194 replies to this topic

[Captain Greene]

Krist Smith, on 31 October 2012 - 09:20 AM, said:

Whoa, now that sounds very strange. If I understand correctly, Objects.pak didn't have a problem until after you'd played the game for a bit? Sorry to make you repeat it, but I need to be 100% clear on this. If that's the case, it almost sounds like it's the game, not the patcher, that's corrupting these files and I need to re-focus my debugging (as well as call in some of the engine guys to take a look).

Yes, the Objects Pak was corrupted only after playing one game and was previously OK. I had ckd each Pak individually after initial patch and the FRead error.
Hope we're getting closer to nailing this thing down!
Shall I replace the Objects Pak and try playing some more?

Edit, my Bin32, front end time stamp is 10-27-12 @ 11:59PM
Obkects Pak is 10-28-12 @ 11:38AM

Edited by Captain Greene, 31 October 2012 - 04:48 PM.

[Krist Smith]

Captain Greene, on 31 October 2012 - 04:37 PM, said:

Yes, the Objects Pak was corrupted only after playing one game and was previously OK. I had ckd each Pak individually after initial patch and the FRead error.
Hope we're getting closer to nailing this thing down!
Shall I replace the Objects Pak and try playing some more?

Edit, my Bin32, front end time stamp is 10-27-12 @ 11:59PM
Obkects Pak is 10-28-12 @ 11:38AM

You can feel free to do what's needed to play and enjoy the game. We are indeed getting closer to solving the problem (now that we know it's not actually the patcher causing the issues, we can start tracking the true cause).

I thank you for this piece of info. Without it I'd probably still be trying to find out why the patcher is causing corruption that it actually wasn't responsible for. I've called in a red alert to all our coders to start trying to sniff out this very frustrating issue, so hopefully we'll see some solid results soon.

[Captain Greene]

Another update.
Replaced the Obkects Pak with a known good Pak.
Restarted the game, no FRead errors or anything abnormal until the game started.
For the first time on my system after playing the game since I initially DLd it July 28 I now have rendering issues in game. Floating structures, video quality is extrmely poor etc. Basically the game is unplayable.

So I restored my system to 10/19/2012.
Ran all Windows updates.
Restarted the game and began DLing the 7 updates.
While repairing River City a Connection Error popup window came up at some point. The progress counter only showed about 15% of the patch was downloaded.
I hit the retry button and immediately the game showed ready to play. No further DLing.
At this point I closed the game and ckd all Paks with 7Zip. I showed 3 errors in the Animations Pak. I saved the Pak before overwriting it if you'd like the exact errors.
Replaced the Animations Pak with a good copy and retried the game. Again had the same unique rendering error to my system that showed up before the restore. The game is not playable on my end. Ckd all Paks with 7Zip, no erros found.
So I'm just not sure I'm doing you all any good at this point as a single error doesn't repeat itself.

If at some point one of your guys wanted access to my system with Windows Remote Access we could give it a go if that would help.

Best of luck with the issue. Considering a Fresh Win7 install on my end, CG.

[Ghost Inc]

Hello Guys, Hello krist,

Here is some input from me:

Installed the game on mondays, played around 30 matches. I had some crashes, but nothing serious. Then, the game didn't want to start with the knwon FRead error.

I replaced the entire "bin32" and "Engine" Folders with those of a friend who had no errors. It did not do any good.
In the following i tried to reinstall. This did not work due to various crashes.

After some browsing, I found this thread. Hence I updated my graphicdrivers and the MS Net 4.5 Framework.
I tried to delete the game via this link: http://support.micro...l_and_uninstall
Reinstall did not work, due to this error: http://mwomercs.com/...-hash-mismatch/

At the moment I try to reinstall again.

Here are my specs:
Win 7 64bit
AMD Radeon 6800
Intel Quad Q6600

All install folders all default. Note: It worked very well the first time, I downloaded the game.

Do you need any more Info?

[Ghost Inc]

Ok, this is me again

Took me 5 hours to reinstall the game. Then, I had about 5 matches, everything went fine. Game crashed at forest colony, rigth after i had been killed.

I installed the game not in the windows system folder. Somehow i think, that helped.

[Krist Smith]

Ok, there's something else that may help either prevent or at least debug this problem - if you set the pak files to read-only while they're still in working order, the game shouldn't have permission to make any modifications. This will either make whatever is corrupting the files crash or just simply not make the changes but continue functioning gracefully. If it does cause a crash, please provide the crash dump so we can nail down what's trying to mess up the pak.

Note: this may prevent the patcher from being able to patch the pak files, so you should probably set them back to writable if there's a patch available.

Quick step-by-step of how to make the paks read-only:
First, navigate to the root game folder (the one that contains Game, Engine, Bin32, etc.)
In the search box in the upper-right, type *.pak
Select all the resulting files
Right-click any of them after selecting and click "Properties"
On the lower portion of the Properties window, check the "Read Only" checkbox and hit Ok

[Soulgorger]

*assuming* there's no changes to the .pak files while the game is running (or when it closes), can't your patcher make the files read only or read/write as part of the starting/ending procedures for the patch update?

