SIMILAR PROBLEM HERE....

Am at my frnds place now...just installed LFS for him....his sytem is an AMD Athlon 2.6 with 256 MB Ram and a VIA Km 400 display adapter....the game runs just fine if he drives on the track...the problem is that it freezes if he runs off the track....say on the grass or sand.Any ideas???

That Km 400 means onboard graphics, doesnt it? Maybe that IGP doesnt like some kind of particle effects generated when you are sliding on the grass/sand.. just an idea... Try to get a newer driver for it and make sure you have VIA 4in1 drivers(or how is this stuff named now). I had one VIA-powered mobo and without that drivers it behave just..... inpredictable.....

Oh yeah sorry...that problem was sorted...we got new updates for the drivers online.

I still get freezes every now and then, but its very random. sometimes i can play for hours and sometimes LFS freezes after a few minutes. I played around with minimum sleep and i think i am getting less freezes with 10 ms (instead of 5 being used before).

I also tried using old Catalyst drivers (5.11) but this makes no difference. Today i tried switching off Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering, LFS ran okay almost all the day, but in the evening i had one freeze again.

I heard most people having these freezes have an nforce chipset on their motherboard, maybe this is a hint ? I am using a nforce 2 chipset (Asus A7N8X).

I am going to try another Gfx-card at the weekend, maybe it helps...

It is a texture-handling problem. Use small (512x512) skins instead of 1024.

But again: It is a new problem since Patch R. Older versions have no problem with 1024x1024 skins.

The freezing happens because the CPU-usage goes up to 100% and it chokes. It is actually not a freezing, just a 5-10 seconds hanging.

I get this too. Disabling vsync and updating my GFX drivers has helped, but not fully solved it.

Glad I found this thread; I've been bitching in "LFS Locks" a few pages into forum. My copy is doing the same exact thing and coincidently I've tried all the solutions that have worked for others. Running an nvidia ti4200, amd 1800+. It's nothing stupid like defrag/trojans/crappy OS. It's a new machine w/ a formatted drive. I even went as far as putting lfs ver U on my other puter and it locks as well; and that machine used to run demo/s1 for over a year w/ no problems. So we can all agree perhaps it's version R/S on, problem is what is it and why. I'll try the 512x512 skins but to be honest I'll be pissed if that fixes it. Shouldn't have to cut back gfx on a seemingly simple game; especially since I built a new machine just for lfs. Got tired of reclamping wheel so just made a permanent lfs 'pod' in the corner of my office : )

Pimp

Quote from crxPimp :

. Running an nvidia ti4200, amd 1800+. It's nothing stupid like defrag/trojans/crappy OS. It's a new machine w/ a formatted drive.

Shouldn't have to cut back gfx on a seemingly simple game; especially since I built a new machine just for lfs. Got tired of reclamping wheel so just made a permanent lfs 'pod' in the corner of my office : )

Pimp

An AMD 1800 is a new computer? My one here is about 5 yrs old now and runs patch Q with 1024 skins fine and it only has a GEForce 2 MX video (32 Mb) and 256 mb system memory, XP Pro! Mind you I don't try to overdrive the graphics on it, sensible settings and it works fine

Its used as a wordprocessor and a spare system for friends to LAN lfs to my 64 Bit Athlon 3200 which also can play LFS without fault with 1024 skins, mind you with a 6600GT 256Mb Video card it's to be expected.

However I really think its more likely a background task cutting in and using all the processor time rather than a graphics thing, could it be a motherboard temperature watcher thing, My 1800 came with one that autostarted and caused a few bugs, Look at all the running process' maybe there's just something there you may have missed
Hope this helps
ShannonN

It's a new computer for lfs, meaning I just built it and all it does is lfs. No unecessary services/procs are running for performance sake alone.

However...

Earlier tonight I turned off 'enable write combining' within nvidia's properties panel and the game ran perfectly. About 5 hours (3 racing, 2 spectating) 1600x1200 32bit @70ish fps 120degF no problem. Dunno how this would affect ATI users with this issue but so far so good over here. We'll see what happens.

Thanks everyone
Pimp

I think the main problem is how are now developed NVIDIA and ATI drivers.

They are all optimized for DirectX9 so the optimizations for DX8 are threw away to give better peformance in DX9 titles.I even didnt mention coming DX10 optimization coming along 2006/2007.

I highly doubt that NVIDIA or ATI will make something because of the issues.LFS even being a great product it is sharing really minimal part of the market so its not important for these companies to focus on LFS and the other issue is what I already mentioned.The DX8 optimizations in drivers are threw away so the support for DX8 is still there but not the performance and issue with DX8 products are included anymore so this can cause LFS problems as well.I think it might get even worse.

I think there is place for Scawen to think soon about migration to DX9 and even best would be to include DX10 support later.

This was a bit offtopic so back to the problems.If I want to be reallz sure that LFS is not the problem I would always try to 1st replace the drivers either with new one or the previous one(but never overinstall them.They must be uninstalled and then later installed the "new" one).
Second thing if this doesnt resolve your problems.Make the clean installation of the OS(best its running OS on seperate partion - hope nobody do nowdays different way).
And last option to not blame always LFS to try if there is such a possibility different graphic card from someone.I already mentioned it many times...your GPU core might showing not overheating but what about your graphic memory!!

And last important thing.LFS is very sensitive to anything overclocked so even your machine might run fine with everything it can crash or freeze with LFS.

lfs looks horrible to me without AA and af...

Quote from Gabkicks :

lfs looks horrible to me without AA and af...

