Zoning Crashes

[Argante]

Hi all,

Turbine have sort of fixed my crashing issue while zoning. It still happens but a lot less frequently. I’ll post their fix below in case anyone else has similar issues:

Greetings ,

Thank you for contacting Turbine Technical Support. Please perform the steps outlined below:

Click on the Windows “Start” button.
Then click on My Documents or Documents.
Double-click the Dungeons and Dragons Online folder.
Within there locate and open the userpreferences.ini file.

Within that file under the sectioned titled [Display] make the following changes:

Change AllowFakeFullScreen=True to False
Change SyncToRefresh=False to True
Verify that the number following Resolution= matches your current Windows desktop resolution.
Change Antialiasing= to Disabled if set to 2x/4x etc. (e.g. Antialiasing=Disabled )
Change AllowDesktopCompositing=False to True

Under the section titled [Render] change the GraphicsCore option to D3D9 (i.e. GraphicsCore=D3D9 ).

Under the section titled [Troubleshooting] change the MaximumFrameRate option to 57 (i.e. MaximumFrameRate=57 ).

Exit the file and choose yes when prompted to save changes prior to launching the game to test these settings.

Some additional settings changes can be made from the in game Options menu:

Under ADV Graphics disable the Player Mesh Combining setting.
Lower the Player Crowd Quality Control slider to 0.
Under Audio if currently using a hardware mode, change this to one of the software settings and ensure that Use EAX is disabled.
Under the Troubleshoot section lower the Engine Speed setting to Medium.

Thank you,
The Turbine Technical Support Team

 

[Myror]

SyncToRefresh=True

MaxFrameRate=57

Is a very strange combination.

US monitors usually refresh at 50 frames per second, and UK ones at 60 (though mine even more bizarrely lets me pick 59 or 60).

I’d be curious to know what frame rate you actually get with both those set.

I don’t crash while zoning, so this is pure curiousity.

[Flavia]

A lot of monitors ( especially the flat panels ) support 100 or 120 Hz of refresh rate… some High End ones go up to 200Hz. ( it was already common to have 100Hz Tubes in High End monitors )

Ideally the Frame Rate and the Refresh Rate should be the same.

But as things are, the refresh rate for the screen is fixed.

Once upon a time, on TV it was fixed by the electrical network 50Hz in Europe and 60Hz in US, and from there everything in a TV was calculated.  
Nowadays with Flat panels that don’t have an electron beam roaming in a tube to light a heavy metal deposit but have a matrix of leds ( or lcd lights, or plasma lights, or oleds, or … ) the refresh rate doesn’t means much as a given pixel gets refreshed when it needs to change color, and the rest of the time it just keeps the last color it was asked to give.
The refresh rate in Windows is still there to give a synchronization signal between the graphic card and the Screen when you have a Flat Panel so that hte flat panel knows where to look at the start of a frame.

 It is also the synch signal for a tube screen, but it’s a real synchronization…. That’s why when you put the wrong frequency on a tube screen the image is distorted, or doesn’t show.

Thus comes the Frame Rate. The frame rate is the rate at which the graphic card calculate a frame ( a given “snapshot” of the screen to display ). The Frame rate varies. 

By pressing Ctrl-F you can see it in DDO.
Mine varies between 2 [middle of the melee with lots of mass spells going and Sally going all spammy spam] and 80 [ sitting at a quest entrance, piking ]. It is usually between 20 and 50, which all things considered is good for a Pentium D930 with a GTS 250 on 3840*1080.

The human eye ‘refresh’ at about 25 Hz ( thus the 50Hz  used to display two interleaved frames in TV to light every spot on the screen ), so any frame rate higher than 25Fps will not be noticeable by most people, but people will argue that they have to have a 180Fps.
( which is useless, especially if you’re still on a tube monitor, as it will at best display 100 or 120 Frames if you have a high end monitor, and your eyes will only see about 25 of them. )

The only interest of a high frame rate at rest is that when there’s a lot going on you are still above the 25 Frames of the human eye refresh rate so you don’t see a slideshow.  ( And it’s where all the geek magazines have it so wrong instead of giving frame rates at rest they should give it under heavy load, as it’s where it matters… at rest a card can give a frame rate of 400 frames, if the card is badly designed and can’t cope with the load it will give a frame rate of 2 )

I’ve made the changes to my file and I’ll see if I crash less.

