4 replies to this topic

[Deathlike]

This guide is not going to guarantee stuff to "work as intended" all the time. Far from it.

If you have had a working system while playing MWO and subsequent patching has causes stability to go awry (more crashing), then this is the thread for you, hopefully.

(First timers - do this) Start by doing the following:

1) Delete all .pak files in the MWO directory. There should be as of this post, 63 pak files.

2) Run the MWO Repair Tool. This is as close you can get to a reinstall, w/o doing the old school "delete frontend_version.dll" with the patch (MWO Repair Tool as better for this).

That's it. It may help to run the MWO Repair Tool AFTER the file downloads again (just in case). It also helps to run MWO Repair Tool AFTER a reboot of the system (you don't want MWO to linger in memory and/or interfere with this operation).

This should help because I think there's something wrong with the process of adding files from the patch... particularly in trying to add files to the archive. When you create a zip/rar/7z file from scratch, it may actually produce a different result if you do an "add to archive" or "replace files in archive" operation. I think this is the "source" of crashing, because it doesn't seem to reliably work correctly, causing the crash.

(Ideally/Always after patching on patch day - do this) In the future (on subsequent patch days), instead of needing to do the entire deletion of the paks after going through this process once...

1) Delete all .pak files that have been recently modified by MWO after patching. These are the ONLY relevant files that need to be fixed/replaced.

2) Run the MWO Repair Tool. You will most likely have to redownload good copies of Objects.pak and other often modified files. This should help most with stability (Objects.pak does tend to get corrupt).

This is a good idea if you want to be safe in the knowledge the files are good, but you don't have to do this step until you are having stability problems in MWO. If you are frequently getting patch-day issues, doing the latter steps are ideal, since you don't want to be frequently downloading needlessly unchanged files in MWO.

I hope this is helpful to everyone.

Edited by Deathlike, 17 February 2014 - 07:34 AM.

[mekabuser]

ty. game is crashing like a ******* 4 times in an hour today pre patch. where is the repair tool again>? I didnt mind this nonsense last year, but at this point its just annoying as anything. Ive had a rock solid game until this previous patch for months and months now.

Its really bizarre. Ive never seen software that can run perfectly, but man when it was closed beta this game barely ran AT ALL on my system. I mean a complete slide show. Up until two weeks ago , perfect 50 fps. The stability of this game has been all over the map .

[Deathlike]

That is actually a sticky in this forum... just FYI:
http://mwomercs.com/...public-release/

[Wintersdark]

Sadly, the repair tool didn't help me at all - nor has it ever. *sighs* I sure wish it would, though.

It really seems to me that there's some severe jankiness with MWO + Win8.1. Seems to be the common thread with stability and DX11 issues.

[Deathlike]

Wintersdark, on 05 March 2014 - 08:07 AM, said:

Sadly, the repair tool didn't help me at all - nor has it ever. *sighs* I sure wish it would, though.

It really seems to me that there's some severe jankiness with MWO + Win8.1. Seems to be the common thread with stability and DX11 issues.

The tool works... but it occasionally has problems with pak files that are generated by the game on patch days. The operation done is essentially what a zip compression utility does to replace and add files to it... but occasionally something goes awry.

I know there are MANY DX11 related issues (omicron.log is a source of listing them all) but the game rendering for the most part is still "fine" and most of it is related to the process in which PGI uses to update the files. Just delete all the .pak files and run the tool (you'll get more stable files to work with), and your stability should increase tenfold. I've had very minimal problems with MWO by doing that (running Win7 FYI).

Edited by Deathlike, 05 March 2014 - 08:17 AM.