C209 AWS closes before getting to the login boxes

[Jarod "Brickwit" McBrickerton]

I have noticed several times since C209 (and possibly C208 as well) that the game will not load fully to the login/password prompt and instead just closes during the "Please wait, initializing engine..." portion. It seems to happen more often if I click on something other than the game (if it does not have "focus" in Windows) but if I watch it load for the duration it tends to be more successful. That might be coincidental though since after a few times of the game closing on its own I end up watching it load to see what's happening at that point.


Whenever it closes I can immediately click on my AWS shortcut and start loading it again, which tells me that the Client.exe process closes at the same time.

[AW "Dr.Butler" SSB Officer]

Can someone else confirm this? We can't replicate it here..

[Zen "ZenX" Star]

I have never had it.

[Dr. "Papaille" FFF]

i do confirm it, it happend to me more than twice already, << that the game will not load fully to the login/password prompt and instead just closes during the "Please wait, initializing engine..." portion >>. And yes, it's happend when i click on something(which are on the second computer screen) other than the game.
hope it help : i always play in window mode.(i ll try to catch the cache next time)

[dale "dalewj" ofj]

trying to replicate but can't, have 3 screens and think I tried every combo of event.

[Angel "Life" Godess]

It also happened in C208 but 1 reboot fixed it permanently
In C209 a reboot didn't work but i can get around it by minimizing the AWS window during the "Please wait, initializing engine..." portion.
After minimizing it worked a second and third time np with AWS window open so i tried a reboot an
was stuck minimizing the AWS window to get pass the  "Please wait, initializing engine..." portion.

hope this helps

[Jarod "Brickwit" McBrickerton]

I haven't rebooted my PC since playing yesterday and when I clicked my AWS icon about two minutes ago it found an update that it downloaded and installed. The game restarted itself like it was supposed to, but soon after seeing "Please wait, initializing engine..." the game closed. I clicked the icon again and this time it got further, but it still closed with that message showing. I had the Win7 Snipping Tool open and Google Chrome, plus some background programs, so I closed the Snipping Tool and tried again... same exact result.

I'm going to close Chrome and try again, then I'll try closing some of my background (task tray) apps and try again after closing each to see if there's any difference. If it still keeps closing I'll reboot and try again. When I finally get it to load completely I'll post here again and hopefully I'll have some info to help narrow the problem down.

[Jarod "Brickwit" McBrickerton]

Well I've found the culprit, at least for my PC. Closing all programs that have an icon on the task bar and closing or disabling all programs in the task tray did not make any consistent difference, except for one program: BOINC. For those not familiar with it, the program is a manager for running those world-wide distributed computing tasks like SETI@Home and Einstein@Home and it will use your CPU and GPU (if you have a CUDA-capable NVIDIA card) to crunch numbers on a bunch of different tasks. On my PC, there are five different computational tasks running right now and sometimes a few more and when it is enabled it pegs my CPU utilization at 100%.

I've put BOINC in Snooze mode before just to see if it helps with freeze-ups and lag in-game, but because it didn't seem to make too much difference I usually just keep it running. But as of C208 it causes the game to crash during the "Please wait, initializing engine..." portion more often than not. I tested it a bunch of times and the game did not crash on me a single time when BOINC was on Snooze (not just Snooze GPU, but Snooze for the whole thing - Snooze GPU doesn't make much difference), but no matter how many programs, services, and background processes (including stuff that only shows up in Task Manager) the game consistently crashes at the end of the third progress bar of the "Please wait" portion of the game loading up, and sometimes even during the first loading bar. I started by closing things down one at a time with BOINC running (Snooze turned off) and the game would finish loading about 1/3rd of the time, even when BOINC was the only non-essential program running. The game only finished loading to the login prompt six times out of 22 during this process. When I put BOINC on Snooze with nothing else running the game loaded five out of five times.

