, after the harddrive thing failed to make a difference I took a stab at disabling all power options. (Basically nothing turns off after a certain time limit) I haven't had a crash since. I'm about to disappear from this laptop for a couple of days so I thought I'd mention it in case it really is a permanent solution. I played a 90 minute session without a freeze so maybe this time I finally cracked it.

If you wanna know how - Control Panel - Hardware - Power Options - High Performance.

There is no guarantee this is a solution but 90 minutes is a record for me and I don't have time for further testing now. Will report back if I ever freeze again.

[v4nkw15h]

Okay, I'm currently over two hours into a single session without a freeze

Add that to the last 90 minute session I played without a freeze.

I forgot to mention that I changed two things before having this success. I changed the Power Options, as I mentioned above, but at the same time I also set the main Maniaplanet.exe file (inside the game folder) to run as administrator.

No freezes since doing those two things so fingers are crossed that I've solved it. If this solves your problems please post a reply. It will help others, confirm it works for at least some people, and will aid in getting the problem patched.

Edit: Ironically I finally had a freeze soon after posting this yesterday, followed by another couple over the following few hours but I do recommend the few tweaks I've mentioned in this post. Although they don't completely solve the problem they really did help. When I first installed the game on this laptop I couldn't last more than 5 minutes without a freeze. Now the freezes are more of a surprise than the norm. Let's hope the devs get this problem patched out soon though.

[PsychoticFoetus]

Update

Well what can I say, the game still freezes at random moments, but with the aid of v4nkw15h's wonderful input, they have now become quite further apart. I am yet to have a session last more than 75mins but I usually get at least 45mins before the "Dreaded Freeze Beast" pops in for a cup of tea and a chat.

Unlike v4nkw15h, I am using a desktop and so, don't have the same issues of HDD slumber via Windows7 Power Management.

From v4nkw15h

I also set the main Maniaplanet.exe file (inside the game folder) to run as administrator.

I haven't resorted to this yet, but I will if the game continues to be recaltriant. Though I must admit, I am begining to feel that paying for the privelage of being a beta tester doesn't seem to have actually helped in producing a "product fit for sale".

My only true hope is that it, and all other bugs, will be resolved soon.