I was enjoying playing the single player campaign until it started crashing to the desktop whenever I tried to load saved games.
95% of the time it would flicker blank black screen after clicking the ingame 1GB of RAM installed -tried letting Windows manage -then tried setting my own parameters for virtual memory. Still no good. I troubleshot endlessly stopping all non-essential services & tsr/systray programs. Tried command line parameters and even said some prayers -nada. The concensus seems to be to save numerous copies of a game hoping that one saved game will load. So now I have a plethora of .gam files that are ?corrupted. I uninstalled game, reinstalled and started playing again. I contacted Microsoft support and spent 1.5 hours on phone with an engineer. We troubleshot everything we could think of including making my WinXP Pro run with the least graphics options, no startups, etc. At the end the tech at MS provided me with a closed but unresolved ticket number and said to call back and request a replacement cd-rom. The tech said all my drivers were updated and fine except my USB & BIOS needed flashed and that that may make a difference. I'm considering putting together some frankenstein pyooter of old parts and loading Win95 on it just so I can see if I can duplicate this issue on a machine circa when AoE was initially released. I've typed up a memo on Ensemble's site general bug report form. Here is what one person at Ensemble said on their site: Ensemble programmer Matt Pritchard: My brother said that this has gone past the point of diminishing returns and that I should play other non-buggy games. The only other game in my library of vidiocy that crashes so terribly is Black&White. I don't know whether it's some variable I've overlooked or if it's just poor AoE coding. But I do know that I'm not the only person experiencing this problem. Any & all help/input appreciated. Thank-you guys for reading my blahblah. my main gametest system:
The odd 5% of the time it would lockup I would
So I searched forums and google for solutions.
I duplicated problem.
So I tried installing AoE Gold on another completely different pc with different hardware/drivers/etc.
Still crashed to desktop when trying to load saved games.
Curious.
The game does function yet the save game/load game function crashes more often than not.
Well, I don't go updating drivers willy nilly -and especially not the mainboard BIOS unless there are serious issues. Besides, I have other different boxes to test game on.
How long do you support a game after it ships?
Problem – no available developers
Problem – It costs $$$
One solution – metric based on sales
WinXP Pro SP1 - updated with most current hotfixes from SP2
DirectX 9.0b
Athlon XP 1.6GHz - not overclocked
1GB non-faulty RAM (tested using memtest)
Nvidia GeForce3 Ti200 128MB
SBLive
HDD - 38GB ; 30GB free