Frequent zone-crashing :: Plane of Knowledge/Lag Pile to blame?

I'm talking specifically about the kind of crashing that happens when you zone, no loading bar appears, and almost immediately you get the "We have detected that your game may have crashed" dialog. Not clicking adv loot items and crashing, or other types of freezing, not hardware-related eg video card overheating or insufficient power from PSU.

On my server, the "lag pile" is in PoK. When I enter PoK, between 1 and 5 zone attempts later I will crash. As an extreme example, last night I logged out sitting in PoK, this morning I logged back in, clicked the Tranquility stone, and immediately crashed. When I avoid Plane of Knowledge the game is usually fine to play all day unless I enter other "known wonky zones" eg Pillars of Alra, Degmar Castle, Valley of Lunanyn Raid Instance (haven't checked that one for a while) , Combine Dredge, there may be more. That's ok I can deal with an elevated chance to crash on those zones, no big deal.

I can't help but wonder what the difference could be between Plane of Knowledge and other zones. I also wonder if there is anything I can do to either fix this or make it less likely to happen. I've done a lot of searching over the years and a lot of reading on these forums and others, and haven't really found anything that helps.

Why does my eq crash so often? Guesses, and guesses at solutions:
1 - Leaving PoK or any zone prior to all textures completely loading may crash the game. You should stay in PoK, and run around looking at everyone so that all the textures load, then you can safely leave. If you leave while the textures are still loading it will mess up the next zone's loading and you will probably crash.
2 - EQ just manages texture memory poorly and it's a crapshoot whether the following zone will do something weird to some memory location and cause a protection fault or w/e. There is nothing you can do - get better dice.
3 - EQ would not crash as much if you didn't insist on running in fullscreen-windowed 1920x1080-ish, but settled down to a much more reasonable 640x480. Lowering your resolution will fix the bug. Or going full-screen.
4 - Hero's Forge is poorly implemented and resource-hungry. If you were able to disable the display of all hero's forge armor on other players you wouldn't crash.
5 - Some Hero's Forge models or textures are just broken, and because they are made by players and not professional 3d artists they rarely get the optimization that other models would have. I'm no 3d modeller but I've heard of people normalizing vectors (or something) in other games to fix stuff like this.
6 - There is something weird with one of my .ini files and redoing say the UI will fix the problem
7 - There is something weird with an item my character wears, carries, or has in the bank. Getting rid of said item would fix the problem.

Boring system specs - Intel quad core @2.33GHz (using all cores in game, confirmed Affinity is on 0-3 using task manager), GTX970, 8Gigs, windows 7. My system has changed over time (other video cards, different motherboard, varying amount of RAM, different OS) but all configurations have had the crashing problem, since it started (when was that? VoA? the release of Hero's Forge?)

Can someone in the know please point me in the right direction? I know that not everyone crashes as much as I do, and I would dearly love to crash less. Thank you.

Started happening to me on Phinny a few weeks ago, always when I use a gnome teleporter. Not every time I use one, but when I crash it's always after hailing one of the gnomes. It's happened in BB, FV, TD and Freeport. I always get the message box you described. I don't think my client ever crashed in 17 years before this started on Phin. Annoying but not fatal.

You can already do this under Options - Display - New Armor. I have it turned off as I think most of it looks absolutely godawful but it's possible it may help with crashing.

I crash now and then mostly while zoning into the bazaar (which is a very busy zone on my server) and it seems to happen most often when I've been swapping repeatedly between characters and/or running several accounts at once for a few hours. If I remember I try to exit the EQ client completely before raids to try and minimize the chances of crashing and having to hassle whoever is running the raid tool for another invite.

If you haven't already you might want to try going to Memory Mode in Options - Display - Advanced Settings and setting it to Least Memory Usage although this does have minor visual side effects.

Thank you, I'm giving that a try! Armor is gone, but custom shields and weapons remain. That's ok it's at least in the right direction.

Since frequent crashes leave me in "least" memory mode, and I crash so much, and I'm lazy, I've left it that way (set to least), although it didn't seem to matter when I tried it in the past.

I get this problem too. It started several months ago. I never had it happen when the lag pile was in the guild lobby and when the lag pile moved to pok it was fine for several months too so something changed in eq I think. I also gete crashes when I travel through a lot of zones if I don't set my memory to maximum use. I think there used to be a lot more people in pok even when the lag pile was in the gulid lobby maybe when the number of people playing dropped they gave pok or maybe all the zones less computer space?

I have been told it is a memory leak because it usually takes a while for it to happen a lot. Thats what I got told by the person who told me to set memory to maximum. I was also told it doesn't mater if you have a lot of memory on your computer because eq can't use it.

JChan post from a recent patch thread has some info that might be valuable:

Since, as you said, not everyone crashes so much I would suspect it's something more specific than most of your guesses. Probably not hardware related or from any recent change.

If it's mostly happening after you've been playing for a long time, then it's probably memory and there's probably not a good resolution other than just relogging periodically. I thought I read somewhere (maybe in the same thread I pulled Jenn's quote from, just too lazy to look) that if your memory mode is being reset after a crash, it means it's probably memory related. I could be wrong on that though.

