Reenow
12-06-2007, 01:41 AM
<p>Drivers tried: 163.71 / 163.75 / 1.62xx or something, the older one that came on the cd with my graphics card.</p><p>I have never found an EQ2_CRASH.LOG or CRASHLOG.TXT. Only one time i think that the system actually crashed and i got a blue screen, memory dump etc.</p><p>I believe that the error associated with that crash is:</p><p><u>Error Message: STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER (Q29307) </u></p><p>However, i think i had been using alt tab to force eq2 to minimize and then restore, etc over & over in an attempt to unlock eq2's graphics in full screen mode. This error possibly occurred due to all my messing around; dont know.</p><p>I have never had any problem except when playing eq2 - have played quite a few hours of Doom3 on this pc as is, and also as a test i just downloaded the Crysis demo - have had not a bit of an issue. So, im going back and forth between thinking this is a driver issue and it's being a bad graphics card - i dont know which is worse (card is under warranty - dont know when a new driver will come- hope it can be fixed with settings change).</p><p>The day this all started was a Tuesday, i think thats patch day..., there was no announced update that day but i did receive some new file. I dont know what it was, sorry. I had not changed drivers or installed anything new just before this started happening, it is possible that i had messed with options / performance, graphics settings from within eq2 - i didnt think to wonder at the time because i was sure it was that 1st npc that was bugged (see below).</p><p>If i think of anything else, i'll post again. Thanks, please help save EQ2 for me!!</p><p>Description of issue:</p><p>I had played for a couple of weeks with absolutely no issues. My problems began one day while soloing in The Commonlands. I was attacked by some female caster npc who is near a bunch of other mobs just away from that 3rd grif tower, the least used one. I actually submitted a bug saying that the npc was bugged and causing my crash - unfortunately i continued to experience the problem after giving up on being able to fight this mob. The very first time, i couldnt even see her, she APPEARED far far away and i only knew i was taking damamge and then saw some spell effect flying across the sky at me from a long distance (something about this 1st encounter definately seems bugged, see was way too far away). She eventually popped over to where i was and then i locked up. After that, each and every time i attacked her, i would lock up as soon as i saw her launch a spell attack. -- and that's what i still think was really interesting about this is that it happend EVERY time i attacked her - i have since never seen anything in-game that seems to always be going on or near me when these problems occur. Does seem it has occured a suspicious number of times when i have been facing the zone out of the crafting zone in stonestair byway - thats the ONLY other consistent thing i can remember.</p><p>Here is what i saw, i was playing only in full screen during this period of time up until this first lockup, it looked like everything froze, all controls stopped responding and all movement on screen ceased, and all of the graphics looked as if they turned into watercolors or something and blurred, some areas left and some to the right - very small areas vertically < 1 cm, longer horizontally - a few centimeters, blurred horrizontally only.</p><p>After some number of these episodes over the next few days, i tried using alt-tab to try to get the full screen eq2 to minimize to the taskbar...this was very difficult but during some of the lockups i was able to, after hitting alt tab over and over and over, to get this to happen - when i did i took the opportunity to reboot w/o just using the power button... i also happend to experiment and went ahead and after getting eq2 to minmize, i used alt tab to retore eq2 to full screen. Lo and behold it wasnt frozen anymore! There was still some graphic issues, i dont recall what they were exactly now.</p><p>SO, i switched to playing eq2 in windowed mode. This did not change the frequency of the lockups, BUT it made it much much easier to get eq2 to minimize. I have been playing in windowed mode ever since (except after trying a couple of driver updates etc because i thought i might have fixed it - it hadn't).</p><p>So, now in windowed mode i used this new ability to unlock to be able to either finish a fight, camp correctly etc. Now i have a lot more info on more specific graphics issue i experience (mainly because these are more recent) -</p><p>1 - i dont see the lockup as described exactly when i was playing in full screen mode. It still locks up completely sometimes, but it looks different.</p><p>2 - the graphics will freeze and for instance a lot of the other colors will all sort of blend in together with say the green of the grass in enchanted lands where the sea mist faeries are among the trees - i dont know, like everthing goes to mostly shades of one color.</p><p>2b after unlocking by min/restore the graphics are sometimes unfrozen but the, for example, green everywhere problem is still going on...its different shades of whatever color - hard to describe! usually there is some flickering going on, it almost looks like heat lightning the way the bright flickering moves around, from area to area (big areas flicker, not little bitty).</p><p>3 most all of this described in 1,2,2b is accompanied by horizontally moving snow moving in what i guess is both directions across the screen. Sometimes after lockup and "fix" with alt-tab, all of the flickering, wierd colors etc are gone, but usually the horizontal snow is still there.</p><p>4 This snow is the ONLY problem not isolated to within EQ2's window, this horizontal snow, once started, occurs on the whole windows screen, desktop etc, not just in eq2 (but again the problem only starts when playing eq2). Also, interesting, the snow does not show up in screenshots - i take it that this shows that the problem is occuring in the graphics card, between there and the monitor. Sometimes there is more flickering type of effects going on that i can see looking at the windows desktop as well. Say, i have a lockup, unfreeze with alt-tab thing, log out of eq2...now im starting to reboot - sometimes it looks fine except for snow - but many times along with the snow there are like flashing colors, usually in circle shapes - specifically when windows is shutting down on that blue screen (xp) where is says "windows is shutting down", you may recall that the upper left of the screen is (be design) a little lighter shade of blue - at the boundery of that lighter area i see i guess two concentric cicles flickering, with the outter perimeter of the outter circle being the edge of the lighter / gradations of blue. It looks really wierd - almost mechanical - this makes me think hardware problem with the graphics card or just that eq2 and the driver are REALLY REALLY whacking out this card!</p><p>5 sometimes everthing seems to clear up after alt-tab min-restore, but i notice that "new" occurrences happen with great and greater frequency after the 1st.</p><p>6 in the middle of all this, there have been times that i have logged on and played for like 5 hours and never had an issue (very infrequently, but it did happen) - especially in the last week or so it seemed to occurs a lot, cant usualy play without 2+ interuptions to reboot the pc in a couple of hours.</p><p>7 can happen at any time - standing, moving, fighting, indoors, outdoors</p><p>8 also, the rarest manifestation of this, is that the graphics say in a room all seem to get overlayed with a grid of little graphics symbols - too bad you cant see these screenshots - it will have like that same symbol going in a row of squares, with different symbols in different rows, Look maybe like little item graphics - cant tell for sure if they are eq2 graphics or some kind of symbols provided by the graphics card. These little graphic square cover the walls, floor, all over. I have a screenshot where all of my hotbar keys, instead of showing my abilities as usual, are all filled with one symbol, looks like a wierd twig or something, all the same but they will have differnt color backgrounds on some, some black maybe, some light blue, grey, etc - looks like about 4 different colors. One more screenshot, i swear hehe, well the colors are all messed up (it's outdoors) and i see in the upper right of the screen, a huge, transparent FISH HEAD!!, to the left of it looks like the long body of another fish filling up the air in front of the tree branches.</p><p> If all of this fits, ill start posting system info in the next post --></p><p>Thanks, Reenownn.</p>