Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance

Sound Issues Leading to CTD - Suggestions On How To Fix Them?
Before all the forum trolls decide to flame me, I'm only asking for the $5-10 back that I spent on the bundle oh so many years ago.

Now, that being said, I've read through these discussions, been to FAF, read syskop's (somewhat unrelated) guide, googled countless dead non-Steam forum threads and exhausted most reasonable avenues to address whatever is causing the crash. Ten minutes into the game (sometimes more, sometimes less) - Screen Freeze, then CTD.

Trying to decipher the crash log is useless as none of the coding means anything to me, dxdiag has registered all the crashes in the past 2 months (twelve of which have been SCFA). Short of uninstalling and forgetting that this game ever existed, not sure what else to do.

And while I'm on my soapbox, it might help if there was actually a troubleshooting section in these discussions rather than just a "General" catch-all. It seems like there are over a dozen known bugs ranging from memory issues to surround sound to graphics driver problems that are spread across multiple years' worth of threads.

Just a thought.
Naposledy upravil Ledonev; 4. říj. 2018 v 19.43
Původně napsal BlazureWolf:
I may have found the solution.

Head into your steam folder for SupCom:FA and delete both music files (The .xwb and the .xsb)

Should be in: ...\Steam\steamapps\common\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\sounds

My first test I played a skirmish that was over an hour long, I had sound but didn't crash, usually I would within 45min or so. 2nd test I played a multiplayer, though it was less than 30min long, I did not crash and still had sound. Obviosuly this mean you won't have music playing at any time, but it's definitly better than having no sound.

If you check the log files, the game will complain about it and some other sound cues, but so far, nothing attributed to a crash.
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Sagi 11. zář. 2018 v 18.05 
Steam is quite clear when they give a refund.
If you already have it for years you can about forget it.
I'm on the same boat my friend. I'm tried using that guide too, tried uninstall reinstalling, all drivers are updated, read through crash logs and tried what I could but to no avail.

However when I did make a new shortcut to the .exe and added "/nosound" to the end of the target, I believe I was able to play without crashing at all. I'll have to test it out some more to be sure.

I have tried to mess around with my computer's sound settings to see if I can get it to work without needing that shortcut. I'd be able to enjoy the game a lot more with sounds.
you can always run the game with a command line switch to print the log into a file and then upload that file to pastebin and link it here.
maybe someone else can read something out of it and tell you what to do to fix your issue.

There is a tech support sub forum on the faforever forum where you can find loads of information about bugs/how to report stuff properly.

Regarding the refund: You can always try to get one but i can't imagine valve refunding this game after years of owning it.
I should clarify. I know full well I wouldn't be receiving a refund - but short of hyperbole, there seemed to be no other options to vent our frustrations.

I do appreciate the helpful advice, I've combed through the support forums on FAF and had no luck there. Might give the /nosound switch a try. I attempted to play the game without sound earlier by just muting it. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that doesn't fool the executable into not trying to access directx sound files.

Nothing more aggravating than getting to that sweet spot about ten minutes in and then freeze, ctd. If only Planetary Annihilation was as engrossing as this game was (and of course, it's predecessor Total Annhilation).
@Ledonev and Blazure Wolf: Please report your results regarding the /nosound switch when you have done the test.

I know that there are some problems regarding sound with SC:FA, but as of now I was only aware of broken sound but not crashes caused by this.

I know that some programs (e. g. these installed by the audio driver) running in the background can cause sound problems.
A quick update. With the /nosound switch on the executable, the game runs smoothly. Lasted about an hour and a half, before the AI's ganged-up on me.

*Edit* Might have been premature, tried another round and it crashed after about a half hour. But, I might have not launched it with the /nosound tag.
Naposledy upravil Ledonev; 12. zář. 2018 v 14.57
That’s great news! Please do another game with log file writing and sound on. Post the log here after the game has crashed.
Any chance you happen to know the switch to turn on logging?

On an aside, it is still somewhat temperamental.

If I zoom out to a wide enough screen while selecting the UEF satellite, the screen will simply go blank, the system will cycle through refreshing the input and it will restore. Unnerving, but recoverable. It may have something to do with my 4k screen resolution.

And - this has happened twice now - occasionally, something will tab out to the desktop. When this happens, the game crashes every single time. No tabbing back in.
the command line switch to print the log into a file is
/log <file location.log>

FA sucks when using fullscreen.
I recommend using windowed mode and some 3rd party tool to force the game into borderless fullscreen.
eg this -> https://sourceforge.net/projects/borderless-gaming.mirror/
Thanks, windowed mode will help. I'm starting my series of tests, I'll post what I have when I finish. It'll be a bit though, got a couple of things going in throughout the day.
fred 13. zář. 2018 v 12.38 
my two cents:
a) use your original sound drivers. some sound driver delivered by windows is very crappy.
b) don't use a onboard soundcard. deactivate and install a good one OR
c) buy a good onboard soundcard. what worked for me was a G1.sniper

and really, I am serious, when a pc can not handle supreme commander, its his fault, not the game is.
whatever, any pc i own has to run FA flawless, otherwise i try until it works,
and I solved my sound problems with the above A-B-C. Well, for the one it's luck, for the other it might be expensive..
I would recommend to use some store where you can send the soundcard it back when it is not working.
but make sure you uninstall the faulty sounddriver to the last bit!
Naposledy upravil fred; 13. zář. 2018 v 12.40
You must have money to throw away if you're willing to say it's the user's fault for not buying the exact right hardware for a program to work. Up front, yes if I'm trying to run SupCom which wants at least 2 GB of memory and I put in 1 GB and I find myself with issues, then that's on me.

