Vista 64, play 5mins, game crashes to black, sound looping, reboot. Repeat.

[LucyFaun]

Hello all, some friends of mine have convinced me to play DDO! And what I've seen has convinced me that I could really get into it.

However, I'm having the "game crashes to black screen and can hear sound looping in the background, and have to reboot machine" problem. Vista 64, 6GB RAM, Intel Core i7 processor, NVIDIA 285 graphics card, ASUS Xonar Essence STX sound card.

I've tried a few recommendations from searching this forum. In DDO, EAX is turned off, using software sound only, and I've turned off stencil shadows completely. I crash in DX9 or DX10 the same.

Still no fix. I can play for about 5 minutes, maximum, before the game crashes to a black screen, the sound loops in the background, and the HD activity light starts going crazy. I know it's not a problem with video card overheating, as as just checked and it's at 38C right now, and I've just rebooted from (yet another) crash.

Any suggestions? I've not even entered that cave in the starting zone - that's how bad this is. I've crashed, oh, maybe ten times before just getting a weapon and learning how to smash stuff. I've tried my best to fix this from the info I've found here, but... well, I still really want to play this game with my friends!

Any suggestions, anything at all? Anything I could try to diagnose this problem better?

[Gorby]

I would start here by checking the event viewer (Start Search -> 'Event Viewer') and look under the application log to see if windows is logging any specific error when it crashes. If it gives you a error code, plug it into google and you might find the reason for the crashes.

Best of Luck.

[Snowine]

This happens with other games or their all fine? Also is DDO fully downloaded or did you try that option where you can start playing after a shorter download while it downloads the high res art in the background? That gave me some trouble.

DirectX on the latest build? August 2009

[Kaldahr]

Could be sound related. I've had pretty much the same thing happen on another game - well, my screen froze and there was looping background sound.

In addition to above, you might check out all your sound drivers and see that they are up to date.

Perhaps disable sound altogether in game and see what happens?

Other people have reported success with changing their vorbis and OpenAl files too but that's a little more complicated.

[LucyFaun]

Fully downloaded, the event viewer didn't seem to have anything interested, but going by Kahdahr's suggestion about a possible sound problem, I checked the sound settings while I was in game - and noticed that the voice chat was enabled by default.

I turned that off, and so far (fingers crossed) things seem to be fine! I'll try maxing out all the graphics settings again, see if that changes anything.

[Raptor5]

I've been having the same issue. I've tweaked some of the settings and set it to run in "Windows XP sp2 Compatibility Mode" and now I can get maybe about an hour of gameplay before it crashes. It tends to be whenever I'm in town or when there are other players present, generally when I'm out in the wilderness or in a cave on my own it will run flawlessly, but in a crowded area, system freezes, screen goes black, music loops, I'll get the dreaded blue screen of death that I haven't seen since win98, and when the system reboots windows diagnoses it as my video driver stopped responding.

I'm going to try disabling the voice chat like LucyFaun did, but I'm not holding out too much hope. Does anyone know if the game runs any better on win 7?

I've played many other games without issue so I don't really believe that the video card is the problem. I have the most recent drivers for the card directly from the nvidea webpage and also including the optional updates from Windows.

Some system specs to help with diagnosis,
Windows Vista 64, service pack 2
PNY nvidea GeForce 9800GT XLR8
8gb ram
AMD Phenom IIx4 2.6GHz

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

[xDV8x]

Similar Issue. But my lock ups happen randomly. Some days I can play for hours with out incindent, others like today I can have a system lock up just mere seconds after logging in.
The lock ups have the sound in a loop, and the only thing I can do is the hold the power button til the computer shuts down and try to start everything again.
My system is not that old and I dont have this issue with the other games I play. After my first couple times of locking up here I tryed to get the same thing happen on the other games. Tryed with Fallout 3, ran it on max setting for 48 hours with no lockup or glitching that I know of. Did the same with Crysiss and Sacred 2.
I have tryed 8 diffrent video cards and 4 diffrent sound card combos and still have the same results.
~
Video cards tryed:
Asus 7800GT PCI-e
Sparkle 6600GT PCI-e
EVGA 8800GT PCI-e
Zotac 9600GT PCI-e

AMD Raideon 3200(Onboard)
Sapphire 3850 PCI-e
Sapphire 4750 PCI-e
Gigabite 4870 PCI-e
~
Sound cards
Turtle Beach 5.1
Realtech ALC888/1200(Onboard)
Soundblaster Audigy 2
Envy ENM232-8VIA

~System~
Vista Home Premium 64 bit
8 GB Samsung PC-6400 DDR
AMD Athlon 64x2 7750(2.7GHz)
Foxconn RS780 Motherboard
Current Video card: Zotac 9600GT 1 GB
Current Sound: Envy ENM232-8VIA

Not sure what I can do, I have payed for game content and the lock ups are ruining the game exp.

[Raptor5]

Well, nvidia released a new certified driver for the video card that I was using, and between that and upgrading to Win 7 I haven't had a blue-screen crash in a few days. I really do think that a lot of these problems are video driver related more than anything else because, as one of my friends pointed out, the driver I had been using was not windows certified...

Hope this helps.