Seems like something that *could/should* be done, considering we have at least a couple people in this thread stating the file modification dates are changing.

[Krist Smith]

Soulgorger, on 01 November 2012 - 12:41 PM, said:

*assuming* there's no changes to the .pak files while the game is running (or when it closes), can't your patcher make the files read only or read/write as part of the starting/ending procedures for the patch update?

Seems like something that *could/should* be done, considering we have at least a couple people in this thread stating the file modification dates are changing.

Yeah, this is something that, once tested, will likely be rolling out in the next patcher update (or the one after it). Nothing at all should be making any changes to the pak files outside of the patcher itself. But, of course, first we need to confirm that it's actually an effective protection.

[Crazie General]

I had it do this too me today while I was out eating... played 10 games logedout loged back in and boom error.


restarting computer seemes to have fixed the issue...

Edited by Crazie General, 01 November 2012 - 10:08 PM.

[Gorfokk]

Hello, i ran through the process once more, searched through the .pak files with 7zip and got this:

Quote

archives: 16

folders: 391
size: 3489833838 (3328mb)
compressed size: 1817731071 (1733mb)

There are no errors

I tried a match at home this afternoon but got the black screen where i can see the mechbay but once the game starts i can hear the match running -torso movements, shots and everything but i can't see anything.

i wonder if maybe in my case the bug is something else?
(fyi i did manage to play normally on this PC before the black screen bug, so i know it can run)
i run win xp on a I7... (shame)

[Soulgorger]

Gorfokk, on 02 November 2012 - 06:36 AM, said:

Hello, i ran through the process once more, searched through the .pak files with 7zip and got this:



I tried a match at home this afternoon but got the black screen where i can see the mechbay but once the game starts i can hear the match running -torso movements, shots and everything but i can't see anything.

i wonder if maybe in my case the bug is something else?
(fyi i did manage to play normally on this PC before the black screen bug, so i know it can run)
i run win xp on a I7... (shame)

Different issue. This thread is about the "FRead" error box that pops up when the game crashes.

[Krist Smith]

Hey Gorfokk, while Soulgorger is correct that this thread is about pak corruption (the symptom being the dreaded FRead error), we have seen Bumpers.pak get corrupted and cause exactly what you're seeing, it just doesn't spit out the same error. However, if you say you've scanned all the archives, then your problem is not corruption. Now, having said that, are you sure you scanned all the pak files? There should be more like 26, not 16. Was that a typo? I'd say just double-check Bumpers.pak. If it's not corrupted, then it is, in fact, a different issue. Although you may wanna try just downloading a fresh copy anyway to be completely sure.

EDIT: Sorry, I should have read your post a second time, all I saw the first time was "black screen". The problem you're having has nothing to do with the bumpers.

[Krist Smith]

So there's a new factor to ask about, based on some of Soulgorger's findings: those of you with the corruption problem, do you have an SSD?

[Garrath]

I run win7 64bit, run the game/OS from SSD and do get the crash/corruption.

[ObliviousKnowledge]

Windows 7 x64 No SSD. I only got this error after moving game files from my brothers computer to mine to try and fix the black screen/loading screen freeze. He does not have an SSD either.

[Paul Inouye]

Pinning to help find the problem

[Gardvord val Orden]

i7, win7 64bit, SSD MWO not on the SSD and NO game crash

[Captain Greene]

Update on my end.
Uninstalled the game using Win7 Control Panel
DL'd, reinstalled.
Before I played the game I used 7Zip to ck all Paks for errors.
7Zip found 4 errors.
Decided to play without addreessing the broken files.
So far the game has worked very well and my rendering issues also are gone.
MIght be interesting to have some folks who have no apparent issues ck their Paks for broken files.


To answer Krist's latest querry I am using a WD 1.5TB ATA drive.

These are the current errors:

Edited by Captain Greene, 02 November 2012 - 06:09 PM.

[ltwally]

Krist Smith, on 02 November 2012 - 10:14 AM, said:

So there's a new factor to ask about, based on some of Soulgorger's findings: those of you with the corruption problem, do you have an SSD?

I have encountered this issue twice. Once after the Oct 25 patch, and again a couple days ago out of the blue. Both times I had to re-install.

The system I've been playing on runs Win7 x64. Regular ol' hard disk -- no SSD. For A/V, I use Microsoft Security Essentials.

For what it's worth, I have never had any issues with corrupt downloads from anything else. Ever. My internet connection is clean and stable, and other programs have never had any issue corrupting cleanly downloaded files. Something very screwy is going on, here.



I would like to ask -- and I hope this thread is not an improper place to do so -- why the installer even needs to patch on first install? It would be better for everyone if it instead just downloaded up-to-date versions of all files. (Save the player time and bandwidth, and PGI bandwidth.)

Edited by ltwally, 02 November 2012 - 08:22 PM.

[Nauk]

My friend was recieving this error, on Windows 7 64-bit, and downloading the installer on Google Chrome.

He did the 7-zip process and it said textures.pak was corrupted. I sent him the file itself, and he replaced it. The game is now running fine for him and he is having no issues.