Game Development Community

Computer Locks Up and Requires a Hard-Boot

by Joshua Horns · in Torque 3D Professional · 05/12/2009 (4:47 am) · 1 replies

This is more of a preliminary post as details are sparse at the moment. I have to look more into system resource use to make this a reasonable thread.

The situation is this:

I'll be working my 2048x2048 heightmap based terrained mission when all of a sudden the mouse will lock up (see below for more info on what "working" is). I can't kill the process in task manager, can't alt-tab or switch in any way to another process. However, because I often have Ventrilo open I have noticed I can still hear people talking and can even talk myself, so the keyboard is working in some sense.

I have not watched the task manager to see how much memory is being consumed but can say there is little processor activity.

OK, so what is "working on my terrain"? Well sometimes it amounts to just entering the mission and navigating a few meters before it locks. Most of the time though I'll be painting the terrain. At this point I have not added very many static items, so I'm pretty much dealing with basic terrain, that's being ... well... painted.

At first I thought it might be my video card overheating so I cranked the fan to 100% and it's at 50C. Then I thought it might be resizing the editor window to full resolution at 2500 x 1600 so I left it at the default. I can try updating my 4870x2 drivers but I believe as of a month ago I was on the current driver.

This has happened since day 1.

My SSD hard drive can hitch at times.. maybe that's causing some kind of problem. I know that's not much to go on, so I don't expect much from this thread =D

ATI 4870x2
Intel Core i7
6 Gigabytes of RAM
Windows Vista Ultimate x64

#1
05/12/2009 (5:04 am)
Ive noticed a huge slowdown when painting terrain while zoomed out, especially on larger heightmaps with higher resolution (1 meter per pixel) even konrads terrain painter resource seems to be effected too. To be honest i just put this down to the fact that its beta 1 and unoptimised as of yet, but then mine hasnt broken that badly just slowed down.