But kind of hard to say that it's my fault that SupCom doesn't want to work even though my PC is n i7-7700K, 32 GB memory, and with two 1080 graphics cards. Sometimes there are programs that conflict and despite all the technical knowledge we may have, there's always some small specific detail that we either miss or just don't know about.
------

But I digressed. From some forums I've found that SupComFA does not really like 7.1 surround, that it even prefers Stereo. Even after making sure that my sounddrivers were updated and switching all my devices to Stereo, the game continues to crash randomly mid game.

I've pasted the crash logs into a pastebin link, I put 4 crash logs in there to see if there's any consistancies.

https://pastebin.com/CDCqQdfc

This doesn't bother me but, during the game I did notice music not playing sometimes and I noticed two songs playing over each other. I want to say it may have to do with "Error playing cue" , not exactly sure.

What makes me say that is when playing with the command line /nosound, I have yet to experience a crash. I even managed to play a full game with a friend and even delayed ending the game for nearly an hour to make sure. And generally when it comes to sounds, if it were caused by one of the units, then the crashes would be more consistant.

Like I said, I did change all my sound settings to stereo and spacial sounds off (I'm on Windows 10), and drivers have been up to date. Nice to know I can play the game, but not having sound takes a bit away from the immersion and the sound cues are helpful for me to know what may be going on else where on the battlefield. It is of course possible that I may have missed something too.
Naposledy upravil BlazureWolf; 13. zář. 2018 v 15.33
@Blazure Wolf - I believe I'm having similar issues. With /nosound, game works fine. I've set everything I can toggle to stereo and switched-off all spatial/surround sound options. It always crashed. I did notice that when the game launches, the THQ logo has no sound, but then the next GPG one does, then nothing, then the main screen sound works fine. Bizarre.

With regard to the hardware recommendation, I appreciate the suggestion that maybe there's some hardware out there that might accomodate, but my Asus board with SupremeFX gets pretty close to being its own board. I'm not going to buy a $20-30 sound board to troubleshoot a game released in 2005(?). When I get the chance, I will run the game and populate some crash logs to compare.
Blazure Wolf původně napsal:
You must have money to throw away if you're willing to say it's the user's fault for not buying the exact right hardware for a program to work. Up front, yes if I'm trying to run SupCom which wants at least 2 GB of memory and I put in 1 GB and I find myself with issues, then that's on me.

But kind of hard to say that it's my fault that SupCom doesn't want to work even though my PC is n i7-7700K, 32 GB memory, and with two 1080 graphics cards. Sometimes there are programs that conflict and despite all the technical knowledge we may have, there's always some small specific detail that we either miss or just don't know about.
------

But I digressed. From some forums I've found that SupComFA does not really like 7.1 surround, that it even prefers Stereo. Even after making sure that my sounddrivers were updated and switching all my devices to Stereo, the game continues to crash randomly mid game.

I've pasted the crash logs into a pastebin link, I put 4 crash logs in there to see if there's any consistancies.

https://pastebin.com/CDCqQdfc

This doesn't bother me but, during the game I did notice music not playing sometimes and I noticed two songs playing over each other. I want to say it may have to do with "Error playing cue" , not exactly sure.

What makes me say that is when playing with the command line /nosound, I have yet to experience a crash. I even managed to play a full game with a friend and even delayed ending the game for nearly an hour to make sure. And generally when it comes to sounds, if it were caused by one of the units, then the crashes would be more consistant.

Like I said, I did change all my sound settings to stereo and spacial sounds off (I'm on Windows 10), and drivers have been up to date. Nice to know I can play the game, but not having sound takes a bit away from the immersion and the sound cues are helpful for me to know what may be going on else where on the battlefield. It is of course possible that I may have missed something too.

those sound errors are quite annoying...
i vaguely recall someone having some nvidia hd sound drivers installed which caused those issues but i had the conversation in an irc so no chance of finding that again - might be worth checking if you have some sound drivers from your gfx card manufacturer that ♥♥♥♥♥ it up

you can also try to delete the sound files and redownload them by validating the game files but i don't think the files itself are the issue here
There are 4 reasons why it may crash for you:
1) sound / graphics driver issue (disable HQ sound, set sound to stereo mode, shut down any graphics driver related software that runs on startup but isn't actually necessary)
2) 32bit system, providing not enough ram, causing the game to crash once too many actions / effects / units exist (there's this 32bit system memory limit per application that 64bit don't struggle with)
3) faulty mod, throwing errors (I think this one's unrelated currently)
4) faulty ram (very unlikely but possible)

Aside from all of this 3rd party programs may interfere.

Actually if I recall that correctly the majority of people struggling with getting the game to run experience issues with either sound or video.

Edit: If you can solve the issue post the solution for others.
Naposledy upravil Hollow; 14. zář. 2018 v 6.21
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