[Argante]

My frame rate seems to be between 30 and 38 no matter what I do. Standing still in an area with no other players and nothing happening won’t take the fps above 38 but fighting multiple mobs with lots of spell effects firing doesn’t take it below 30. It’s acceptable.

[CaT]

Nice info Argante and a lot of insight in Flavia’s post (must be your job, either way I am impressed with your knowledge!).

I tried your fixes Argante, but that didn’t helped me much (I have same problems as Flavia like slow loading times with red connection and disconnect or keep falling in the ship belly while loading). My PC is quite capable being an INTEL i5, 3GB RAM (seen by W7 32bit, but I have 4 actually) with a GTX260 video card (896MB VRAM) and connection I can DL with 1MB/s to 1,5MB/s so really I am not playing on some old rig with modem connection.

I did noticed something though: I read on the forums that UMD is causing huge lag spikes and I noticed it myself while switching some gear to increase it and scrolling during fights. Since I am a huge fan of UMD almost all my characters come with it in one form or another. I noticed that some of my characters always fail to load first time while others have no problems. Seems the problem is UMD items related since my wizard loads fast and fine now that he is low level and the UMD items are still in the TR cache.

TL;DR version: unequip when you log out all the UMD boosting items (+CHA, +CHA skills, luck or +UMD), if my theory is correct you should load fast and fine next time. You also need to do this all the time when you move to another new, unloaded yet area. That helped me with the load times and lost connection on first loads, but I am still laggy during fights with 20 to 50 FPS. Maybe I should always keep UMD boosting items away except in between the fights and that would solve the lag.

[Ryan]

I dont have the probs that Argante has – mine are random crashes in FR only, but knowing what GC Argante uses Im suprised his Fps is so low (unless his CPU is a bottle neck)

As for slow loading, falling to ship belly etc on initial log in I was advised to turn down my draw distance when logging for the first time.

 

Does it work?  Perhaps, but not a lot (my connection is about 6meg) I dont use UMD items either

[CaT]

Draw distance? Thank for the tip Ryan, need to check my settings for that 😉

[Argante]

This is fixed now (I think – I visited the Desert today and didn’t crash – this was after playing for 6 hours and zoning to various locations).

Turbine suggested setting everything to the lowest levels so I ignored that suggestion – I don’t spend hundreds of pounds on graphics cards so I can play games that look like crap.

Instead, I turned DX11 back on and turned everything up to max settings.

I then tried a fix that someone suggested on the DDO forums.

Important: This will only work on Vista and Win 7 32-bit systems (though you shouldn’t even have the issue on 64-bit systems)

Also Important: This fix will only work for the zoning issue that gives the error “Not enough virtual memory or paging file quota is available to complete the specified operation” in your dndclient.txt log. If you try this fix and you still get crashes, then it’s not this specific issue that’s causing them, you need to look elsewhere.

Here’s what I did:

1. Open a command prompt with Admin privileges

2. Type the following: bcdedit /set increaseuserva 2560

3. Restart the computer

This increases the amount of memory available to programs and limits the amount of memory available to the kernel. The fix shouldn’t work – DDO should know that there is only 2GB of memory available so shouldn’t attempt to use more. The fact that this fix works means that DDO is broken.

Note: If your system uses onboard graphics and/or shares memory with your graphics card then using this fix may result in Out Of Memory errors. If this happens I suggest making the userva value lower in increments of 64 until your system becomes stable.

Also Note: This may cause issues with other applications – it’s hard to tell when making global changes of this nature what will actually happen. This “fix” should be considered a workaround, the only real fix for this issue is for Turbine to sort out their code.

I hope this helps somebody – this issue has had me tearing my hair out for two months, I’m glad it’s finally resolved.

[Myror]

Flavia said: “The refresh rate in Windows is still there to give a synchronization signal between the graphic card and the Screen when you have a Flat Panel so that hte flat panel knows where to look at the start of a frame.”

This is not entirely accurate. The graphics card has to trasmit the picture signal to the monitor once once per refresh cycle over that cable joining the two. The monitor and graphics card have to agree how fast it does that, and that is basically what the refresh rate is. You cannot set your graphics card to refresh at 100 Herz when the monitor can only do 60. That sort of error is why you get the “confirm changes” question when you change your settings, that reverts if you don’t answer (it assumes you messed up and cannot see the question)

Like you said it is independent of the frame rate. However when the framerate and refresh are different, the picture can change part way through transmission, and this “tear” will be shown on the monitor (if your eyes are fast enough to notice, which they usually are not).

 

 

 

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