162 replies to this topic

[Rolodex]

Mike.nl, on Sep 30 2007, 07:32 PM, said:

Very strange that it would do this. It's possible however that the error lies not in the game code, but in the Securom code.

Securom probably does quite some tricky things, and FoC might use a slightly newer version that does something slightly wrong on Vista under these mentioned circumstances.

I know I'm entering a grey area here, but try running the game from a no-cd 'patch' (I mean, you already have the authentic game), which has Securom stripped or disabled. Make sure to get the patch for the correct FoC version, and make sure to back up your original files from the patch.

I'll check tonight when i get home...

[Charette]

Checked yesterday , no Chance , still Exception when FoC starts up

[Borbarad]

I get this FoC crash-bug with Windows Vista Ultimate 64 Bit (German) and 4GB RAM as well. I was so much looking forward to play this game! I can't believe that this Gold Version - which is part of the "Games for Windows"-Program - has an error like this    Is there any official word about this issue? I use a clean installation of EaW & FoC.

Borbarad

[TolaGarf]

Borbarad, on Oct 2 2007, 12:36 PM, said:

I get this FoC crash-bug with Windows Vista Ultimate 64 Bit (German) and 4GB RAM as well. I was so much looking forward to play this game! I can't believe that this Gold Version - which is part of the "Games for Windows"-Program - has an error like this    Is there any official word about this issue? I use a clean installation of EaW & FoC.

Borbarad

LOL, figures.. So Petroglyph, you going to respond to this soon and make a fix for us?

[Shrike Valeo]

karlfredo, on Sep 8 2007, 12:27 PM, said:

Removed 2GB RAM: works.

No idea about anything in this, but for now, i guess if youre super eager to play it, get a program to truncate your RAM a gig or 2.
It's something that would be good to fix, what with so many opting for 4GB of RAM with vista, DirectX 10 and so many high req. games nowadays, but i expect currently there are various things of importance already, and at least this appears to have a temporary solution.
Truncate your RAM, sit tight, and be happy you have a beta key

[Borbarad]

Shrike Valeo, on Oct 4 2007, 04:04 PM, said:

get a program to truncate your RAM a gig or 2.

Sorry, but that's not an option - I have to work with this PC and I need 4GB of RAM.

It's Petroglyphs obligation to fix this, otherwise they shouldn't promote this game to be Windows Vista compatible and remove this "Games for Windows" logo from the 'Gold Pack'.
None of Vistas compatibility options or running the game with admin rights seems to help. Valves source engine knowns an -32bit command line switch to force the game into 32 bit mode if you have trouble running it with Vista x64. I was hoping here for some input and help by the support and/or developers to find a workaround or a least a statement that they will fix this in a future patch!

Regards,
Borbarad

Edited by Borbarad, 04 October 2007 - 12:51 PM.

[Charette]

I must Agree with Borbarad

I didnīt buy 4 GB Ram , only to Rip the half of it out of my System to play FoC , where all other Games and Programms works fine.

In my P.o.V.  its a Programm Issure from FoC and with this its on Petroglyphe to clean it or made a small 4GB Vista /64bit System patch

[BOTA:99]

Microsoft has a temp workaround for the 4 gig not recognized error. People w/ 4 gigs were getting this a lot in Supcom as well. Try searching the GPG forums and you should find the direct microsoft hotfix for this.

Edited by BOTA:99, 09 October 2007 - 11:47 PM.

[Charette]

Thnx Bota i will took there , but itīs still the Question why still NO official Answer of Petro comming around ?

[Raziel Kanos]

and why should Petro act if it's a Microsoft Problem?

for all who have the 4 GB Ram Issues try out these hotfixes:

Download Microsoft Vista Patch KB940105:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105

Download Microsoft Vista Patch KB938194, KB938979 :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938194
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938979

Download Microsoft Vista Patch KB936710 :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936710

[Charette]

Raziel Kanos said:

and why should Petro act if it's a Microsoft Problem?

Well , all i could say :
No other Program of my very large Game Collection shows any sign of Error,
only FoC , even EaW works fine. I testet so fare more than 30 Games with Vista 64 and 4GB and FoC is still my only Trouble-Child.

So itīs look for ME , thatīs not a MS Problem more a FoC Problem.

[TolaGarf]

Raziel Kanos, on Oct 14 2007, 04:06 PM, said:

and why should Petro act if it's a Microsoft Problem?

for all who have the 4 GB Ram Issues try out these hotfixes:

Download Microsoft Vista Patch KB940105:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105

Download Microsoft Vista Patch KB938194, KB938979 :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938194
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938979

Download Microsoft Vista Patch KB936710 :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936710

I have all of those updates installed, except the SLI one (since I don't use SLI, it's not relevant). I also have all of the other available updates installed from Microsoft including the latest DirectX release. Basicly, it solves nothing.

Edited by TolaGarf, 16 October 2007 - 08:13 AM.

[Borbarad]

TolaGarf, on Oct 16 2007, 03:12 PM, said:

I have all of those updates installed, except the SLI one (since I don't use SLI, it's not relevant). I also have all of the other available updates installed from Microsoft including the latest DirectX release. Basicly, it solves nothing.

It's the same with my system - I have all of these updates installed...

All of my games are running fine (even EaW like Charette posted too). Older ones like Age of Mythology and brand new games like MoH Airborne are working, some only with admin-rights but thats no problem of course.

