Getting crashes in combat with an Asus Xonar soundcard? Read this.

[Erpy]

This thread was made in response to two messages I noticed in the Major Issues thread.

I'm actually still having semi-regular crashes, but they're in a place that nobody else is reporting. My crashes all occur during combat. Most of the time, these happen right at the end of the battle as the victory music is playing, though sometimes they occur at other times (when an enemy is self-destructing, or when an enemy death animation is playing). When the crash occurs, the sound card gets locked in a loop of playing the most recent game sound that was playing, and that sound won't go away until the computer is rebooted.

The strange part is that the crashes don't generate any dump files (I have a few from older crash bugs that have since been fixed), so I have nothing to send. Also, the frequency of crashes varies - I can play two hours without any issues, and then have two crashes back-to-back. I suspect the issue is sound-related; I've disabled sound entirely and things seem to be behaving much better, and my sound card (an Asus Xonar DX) is pretty non-standard these days (most people probably use their motherboard's integrated audio chipset).

First of all, I get the exact same crashes. I can do everything I want to, but killing bosses (for now, I only encountered 1 "boss", Pine Plant. It's the first "boss" you encounter on the "Milch Main Road"), who use self destruct and die, make my game crash. I get this weird soundloop too. As if I bluescreened. Just a loop of a sound played at the very last second before the crash. I have to reboot to end this loop since no process which might produce this loop exists(atleast none which is related to the game).
Funny thing is, I use the Asus Xonar soundcard too. Its a DGX though, not the DX.

I've been getting the same crashes and it's been driving me nuts. With the pineplant, later with the robber trappers in the Esmelas Tower and the winged cats in the chest with the topaz talisman and invariably with the shining poms. I have an Asus Xonar DG soundcard, so yeah, judging from these posts and my own experience, it seems these crashes are almost certainly due to some snafu related to Asus Xonar soundcards. When it crashes there's no crash dump and the sound gets locked in an infinite loop that persists until you reboot your system. Fortunately, the problem can be worked around.

The exact moment of the crash is always the same: it occurs whenever sepith crystals spawn in battle. Usually, more sepith crystals means a higher probability to crash. Boss monsters dropping big crystals or big crystals of several colors are much more likely to cause the problem than minor monsters. Most of the time, sepiths spawn whenever you defeat a monster, but the problem can also occur whenever you strike a monster during a sepith up-turn bonus. Especially when using attacks that rapidly hit the monster several times in a row.

One way I got a guaranteed crash was when I used Estelle's pummel S-craft on a shining pom during a sepith-up turn bonus. Doing this usually produces a fountain of sepith to spring forth from the pom, but on an Asus Xonar, it's pretty much guaranteed to choke.

Now as for the solutions:

If you're not comfortable fiddling with your system settings, an easy but inconvenient workaround is to simply go to the in-game options and disable the sound. The crashes won't take place if the game doesn't play any sound effects. Unfortunately, while you can still listen to the music, there won't be any battle voices or even menu bleeps.

If you want to bypass the issue entirely, do the following:

1) If you have an Asus Xonar, your on-board soundcard is most likely disabled. You must restart your PC, enter your system's BIOS setup and enable it. When you boot up Windows, it should detect your on-board sound card and add a device to the device manager.

2) In my case, simply pulling the speakers' plug from the Xonar device and into the on-board soundcard was enough. The OS detected that the on-board soundcard was now connected to the speakers and automatically used the on-board device for sound output instead of the Xonar.

3) If you're worried about conflicts, you can always go into the hardware manager and manually disable the Xonar device.

Since the sound is now going through the on-board sound chip instead of the Xonar, the sepith-crashes won't be taking place anymore. I've tested this on both the Steam version and the GOG version (which is a less recent build) and the crash was gone in both cases.

Note to Sarah: if you decide to tackle this puppy, I'd be more than happy to purchase a Xonar soundcard for you guys. Word. :)

[AkiraLeir]

My Xonar DSX is working flawlessly with the game. Try to install an UNi driver for your sound card instead of those official ones.

[Saralene]

I've had a lot of trouble with these cards in past games. The most common solution to issues with official drivers was to turn off a specific 3D feature I forget the name of in the control panel, but I have no idea if that applies to Trails. What sort of drivers are you suggesting here and can anyone else confirm them as an acceptable (or unacceptable) solution?

[AkiraLeir]

Not someone else, but people were also reporting problems with Xonar cards on Starbound. And, well, using UNi drivers made me not notice/experience a single bug/crash within the game. It is worth a try, I must say.

Edit: The UNi driver "project" is a somewhat known (as far as I can check) alternative to official builds, which includes tweaks, modifications and management tools. It is kind of tricky to configure it (for non-tech-savvy users, that is), but once you get through it successfully, you'll never want to go back to "normal" drivers again.

[Erpy]

Originally posted by Sara:

I've had a lot of trouble with these cards in past games. The most common solution to issues with official drivers was to turn off a specific 3D feature I forget the name of in the control panel, but I have no idea if that applies to Trails. What sort of drivers are you suggesting here and can anyone else confirm them as an acceptable (or unacceptable) solution?

Falcom games in general seem to hate the Xonar. I've had a persistent sound bug in Felghana and Origin as well where the music would stop playing after it switched tracks a few times. (at least until you restarted the game) Fiddling with the 3D output settings in the game's control panel didn't help. That one was solved by the same solution I posted in this thread too.

[Revarye]

Hi, reviving an old discussion to say thanks because this was the one thread that helped me! ASUS Xonar DX, official latest drivers, had a battle crash that I could reproduce. After switching to the UNi Xonar latest stable drivers, problem solved