Project Reality Forums

Hi all,

I used to have a couple of problems. The most annoying one was my PR and my PC System would be frozen(locked up) with a constantly looping sound. Sometimes it was a PR weapon sound that would be looping, sometimes it would be sound bite from voip. Usually a weapon sound though. I would encounter this problem two or three times a day. The only choice I would have was to shut off the power to the system. Ctrl-Alt delete to bring up the Task Manager didn't work, Ctrl+Esc to bring up the Start Program menu didn't work, nor did pressing the Power Down button on the front of the PC. I would have to cut the power completely off with the switch in the back(PSU power button).

Here's what I believe is a 100% cure/fix for this problem as it's been several days now since I made the change. I wanted to be sure it really fixed the problem before posting the cure.


Turn your 'Sound Quality' setting from High(or Ultra High) to Medium.

If you have Hardware and EAX options checked you can leave them checked.


I have an Audigy 2 Platinum Soundcard and had my Sound Quality setting on High. After setting it to Medium, I don't really notice too much difference in the sound quality. I have heard there is a noticeable difference if you have an X-Fi Soundcard and set it to Ultra High. So X-Fi owners that are having this problem might cringe at the thought of turning it down to Medium. All I can say is, if you want/value system stability, this is the fix. Naturally, the choice is yours.

This problem indicates some sort of a slight problem with the format(for lack of a better word/knowledge) with one of the sounds in PR. I say slight because it seems not all systems are having this problem. Perhaps the number of systems it affects might just be a minority, but I do know it does affect a number of users/systems. There is a thirteen page thread about this problem on the PR forum. This problem is also present in another mod. Apparently it's a problem with the AT-ST Walker sound in the First Strike mod(a star wars mod).

Now, even vBF2 isn't completely perfect in regards to this sound problem on my system. On somewhat rare occasion I would get the looping weapon sound in vBF2 also, until the person with the weapon either fired it or changed weapons. But vBF2 never locked up/froze my system.

The other problem I was having was that vBF2 or PR would CTD(poof, game disappears and you're back at your desktop) and leave a dump file(.dmp file) in C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\Battlefield 2\Dmp. This would also happen about two or three times a day. This problem seems to be cured now too. If you have a bunch of dump files in that folder you can delete them to free up HD space, and probably speed up defragging your HD a little.

Just as an fyi, even though my systems is pretty old now by PC aging standards it consists of all high quality parts. Nothing cheap in it at all. For grins and giggles I will list my specs at the bottom.

Lastly, if you've been having this problem and this fixes it, I wouldn't mind hearing about it from you here!


Cheers,

OneTinSoldier



System Specs:

Intel P4 3.4C Northwood Core with Hyperthreading on Asus P4C800-E Deluxe(Intel 875P + ICH5R Chipset), Zalman 7000a-Cu HS/Fan, Enermax EG651P-VE 550W PSU, 2 GB Mushkin eXtreme Performance(2-2-2) Dual Channel PC3200 RAM, Samsung 214T MultiSync 21" Digital LCD Monitor(1600 x 1200 native res), HIS(ATI) X1950 Pro 512 MB AGP Videocard with IceQ3 Cooler and Catalyst v7.11 Driver, DirectX 9.0c v9.21.1148(November 2007 update), Creative Audigy2 Platinum Soundcard with Driver v02.09.0016, Logitech Z-5500 5.1 Speakers, Western Digital 250 GB w/8 MB Cache 7200 RPM Parallel ATA HDD, WinXP Pro SP2 32-bit, Norton Internet Security 2008(Firewall and Anti-Virus), Comcast Cable Internet Connection

i can assure you this works. thank you OneTinSoldier

You're welcome Harrelson.

I turned the sounds to medium a few days ago and haven't had any crashes since.

I did it and kept having the freezing even though my card isn't an Audigy or X-FI.

What I did though was to set affinity for BF2.exe through Task Manager to only one processor (I have dual-core) and bang, it worked. For a while, though. A blue screen from hell appeared all from the random and the pc went off. I had to change the cards in the PCI slots in order to solve this problem and now it's working like a charm.

Ok, I'm telling you that this is absolutely incorrect. It's merely coincidence that you don't get the freezing anymore. It is NOT sound related, I can assure you. I really don't mean to get pissed off because I know you're just trying to help. But I (and I know sofad as well) have no intention on letting people set their sounds to medium and thus, allow the BF2 engine to molest our audio work with shitty compression.

If a sound in BF2 is not compatible with the engine, it simply doesn't get played. It doesn't freeze the game and loop the sound (in which it shouldn't be able to play in the first place?). Also note that when you hit the screenshot button, the exact same thing happens except it unfreezes afterwards. Not sound related.

'[R-DEV wrote:Jaymz;572242']Ok, I'm telling you that this is absolutely incorrect. It's merely coincidence that you don't get the freezing anymore. It is NOT sound related, I can assure you. I really don't mean to get pissed off because I know you're just trying to help. But I (and I know sofad as well) have no intention on letting people set their sounds to medium and thus, allow the BF2 engine to molest our audio work with shitty compression.