If the logs reveal anything useful, you might be able to figure out a reliable method of reproduction. If not, or if you can't figure out how to reproduce it, I guess all I could suggest is that you give as much detail in the crash report as possible.

As I mentioned, I have been playing with Hero's Forge disabled. To me, the game seems to crash a bit less. However it still crashes, and I've been careful to save my dbg.txt files (4 so far).

In each case, the dbg file indicates a fragmentation issue, as each contains something like

followed by

What does this mean? Is there anything that I can do the prevent or reduce this fragmentation? Could it be related to having other programs running and tabbing out to, say, read a web page?

Again, I crash more often than most, so I'm interested in what the difference could be.

I crash once I have zoned more than 4-5 times, but not with any consistent number after that. Could be 6, could be 15.

I've tried altering my settings 42 different ways, but no matter what I expect to get the instant close after having done some zone hopping.

It's pretty amusing considering my PC is probably 15-20x better than I used back in 99 and yet I crash more now than I ever did back then.

Following a crash, the memory usage switches to minimum in an attempt to prevent further crashes occurring in the future - you may have noticed that as you zone into different areas the textures are solid and gray/white, and they then pop in. In options, go to display, select advance and on the bottom left you can change memory usage to balanced or most.

I and many others are experiencing crashes vastly more often - I'd never had a crash in a long time, than the most recent massive patches hit, the ones that caused huge lag and stability issues with the game/server, and I'm crashing several times per play session - it's no coincidence.

I guess I wasn't clear, I understand all about the Memory Mode, what it does, and why it changes, and how to set it back. I don't understand what FRAGMENTED means or how it happens or what I can do to prevent/reduce it.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's a real way to tell, other than a lot of trial and error.

Looking at my own dbg.txt file, it looks similar except my Available Virtual tends to be 600-650 on the low end, dropped to around 500 after I had been on for quite a while doing a lot of running around. I normally run 3 accounts and have several web pages open, but nothing else running usually. I also 8gb ram and typically around 3gb avail phys. I also run in maximized 1920x1080 window. I tend to run around a lot, and make frequent trips through PoK and GL. I'm lucky enough that I can't even remember the last time I had a client crash.

However, I don't typically play for long periods, so maybe that's the trouble. Another big thing could be that I'm on Test. So it could be something different in the background or even just because Test doesn't have a "lag pile".

If it's only happening after you've been playing for a long time, there might not be anything you can do. Play around with different graphics settings to try to reduce memory consumption. Keep other running programs to a minimum. Maybe hide AFK players/pets/mercs (not sure if that affects memory or not).

Just to add a little more information, having the FRAGMENTED show up in the log doesn't mean you've crashed. The last few times I zoned I see the following:

And I am still in the game (no crash).

I still experience crashes but they seem a lot less frequent now.
- enabling or disabling Hero's Forge didn't seem to make a difference in crashing
- the problem might be server-side, or to do with a specific server that the client connects to for some resources, that has either been partially fixed or improved
- the one client setting I left on that maybe helped is "display loading screen", the graphic that pops up while zoning - that is now set to ON.

Some of the weapon ornaments cause you to crash. If you see someone either zone into a zone or get rezzed using the Flowing Blood, Sepulchre, Frightstone ornaments weapon or shield ornaments it will cause you to crash. There is also one of the player designed SC ornaments that does the same thing. I have been repeatedly crashing on raids, come to find out it was an ornament one of our shamans has been using. I have tried to fix the problem on my end, but this is the third computer in a row I have had this problem with. This one I just installed one of those high end graphics cards a few months ago to see if that would fix it, nope. They really need to allow players to turn off weapon and shield graphics. That or remove all the buggy ornaments from the game. Tired of cussing at the You have crashed error box only to never ever receive a fix, its been what 5 years now?

I too have been crashing a great deal recently, but my crash frequently just boots me right out to desktop with no dialog box. Not sure what to do with that.

The other ornament that was causing us to crash this time was the Staff of the Inferno Ornament also available from SC. So Flowing Blood, Sepulchre, Fearstone(from LoN) ornaments and now this Staff of the Inferno Ornament all causes many people to crash to desktop. I had my first crash-free raid in at least six months after we determined this was the cause of it the other day. Its a travesty that this crapola gets shoved onto live without being tested, and it takes months and months of sorting people out to figure out how to fix this ourselves. Not to mention it makes you steer away from other players altogether since you don't want your game to crash and they might be sum idiot who forked out SC to buy a broken ornament.

would turning everybody into stick figures fix the crashing?

Unfortunately no it would not. Stick figures still shows the weapons and shields the toons are using. As long as they insist on putting broken game crashing ornaments into the game it will continue to suck. Only thing you can do to stop the crashing is avoid high population areas. I know; why play an online game if you cannot play around others?

I think you might have a different issue. On Test, it seems like half the server has frightstone ornaments. You'd think if there was an issue with them we'd all be crashing all the time.

Every server has them now, thanks to LoN closing many people rushed to go claim their crap off of their LoN accounts and started using the Junk ornaments. Lo and behold game crashes started to occur more frequently.