To double-check I rebooted my PC, let everything load up like normal and let BOINC start the number-crunching tasks. The game crashed five out of five times, so I Snoozed BOINC again and it loaded to the login prompt five out of five times (zero crashes). To Myth Buster it, I loaded every program pinned to my task bar (all 11 of them including CamStudio, which I started recording with), plus I had the main BOINC window showing that all tasks were Suspended, plus Task Manager was running in the background and AWS fully loaded another five out of five times. My CPU utilization got pretty high with CamStudio recording everything and it certainly took longer for AWS to load all the way to the login prompt, but it never crashed.

Long story short: If you have anything running on your PC that uses a lot of CPU you should pause, snooze, disable, or close it and AWS will run great.

[AW "Dr.Butler" SSB Officer]

Well I've found the culprit, at least for my PC. Closing all programs that have an icon on the task bar and closing or disabling all programs in the task tray did not make any consistent difference, except for one program: BOINC. For those not familiar with it, the program is a manager for running those world-wide distributed computing tasks like SETI@Home and Einstein@Home and it will use your CPU and GPU (if you have a CUDA-capable NVIDIA card) to crunch numbers on a bunch of different tasks. On my PC, there are five different computational tasks running right now and sometimes a few more and when it is enabled it pegs my CPU utilization at 100%.

I've put BOINC in Snooze mode before just to see if it helps with freeze-ups and lag in-game, but because it didn't seem to make too much difference I usually just keep it running. But as of C208 it causes the game to crash during the "Please wait, initializing engine..." portion more often than not. I tested it a bunch of times and the game did not crash on me a single time when BOINC was on Snooze (not just Snooze GPU, but Snooze for the whole thing - Snooze GPU doesn't make much difference), but no matter how many programs, services, and background processes (including stuff that only shows up in Task Manager) the game consistently crashes at the end of the third progress bar of the "Please wait" portion of the game loading up, and sometimes even during the first loading bar. I started by closing things down one at a time with BOINC running (Snooze turned off) and the game would finish loading about 1/3rd of the time, even when BOINC was the only non-essential program running. The game only finished loading to the login prompt six times out of 22 during this process. When I put BOINC on Snooze with nothing else running the game loaded five out of five times.

To double-check I rebooted my PC, let everything load up like normal and let BOINC start the number-crunching tasks. The game crashed five out of five times, so I Snoozed BOINC again and it loaded to the login prompt five out of five times (zero crashes). To Myth Buster it, I loaded every program pinned to my task bar (all 11 of them including CamStudio, which I started recording with), plus I had the main BOINC window showing that all tasks were Suspended, plus Task Manager was running in the background and AWS fully loaded another five out of five times. My CPU utilization got pretty high with CamStudio recording everything and it certainly took longer for AWS to load all the way to the login prompt, but it never crashed.

Long story short: If you have anything running on your PC that uses a lot of CPU you should pause, snooze, disable, or close it and AWS will run great.

Huge thanks for this detailed report and your experiments!
Haven't started BOINC for something like 7 or 8 years, so I think its a time to get it on one of our test computers in order to check why AWS doesn't load properly (and if it even possible to fix that).

[Joe "Atsik" master]

i have same problem, if i click on some other window to front screen when loading to login screen then client crashes. Only wont crash when i keep client front screen all the time to login screen

[Leopold "Shaqan" Mutter]

Out of curiosity, how many of you with the AWS pre-login crash issue, happen to run 64bit Windows as well? I do have this problem time to time.. Win7 x64 here

[Joe "Atsik" master]

im on win 7 pro 32 bit

[Jarod "Brickwit" McBrickerton]

Win7 Ultimate x64 for me. That could very well be another part of the problem.

[Zen "ZenX" Star]

I think there was a request to put PC specs in signature of posts , for this very reason, to see if problems had some commonality.
There is a post somewhere from when the forum started detailing how to do this.

Zen

[Event "Janе" Horizon]

I think there was a request to put PC specs in signature of posts , for this very reason, to see if problems had some commonality.
There is a post somewhere from when the forum started detailing how to do this.

Zen

That topic is in the closed section.

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