Crashes at irregular intervals (Bootcamp Windows 10)

[KBlomquist]

Does anybody run Supreme Commander Forged Alliance (Steam version) on an Apple 5K IMac (20017, Radeon Pro 570) under Bootcamp Windows 10 ?
Any help would be very welcome because I'm tired of fumbling around. I have tried all the usual tips (Compatibilty EXE settings, windowed mode, nomovies etc.) and in the end (not allways, not allways after 10minutes) it crashed.
It certainly crashes when you end the game, there is never a clean exit to windows.
The above setting runs with no problems Bioshock 1, which is also a DirectX9 game.

[Ceejay]

Its because its an apple.....:p (Well I had to say it)

No idea to be honest, if your running windows 10, its just a pc running windows 10, the game should not be affected by it being a mac with bootcamp. It sounds like you have tried all the usual things to get the game working fine.

Is the game installed on the same drive as 10? Sometimes issues can crop up if its installed on a different drive.

Also try another install of direct x 9. While 10 comes with 12, it does not contain all the commands of dx9.

Had a quick search found a thread with simiar issues, something may help

Originally posted by zaldusrecon:

this post in another discussion
Originally posted by ZaidusRecon:
restart computer
windowed mode
compatability mode
administrator privileges
control panel text size
ini file re-generate
directx installs
dual monitor issues
surround sound issues
drive (or partition) issues
game/program 'optimisers' interfering
antivirus trigger
graphics driver
sound driver
new windows update causing issues
lack of windows updates causing issues
the list goes on.

Let me know how the troubleshooting goes.

In another thread someone fixed their issue by installed the fafoever client. (I have not used the mod or needed to try the launcher so have no experiance of it directly).

[KBlomquist]

Thank you for looking once again at this frustrating issue. There are so many posts here complaining about basicly the same issue (the program just not running stable) but i still have the hope that there is some general reason. Maybe to modern sound drivers or graphic drivers could be one reason. Nvidia users, do you also have problems ?
This way its just a searching in the hay stack (maybe wrong phrase :-)) with too many screws to turn. I am a little sad, because I really would love to play this super game !

[PhilipJFry]

check out this guide
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=175274474
it has some info about how to save a log which may or may not contain important stuff about your issue so you don't have to test random stuff

[Ceejay]

Also apparently there was an issue with AMD's latest drivers (out of another thread) breaking dx9 games.

There is a hotfix for it, so maybe you just need to update your drivers :)

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-adrenalin-issue-dx9-games,36203.html

[KBlomquist]

Yes, thanks but there we are at the (only) disadvantage to run on IMac - you are not free to install every hardware driver at its release - you have to wait for official boot camp drivers.
Anyhow i have another track - the culprit seems to be xactengine2_9.dll which is responsible for the sound effects of the game. I will post more if this leads to something.

[Ceejay]

Originally posted by KBlomquist:

Yes, thanks but there we are at the (only) disadvantage to run on IMac - you are not free to install every hardware driver at its release - you have to wait for official boot camp drivers.
Anyhow i have another track - the culprit seems to be xactengine2_9.dll which is responsible for the sound effects of the game. I will post more if this leads to something.

Forgive me but I thought with bootcamp it was a full version of windows 10, inwhich case display drivers should be fine to install as the drivers do not affect bootcamp.

[KBlomquist]

You install a full version of Windows 10 in Bootcamp, but the drivers you install in Windows connect to the Apple Hardware, so they are a little bit special in some cases. For example the latest official AMD graphics driver can not be used in Bootcamp. There is a special Bootcamp release which is allways delayed (because all the well payed Apple Engineers have to check before :-)

[Ceejay]

Ah, did not think that is how it worked, personally never used bootcamp, just been going off what I was picking up from friends who use it and kind of filled in the blanks on my own :) Thats why I like these forums, people are generally very helpful. Thanks :)

[KBlomquist]

What i found out so far:

After a crash I took a look into the Windows Event Viewer (Computer Management - Event Viewer - Custom Views - Aministrative Events - Application Events)
There you find your Supreme Commander crash and something like this (I took Naginooh's example because its in English):

Faulting application name: SupremeCommander.exe, version: 1.5.0.1, time stamp: 0x4e5c092e
Faulting module name: xactengine2_9.dll, version: 9.20.1057.0, time stamp: 0x46a06729
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0001de58
Faulting process ID: 0x3078
Faulting application start time: 0x01d329baa147e855
Faulting application path: F:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\bin\SupremeCommander.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\System32\xactengine2_9.dll