If a sound in BF2 is not compatible with the engine, it simply doesn't get played. It doesn't freeze the game and loop the sound (in which it shouldn't be able to play in the first place?). Also note that when you hit the screenshot button, the exact same thing happens except it unfreezes afterwards. Not sound related.

I'm pretty certain it's punkbuster, i posted a big post about it here
https://www.realitymod.com/forum/showpo ... ostcount=3
I put my sound settings on medium and have not frozen yet but I only played a couple rounds.

I have tried almost everything to fix this freezing/looping sound problem for few monts including changing all audio settings, and none of that hasn't worked. I have X-Fi Gamer and I really suspect that the problem is related to driver of it. There was similar problem with FH2 mod and I got it fixed by installing older X-Fi drivers, but this didn't work so well with PR, altought it doesn't seem to happen so often anymore. Now it either ramdomly mutes microphone at some stage or causes freezing.

I haven't yet tried all other PCI slots and goig to try that next, as there has been reported problems with X-Fi cards.

Specs: AMD Opteron 170, DFI NF4, 2GB Corsair, 240GB RAID0, Windows XP Pro 64-bit and X-Fi XtremeGamer.

Previous threads:

https://www.realitymod.com/forum/pr-fre ... 30268.html

https://www.realitymod.com/forum/game-f ... 32980.html

'[R-DEV wrote:Jaymz;572242']Not sound related

How come you can tell it isn't sound related if you haven't been able to fix it?

Sorry... I don't want to upset anyone at all. You are right, I'm just trying to help with this problem. But I am an honest person and I feel I must say what I think. With that said, I could certainly be wrong. But I have seen this kind of thing before. There has been problems with sound on many games and applications. I have downloaded mods for other games that caused crashes, and later on, sure enough, it was discovered by devs that it was a problem with a sound file. Same with mini-mods for a mod. A texture/sound mini-mod for FH 0.7(FH1), mods for Silent Hinter III, ect, ect. And I have seen problems with original un-modded games due to sound too. For some reason sound seems to be a sensitive api layer on Windows. Again, I could most certainly be wrong about the root of this problem, but I don't think this is just a coincidence.

I quote part of an article on the reason why Microsoft didn't include hardware sound rendering in Windows Vista. I encourage everyone to read the entire article found here...

http://pc.ign.com/articles/759/759538p1.html


"So imagine your surprise when you fire up one of your favourite games in Vista - say World of Warcraft or Prey - only to find your fancy EAX-endowed soundcard and 5.1 surround speakers are dribbling out flat, unenhanced stereo sound. Then, in a vain attempt to spruce up the audio by enabling EAX, you get a nice taut error message saying EAX is not detected on your hardware. What's going on?
Welcome to the world of Vista audio. And a brave new world it is.

The root of all these problems? Microsoft's Windows team made the bold decision to rewrite the Vista audio stack from the ground up, and in doing so they removed hardware acceleration for DirectSound. That's right. They took hardware support away from the most ubiquitous sound API implemented in games over the past several years.

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Why would the Windows team strip DirectSound of its hardware privileges? The reason goes all the way back to the days of Windows 3.1 in the early 1990s. Back then it was the beginning of the multimedia boom - the days when sound cards came bundled with CD-ROM drives. At that time Microsoft first incorporated its Multimedia Extensions (MME) API into Windows, which allowed an application to interface with a sound card, opening up a somewhat richer experience than the bleeps and bloops of the old PC speaker. However, the MME API was fairly rudimentary and included no support for channel mixing, so only one audio stream was rendered at a time.

Then with the release of Windows 98 came a new and more advanced audio stack based around the Windows Driver Model (WDM). This fully 32-bit audio stack was notably more sophisticated than the MME API and did allow the mixing of audio streams. Coupled with DirectSound and DirectSound3D, applications and games could send commands straight to the hardware, opening up a whole world of enhanced features, such as 3D positional audio and Creative's EAX.

However the new Windows audio stack's new strengths belied a critical weakness: much of the audio stack was run in kernel mode, right in the guts of Windows. This meant that if - heaven forbid - something went wrong and the audio stack crashed, there was a good chance it would drag the rest of Windows down with it."

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Sincerely,

OneTinSoldier

fubar++ wrote:How come you can tell it isn't sound related if you haven't been able to fix it?

Because like I said, if a sound is incompatible with the BF2 audio engine, it simply doesn't get played. Look what happens when you take a screenshot. It freezes and constantly loops that last few audio events. That has nothing to do with sound, just like this bug has nothing to do with sound.

EDIT: Wow, very very cool article onetin. Thanks a lot for posting that.

Ya its freezing related. Its nothing to do with your game sounds.

