Alpha 18 Game freezes on Horde night (Alpha 18.4)

[ProlificPoultry]

I’m kind of hoping someone here will be able to help me but pretty much for the last two horde nights my game has been freezing to where I get the “program not responding text box” while I still hear the sound of the crickets chirping. This hasn’t happened on any horde night before the last two and disabling zombie spawns gets me through the night without any issues. Of course I don’t want to play like this. Here are my logs: https://pastebin.com/SYfwVyi8

 

Any help would be very much appreciated! Please and thank you! 

[BFT2020]

Your saved game is Alpha 20 but trying to play on Alpha 18.  You can’t start on the latest Alpha then roll back to a previous alpha

[ProlificPoultry]

 

29 minutes ago, BFT2020 said:

Your saved game is Alpha 20 but trying to play on Alpha 18.  You can’t start on the latest Alpha then roll back to a previous alpha

I downloaded the depot for alpha 18.4 so I don't have to keep rolling back my game. I can have the two versions co-existing at once since all the saves are stored in the same place. I haven't tried to open my alpha 18 world in alpha 20 and vice versa. Like I said, I was able to play the game normally up until the past two horde nights. I have fought 8 other hordes before that since I am running horde every 4 days. I haven't ever encountered any problems up until this point. I don't think it's my computer because, well you can see my specs from the log and even before it started freezing on horde night, the game was running really smooth on like ultra settings since this is alpha 18.4

[BFT2020]

The log for your 18.4 saved game specifically states that it is looking for Feral Sense and Regions.  Those were added after Alpha18.  It thinks those were earlier features from an earlier version so the game is trying to ignore them.  I can't copy the actual lines in the log as I am at work and they don't allow me to access the pastebin site on my work computer.

 

At some point, your saved game was ran under version Alpha 20.  Yes you can run multiple versions of 7D2D at the same time, but it would be best to have different locations for the saves and generated worlds to ensure that you don't accidently use either the worlds or saves on the wrong version.

 

This may not be the reason you are seeing the issues when you are playing horde nights, but it makes it very difficult to root cause the issue since this might be causing conflicts in your game.

[ProlificPoultry]

1 hour ago, BFT2020 said:

The log for your 18.4 saved game specifically states that it is looking for Feral Sense and Regions.  Those were added after Alpha18.  It thinks those were earlier features from an earlier version so the game is trying to ignore them.  I can't copy the actual lines in the log as I am at work and they don't allow me to access the pastebin site on my work computer.

 

At some point, your saved game was ran under version Alpha 20.  Yes you can run multiple versions of 7D2D at the same time, but it would be best to have different locations for the saves and generated worlds to ensure that you don't accidently use either the worlds or saves on the wrong version.

 

This may not be the reason you are seeing the issues when you are playing horde nights, but it makes it very difficult to root cause the issue since this might be causing conflicts in your game.

Oh wait. Shoot. Darn I wish you could tell me where it says this but that sounds like it makes sense. Mmmm I don’t know what to do about that. Is there a way to have the game try to run the world and my save from a different location? I’m going to think about this some but you’ll probably have to help with that too! Sorry. Thank you for your help though. I’m really grateful that someone decided to help me with this!

[BFT2020]

• Line 39 - Last version played 20.6
• Line 100 - savegame contains unknown option 'ZombieFeralSense'
• Line 101 - savegame contains unknown option 'Region'

I only run one copy at a time so I never had the need to setup custom save game location arguments.  I know others do it all the time so hopefully someone will chime in with the correct argument to add to the game launcher.  I will see what I can find, but someone doing it is more likely to give you the correct directions.

[Beelzybub]

Also, you're running A20 mods on A18 which is not likely to go well.

[ProlificPoultry]

Alright so I’ve actually been finding quite a bit of info on this problem. Or rather things being in one version and not another. I have tried deleting and reinstalling the depot for alpha 18.4 which didn’t work however people have said that when playing with depots and other versions to use the mod launcher because it can store separate copies of the game for you. 
 

But do you think that having my save be in a different folder will fix this? I’m having difficulty wrapping my head around this as it is. So am I getting this error because the saves are stored in the same location? Would I be able to just have the game on a different drive do you think? 
 

