Game hangs when researching housing

from Elemental Forums

As the title says. If I research 'Civilization' and choose the 'Housing' technology the game hangs using 100% cpu on one core. If I restart the game, the game turns out to have been autosaved on the turn I was going to but without gaining any tech. This can be reproduced consistently, both by researching housing again, but also by researching other techs, and then researching 'Housing'. Only housing makes the game hang.

6,963 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Please open your debug.err file in notepad, and link the contents into a post here via pastebin. This will give us some technical information that can help troubleshoot your problem.

The file can be found in My Documents\My Games\Elemental

Be sure to copy the debug immediately after the error occurs; if you start the game again, the debug log will be erased and recreated for the new session.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

debug.err didn't contain anything suspicious. The debug messages it had, was the same it emited for every single turn, the one that hang was not special. I can of course reproduce the bug and make it happen again, but I would have posted debug.err if it was interesting

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Carewolf, reply 2
debug.err didn't contain anything suspicious. The debug messages it had, was the same it emited for every single turn, the one that hang was not special. I can of course reproduce the bug and make it happen again, but I would have posted debug.err if it was interesting
End of Carewolf's quote

Do you have many huts throughout your Kingdom?  I get a slight hang whenever I research Housing/Proper Living because the game is busy auto-upgrading all of my huts/hovels to houses/shanties.  The first time I researched Housing I thought that my game had crashed because I had spent many turns beforehand conquering a couple of the AI factions (which typically have a ridiculous amount of huts/hovels in their cities to begin with) and it took its sweet time upgrading them all.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I did have a lot of huts, but I also had a number of Empire shantyies. I thought it might just be processing, but I tried waiting up to 10 minutes, and it didn't help. I also tried waiting even longer, but then Windows locked itself and asked for login when I returned. Elemental naturally crashed from the context switch like it always does.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Happened to me as well.  I had a lot of huts but no shanties.  However when I reloaded a save game and researched houses again, it did not crash the second time.  I get inexplicable crashes every couple of hours of play so I save a lot - every second turn.  However I seem to crash the most often when I attempt to save.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

I had this happen as well.

 

Everything was going relatively fine until I researched houses, then my game froze. I brought up the task manager and then clicked back to the elemental screen and my game started working again. In another game that same play session (I don't get many random crashes) I researched housing again and the game slowed down for about 10 seconds while it updated my huts but it didn't freeze.

In the game that froze I had no shanties, only huts. In the second game I had both if that helps.

 

EDIT: (Just a question really, am I the only player with auto-save turned on? It seems that a lot of people complain about the crashes but then go on to say that they hadn't saved. Mine saves every 5 minutes, so even if I do get a crash I'm not totally SOL.)

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

I've never seen crashes on anything but context-switches (windows tabing). The housing problem happens repeatably though. Funny thing is that the game also auto-saves before the invension choice is made, but after the research point has been spend. So I can load the auto-save that hung, but without the research.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

EDIT: (Just a question really, am I the only player with auto-save turned on? It seems that a lot of people complain about the crashes but then go on to say that they hadn't saved. Mine saves every 5 minutes, so even if I do get a crash I'm not totally SOL.)
End of quote

I too have autosave turned on, and I quicksave frequently.  The problem isn't saving, however; rather, it is loading.  If the game doesn't crash to desktop when trying to reload, you have the chance to spawn more shards, to reduce the number of figures in a unit, and so on.  So when the game does crash, I am still frustrated, even though I save, because I know that my game will be altered in ways I do not want it to be.  Hopefully 1.07 changes this!

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Agreed, I have had some issues with units stacks just doing whatever they want after a reload which was upsetting because the units affected took me somewhere to the tune of 30 turns and a boatload of gold to build each. :(

 

I tend to get most of my bugs and crashes either when the fog of war is being adjusted (absolutely terrible performance and occasional crashes) or when getting the results screen at the end of a tactical battle (mostly just occasional crashes, no other issues there that I have encountered). That really isn't the point of this thread though as it doesn't relate to the housing research freeze so I'll get back on topic.

 

It really seems like it only freezes the initial time that housing is researched during a given game session.