I have a buddy that is/was having the same issue. He has an NForce 4 motherboard with a built in Gigabit NIC. On a whim he forced it to run at 10/100 Full duplex, and ran PR/BF2 for several nights now with only ONE crash. It used to crash on him after about 30 to 45 minutes of playing each night, but now he has gone several nights in a row with only the ONE Freeze loop/crash. Not sure if that will be of any help to anyone, but it might help someone. Good luck to yous.

R

[R-DEV]Jaymz wrote:Because like I said, if a sound is incompatible with the BF2 audio engine, it simply doesn't get played.

This isn't question on imcompatibility rather than fault in sound system. Windows, game engine, driver, you name it, and untill better information I'm suspecting fault in sound driver.

[R-DEV]Jaymz wrote:Look what happens when you take a screenshot. It freezes and constantly loops that last few audio events. That has nothing to do with sound, just like this bug has nothing to do with sound.

I'd say what you are saying doesn't really proof anything. On the contrary many sound settings and and other sound related changes have affected to behavior of this problem, just look at those threads posted earlier. And if I remember correctly I never have had looping sound while taking screenshots.

I don't say that you couldn't be right and the problem isn't sound related, but just saying it can't be doesn't solve much.

It's not sound and this is not a fix. I've been playing on Medium sound settings for 2 days, and I was ready to declare this a fix but it just froze again.
I'm still pretty certain the problem is punkbuster, I've had this problem before on BF2 and COD4 and it was punkbuster.

unrealalex wrote:It's not sound and this is not a fix. I've been playing on Medium sound settings for 2 days, and I was ready to declare this a fix but it just froze again.
I'm still pretty certain the problem is punkbuster, I've had this problem before on BF2 and COD4 and it was punkbuster.

As I said earlier I have tried this medium "fix" long time ago and it didn't solve anything. But that doesn't mean it can't be sound related.

Punkbuster is generally a piece of cr*p but please give us some test results to verify.

And yes, I changed soundcard in other PCI slot (IRQ sharing problem in the last chapter at link you posted) and there wasn't any freezing. But again, that doesn't proof it will be fix untill tested further.

Maybe there is several reasons causing freezing, like Punkbuster conflicting Rivatuner, affinity with multicore CPUs and IRQ sharing, or maybe it's all Punkbusters fault (which I wouldn't doubt so much), but it is impossible to know by only one or two user experience.

Howdy,

[R-Dev]Jaymz, I'm glad you found the article interesting. You're Welcome.

And thanks so much for contributing to making such an awesome mod!! I'm addicted to it, and I'm not ashamed to say it.


Anyway... I should not have said that I believe that this was a 100% fix. What I should have said is this a 100% fix for me. And it is. For an entire week now I have not had one single Looping Sound with System Freeze occur. I play for something like 6-7 hours straight, no problem, almost as solid as a rock. I say almost because I have gotten a couple of CTD's with dump files now. That's a program crash and as much as I play, I consider it to be pretty infrequent and very minor nuisance. But my System is now stable, which is what I really care about. As for Punkbuster, personally I've never had a problem with it except for a short period of time that one of their updates was causing something funky for several days in BF2, but they fixed it with an update. And that's from someone who has been playing the Battlefield series ever since the day BF1942 was released. With one exception, I never bought or played Viet Nam.

I'm sorry to hear this hasn't been a solution for everyone. I hope it can be figured out and fixed for everyone though!!

Cheers

Update:

There hasn't been any freezing since soundcard was changed for different PCI slot (maybe 6-10 hours play time totally). It still keeps muting microphone quite often and that can be fixed only reinstalling sound drivers (using latest now). I will report if this doesn't work...

Update 2:

Well it didn't work out, one total freezing today.

I'm starting to hate this sh*t.

I had some weird problem with sounds on high too, i heard every sound cleary and things that were on the other end of the map sounded like they were next to me. So, I could hear a enemy APC being started at enemy Main base in my own Main base.

i would strongly recommend to update your open al wrapper:

download this!

a) Rename the OpenAL wrapper BF2OpenAL.dll in your Battlefield2 directory to something like BF2OpenAL.original

b) install the latest Creative OpenAL32.dll (download the oalinst.exe from the link above and execute the .exe file)

c) Copy wrap_oal.dll (version 2.1.8.1) from WINDOWS\system32 to your Battlefield2 directory.
Check with properties that it really is the latest OpenAL library from Creative.

d) Rename the copied file to BF2OpenAL.dll just to finish clean


of course its also always a good idea to have the latest drivers for your sound card installed:

european creative driver download

american creative drivers download


that dont might fix any of your problems, but to have the audioengine updated cant hurt and might be solve some issues.

reducing the sound hardware acceleration in the dxdiag screens is also sometimes a known sound issues fixer..

If possible make sure that your video card and audio card do not share an IRQ.

Every time I play PR or BF or any mod for that matter, I will lock up for around 10-15 secs, and if a sound was playing it loops. If I wait 10-15 secs, the game then kicks back in and I don't experience it again until I restart BF2 (hinting to me that it is PB related)