If you compare this with the output of the Tool ProcessExplorer (procexp.exe from sysinternals.com) during run of SupCom you see that xactengine2_9.dll is used by SupCom, but with the path of a 32Bit Exe (C:\Windows\SysWOW64\xactengine2_9.dll) which should be the case with a 32Bit application.
The module xactengine2_9.dll which crashed is responsible for the audio effects. If you start SupremeCommander with the command line option /nomovie /nosound you see that ProcessExplorer shows no dependency to xactengine2_9.dll (and the game will not crash, but will also have no sound).
What I dont know, and maybe somebody can help me here, do I look at the problem when I see the path C:\WINDOWS\System32\ in the crash log, or is this just the 32/64Bit mechanism of Windows reporting a C:\WINDOWS\System32 dll when its really the 32Bit dll in C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ ?
Or is this exactly the problem, the program trying to open a 64Bit dll in C:\WINDOWS\System32\ and then of course getting error 0xc0000005, which means something like cant access, which would be true for a 64Bit DLL.
If the error log is wrong indicating C:\WINDOWS\System32\xactengine2_9.dll, meaning C:\Windows\SysWOW64\xactengine2_9.dll, than I would have to find out why this DLL is crashing. Should be then some dependency between this dll and the sound card driver.

Any Windows experts here who could help ?

[Ceejay]

hmm, I recall a thread some time ago where some people were having crashing issues with sound, they had to go in and change the bitrate, as your error appears to be sound related too maybe that will help for you.

Right-click the Speaker icon in your system tray and click Playback devices.
Select your speaker, then click Properties.
Click the Advanced tab.
Click the drop-down and it will show you the sample rate and bit depths options

Try a lower bit rate or hz rating.

[hockjin]

im having the exact same issue here, have been trying to debug the last few nights?

[Tydo]

Not trying to offer a solution, merely some things you may want to look at and consider.
Basically, xact is part of the (dead) XNA framework, a windows/xb360 game dev project under DX9. You can use this URL as a starting point.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff827592.aspx
It is also a good resourse if you want to get into sound mods for this game and need to make/modify the necessary xwb and xsb files.

Maybe you can use that to dig a bit more specifically into your problem (or give up right now).
For example, with that (the xact tools) you could essentially take every sound resource apart, resample to whatever you need, and put it back together.
(*cough* classic supcom music mod *cough*, killing the main menu background noise, etc.)

Other than that I second Ceejay's suggestion. Try setting sample rate to 44.1kHz (maybe even 48kHz). On a "native" windows system on a non-mac PC it normally does not matter, except for audio quality, and things just get resampled as necessary.
Experiment with the /nosound and /nomovie parameters separately. You can live without the voiceacting and animated portraits, specially in skirmish/pvp where that is a non-issue.

I would have suggested that you maybe reinstall dx9.0c, but your reported version of the DLL appears identical to mine (on W7) where it works, so you can probably skip that.

[KBlomquist]

Unfortunatly i couldnt make any progress in this matter. Its definetly a crash of xactengine2_9.dll. When i use the option /nosound the game doesnt crash because this dll is not in use by SupremeCommander.exe (ProcessExplorer is usefull to verify this). I assume that there is some problem in my sound driver (Cirrus Logic) in relationship to this xactengine2_9.dll. When I run the game on another Windows10 PC with Realtek Sound drivers, the exactly same xactengine2_9.dll is in use (again check with process explorer) and there are no issues. Maybe I should file a bug report to Cirrus Logic/Apple with the crash reports attached.

[Ceejay]

Originally posted by KBlomquist:

Unfortunatly i couldnt make any progress in this matter. Its definetly a crash of xactengine2_9.dll. When i use the option /nosound the game doesnt crash because this dll is not in use by SupremeCommander.exe (ProcessExplorer is usefull to verify this). I assume that there is some problem in my sound driver (Cirrus Logic) in relationship to this xactengine2_9.dll. When I run the game on another Windows10 PC with Realtek Sound drivers, the exactly same xactengine2_9.dll is in use (again check with process explorer) and there are no issues. Maybe I should file a bug report to Cirrus Logic/Apple with the crash reports attached.

Did you try adjusting your sound quality?

[KBlomquist]

My sound sound driver only lets me set 48000 / 16Bit or 48000 / 24Bit. There doesnt seem to be an adjustment for 44.1 kHz. New stuff meets ancient games - really sad. I think they didnt bother compatibilty for DX9.