It's the job of Petroglyph to fix this issue or to work this problem out with MS. I'm slowly loosing my faith as they don't communicate with us...

Edited by Borbarad, 16 October 2007 - 12:38 PM.

[benitojuarez]

I created an account just to ask that a fix for this be made as I have the same issue and its only with this game.  The only other game I have that I haven't been able to run is kotor 2, go figure its another lucasarts game.

And yes, I have the gold pack which specifically says compatible with windows vista.  Lucasarts tried to tell me that vista wasnt supported.  Empire at war works but I get the same exception error with Forces of corruption and I have 4gb of ram and vista 64bit.

Help us Petroglyph, you're our only hope.

Edited by benitojuarez, 18 October 2007 - 07:51 AM.

[benitojuarez]

well i tried what karlfredo mentioned, reducing the amount of ram vista sees


and guess what? the game works.  i think this is completely bogus because this obviously isnt made with 64bit in mind, even though technical docs on the gold pack disc state otherwise.  3325mb is around the maximum amount of ram 32bit xp and vista can address.  You go over that on a 64bit os and the game crashes. Coincidence? I think not.  I'm very disappointed that there has been no official response.  I'm highly considering avoiding petroglyph and lucasarts games in the future which makes me sad because for the most part both produce great games.  Not to mention I am a star wars junkie.

[benitojuarez]

Also now that i have it working, I cant drag select a box around units and i cant move the map by right click dragging in combat or galaxy view.

[TaylorMichaelL]

Ignore any responses you read about 64-bit Vista not supposed to have that problem.  Such responses are misinformed or at least not completely accurate.  FoC is a 32-bit app AFAIK.  Under a 64-bit OS ALL 32-bit apps see the same thing they see under a 32-bit OS, without exception.  Running a 32-bit app under a 64-bit OS does not in any way suddenly give the app access to more memory.   It doesn't, with one caveat.  Under 32-bits 4GB maps out to be about 3.2GB of available memory.  This is because of how the OS lays out memory to handle hardware, video (Vista) and compatibility mappings.  It doesn't do this under 64-bits AFAIK.  Therefore with a 64-bit OS, a 32-bit app would see 4GB of memory whereas under a 32-bit OS it sees only 3.2GB.  

The truth of the matter is that under a 64-bit OS the OS can access and use more than 4GB of memory as can 64-bit apps (which FoC is not).  Having a 64-bit OS does impact things like where the process might reside in memory and how well the OS swaps things around but the 32-bit app still sees itself running under a 32-bit OS with a max of 4GB of memory (the WOW32 handles this) in the exact same address range (0-0x7FFFFFFFF under Vista I believe).  Therefore 64-bit Vista is not immune when dealing with a 32-bit app that doesn't like 4GB of memory.

There are easily other factors at play here.  Perhaps the WOW32 layer is causing the app problems.  Perhaps the fact that the video memory buffer might be in post-4GB memory land is causing problems.  The list can go on.  The mere fact that you have 4GB of memory and running a 64-bit OS does not make you immune to 32-bit apps with memory restrictions.  Since people do have it successfully running under XP 64-bit and Vista 64-bit I think we can eliminate the 64-bit issue altogether and go back to a problem with post-2GB memory.  The question is why?

Unless an app is compiled with large address awareness it is limited to 2GB anyway.  Any memory above that is not seen by the application as available.  It is part of the system memory that the process sees.  Therefore having anything above 2GB shouldn't impact the maximal amount of memory available to a process.  Generally, then, this is a symptom of bad pointer arithmetic.  Pointers, by definition, are unsigned.  If they are treated as signed then bad things start happening when you cross the 2GB threshold.  Whether this is the actual problem or not I can't say for sure.  Given that the AV happens almost immediately means that it isn't so much referencing bad memory as it is probably related to the memory checking that code is using.  

A little debugging revealed that it is quite possibly a stack overflow or stack corruption problem.  The actual AV happens when the code calls into the OS to allocate some memory.  It is possible that a calculation error occurred in the code and it requested more than could be given.  Perhaps they retrieved the total available memory (4GB) and then requested that much.  In that case it'll fail as they can only have 2GB.  Unfortunately debugging this app is difficult at best due to copy protection and because we have no symbol files to work with the call stack might be completely wrong.  Only Petroglyph can truly debug this issue.

As for me I run Vista 32-bit with 4GB of memory.  If I reboot with 2GB limited memory then I can run the app.  I don't find this a good option.  Unfortunately MS does not expose any options (even in ACT or through jobs) to limit the total memory seen by an application.  If they did this would be an easy problem to solve temporarily.

[Kelathin]

One thing worth mentioning:

Quote

Tech Support
Having problems with a Petroglyph game or mod? Post here for support from others in the community.

Expecting a petroglyph employee to answer here is not the wisest of decisions.

[Borbarad]

Kelathin, on Oct 25 2007, 07:18 PM, said:

One thing worth mentioning:
Expecting a petroglyph employee to answer here is not the wisest of decisions.

So when not here, where should I try to inform Petroglyph about these issues? They just can't sell this game (in the gold edition) under the label "Games for Windows" and write at the back cover "Windows 2000/XP/Windows Vista" as supported OS. This game needs a patch or hotfix to correct this problem.

[Martinus]

Well just wanted to confirm the Vista 64bits and 4GB Ram wont let FoC load.

Kinda sad. Wanted to play the game again. Would be gratefull if Petroglyph would do something for us.

Mart.