Like every other game.LFS just use usualy less polygon for curves so the jadggies effect is more visible.

Every game inevitably has it's issues w/ drivers/configs. It was just killing me that lfs would lock so randomly. So much easier to fix a game that locks during load or main menu. I ran lfs in sp mode this morning before I ran out for errands. Set the bots to race around for a few hours. This definetly would've locked my machine(s) in the past. Low and behold all is still well.
tweakguides.com explains write combining as

Enable Write Combining: Write Combining is a technique which merges multiple operations into a single read or write, increasing graphics performance. However just like Fast Writes (See BIOS section above), having it enabled may cause problems and exacerbate instabilities on various system configurations. For most people, I recommend ticking 'Enable Write Combining' as it increases performance and should not cause any problems. However if you continually experience crashes, particularly the 'infinite loop' error, you can try unticking this setting to see if things improve.


Dunno why it cooperated w/ previous lfs versions but for now seems to have done the trick.

mmm happy day : ) ...now I just gotta fix my racing
Pimp

Hello fokes,

To throw some spices into the fire, it's not just ATI's.
I'm running an Nvidia 6800GS 256MB (AGP) and I get the same freezes randomly.

My video card is running at about 70C temprature when I am gaming, where 120C is the threshold.
I'd say this is quite normal, so it's not a heating problem.

Since the Nvidia card is a very stable card, my computer does not crash after the game freezes. I believe it's doing some memory reboot and I continue playing.
How ever, on multiplayer, during those 10 seconds that the game freezes, I experience a time out and get disconnected from the server.

As you can figure out this is really annoying when you're 1st on a race!

Once the game continue's, I sometimes experience graphical bugs, such as weird lines going trough my screen, or my car looking crippled.

How ever most of the time, there is nothing weird to be seen or experienced.

I wish someone would come with a solution to this

RedFOX

Hey I have been getting these freezes too. This is what I know. When I am online it happens lots of times when I hit a kerb or another car. That made me think it had something to do with sound. My PC will freeze and the sound will loop for about 20 seconds. The weird part is then LFS comes back and says lost connection to host and everything is OK again.

But here is the weird part, when i am OFFLINE racing by myself, I get the same lockup, EXCEPT i am never returned to LFS. Instead, i get a windows blue screen and it is complaining about nv4disp.sys

Now that nv4 problem bluescreen I have gotten before when I play Oblivion. That is the weird part, because its almost the exact same lockup, except that when I'm online in LFS, i dont get a bluescreen, my PC comes back to life when LFS quits the race.

So here are my theories. Maybe when a sound file gets played, it is conflicting with the video. So maybe disabling write-combining eliminates that, and turning down AA or AF makes it less likely? Also, maybe the devs could answer this, but what happens when i get that Connection to host lost message? I ask because that is the only thing saving me from a blue screen, maybe quitting the race kills some action LFS is trying to do that escapes out of the problem before windows gives up?

Here are my specs:
Athlon X2 3800 (dual core)
asus A8N-E (geforce 4 ultra chipset)
EVGA Geforce 7800 (AA and AF turned on in windows)
Creative X-Fi Xtrememusic
2 gig dual channel ram


I think everyone who has this problem should also post their sound card

Have you turned off the onboard soundcard in the BIOS? Quite often nV nf4 chipsets dont like playing when the onboard is on, and theres an external one as well.

I've also had similar issues with boards when I've not manually turned off the onboard VGA; all nf4 chipsets.

Expierencing the same problems ...

• KV7 2200+
  
• Hercules 9500Pro 128 Mb
  
• 512 mb memory

Hope the devs find something to solve the problem soon !

Hi. I'm getting similar problems, but different ones as well... It makes me wonder that the problem might be with the sites you are getting patches from instead of all the complicated stuff about cards, drivers, cpu temps or whatever. see everyone's rigs seem to be very different, yet have similar problems. I d/loaded LFS on this BRAND NEW COMPUTER... the U. patch from scratch. THe first time I did I got a real crappy start up, freezes and crashes.
LOL I did finally get to try that beemer
I dumped it and re downloaded all over again. this 2nd file i got ran smooth... real smooth, cept for one small detail. THERE WAS NO UNLOCK OPTION ANYWHERE!!!!!. so now I'm going for a third try...
so if you're getting all these funky issues, the original zip file might be the culprit.

i turned off write combining and turned down AA and AF but i am still getting lockups

WEll now on this install i don't have the unlock option either.... where is it?
shouldn't it be at the startup screen???

Oh my god .. sigh.. i just managed to make HL² freeze in a mod...

devs please help

Ive updated my sound drivers and reinstalled the game from fresh and its solved it, or it seems to have. Updating GFX drivers helped a little bit but it still frozee occasionally, updating the sound drivers seems to have stopped it.

Stellios, just to know, is your board based on NForce chipset? The Angry Angel pointed out there are problems with sound with this chipset, sometimes leading to Blue Screens of Death. For example a friend of mine (who doesn't use LFS) had frequent BSODs with San Andreas. Lowering directx sound acceleration to zero before playing was a good workaround. I'll update his drivers soon to see if the problem persists with new drivers.
As a side note, since freezing problems seems to be quite common and sometimes have quite strange solutions (for example the ACPI computer driver thingy), it would be useful having a single (maybe sticky) thread with updated information.

Edit: use dxdiag to modify directx sound acceleration.

This thread helped sort out my freezing issues with LFS.

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=8831

it may or may not help... but worth a try?

Rowie