Also I went through the alpha 18 launcher and opened settings in registry editor and I can see the feral sense and region options I think. But I think this is for all versions of the game so this is where the settings are stored? I’m probably talking out of turn here since I’m not very experience with this sort of thing but I’m thinking would it even matter if the save location changed? Maybe the launcher is the way to go since I remember that it creates an entirely different installation of the game and I had to go through a “mod launcher” folder to get to my copy of darkness falls so it might have the settings stored only for alpha 18.4 there in a separate registry. I can see that the registry is in a “Fun Pimps” folder so maybe through the launcher there will be a separate folder for all that stuff. 
 

Again, I’m probably talking out of turn here and I know you know better than me, so this is all just guess work and me throwing out ideas to see if something sounds correct to you 😂.

 

Regardless I really appreciate you helping a stupid kid like me out, especially since you have a day job and this probably isn’t the kind of garbage you ought to be dealing with while you work.😅 Unless you secretly work for the Fun Pimps! But yeah thank you no matter what happens. I wouldn’t have found out any of this stuff without you!❤️

[ProlificPoultry]

1 hour ago, Beelzybub said:

Also, you're running A20 mods on A18 which is not likely to go well.

I’ve gotten errors about this in the past where I tried to see if a certain mod for a newer alpha would work on an older version, which it did not but the only thing that happened was the mod wouldn’t show up while I played. This was the case for newer versions of Khaine’s backpack, however the longer loot bags haven’t caused an issue on my other horde nights. But I can see if removing it will do something because I’m pretty desperate to save this save at this point. 

[Star69]

If you don't know how to manually set up two game instances, please use the mod launcher as it does it for you and does it quite well. Per the log, somehow 20.6 and 18.4 are accessing each others data.

[BFT2020]

Setup the game as A18.4 and then copy it over.  You can setup different versions that way without using modlauncher and such.  It is easy to do by just simply going into Steam, select properties when you have the game highlighted, go to  Betas and select 18.4 on the top drop down list.  The game will install all files for 18.4,  Then following the video instructions below, copy it over and rename the folder to distinguish from the latest update version.  Then go back to the game launcher and change it back to None which will have the latest version.

 

Then launch from the exe file in the folder you want to play

 

Good instruction video

 

 

[ProlificPoultry]

3 hours ago, BFT2020 said:

Setup the game as A18.4 and then copy it over.  You can setup different versions that way without using modlauncher and such.  It is easy to do by just simply going into Steam, select properties when you have the game highlighted, go to  Betas and select 18.4 on the top drop down list.  The game will install all files for 18.4,  Then following the video instructions below, copy it over and rename the folder to distinguish from the latest update version.  Then go back to the game launcher and change it back to None which will have the latest version.

 

Then launch from the exe file in the folder you want to play

 

Good instruction video

 

 

So I tried this and did what you said where I went into steam and made a copy of alpha 18.4 from there. Then I made a copy of my saves folder and did what he said where I edit the properties of the exe to route to the copied save folder. But for some reason the exe keeps using my old save folder. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I also tried using the mod launcher which almost worked until it crashed at the end of horde night. I even got rid of the modlet that wasnt native to alpha 18. I have tried using the mod launcher again, and rolling back the save for it (I made a backup right before horde night starts so that I can test stuff like this) and it's crashing like an hour in just like before. The mod launcher has its own separate game folder to where once I selected the depot for it to use then I had to create my character all over again, however I put my savefolder in there and only those saves would be loaded. It's as if I downloaded a fresh 18.4 without the other newer saves. I don't know what to do but I'm going to keep thinking about it. Here's the log from the launcher : https://pastebin.com/drqyQseG

[meganoth]

Usually when the game itself has problems you see something in the log. On the other hand, if you don't see anything in the log it most often is because of "external" problems like windows settings, not enough memory or some anti-virus stuff.

 

In your case nothing is in the logs so you should check windows if there is any error showing up there. The program to check windows errors and warnings is called eventvwr.

 

If you don't find anything in the logs then memory is a likely culprit. Your log shows that you are using 9G of memory for heap (=dynamic data) alone. I looked for a comparable log of another SP game here in "General Support" and he used only 4G of heap (with 20.6). This is far from conclusive, just a hint it might be actually memory-related.

 

You could check by playing a smaller world than 10k but that would mean starting a new game for unknown gain. You should make sure you have no browsers or other programs running while playing the game. You SHOULD specifically check that you have have "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives checkbox" checked in the performance settings of windows and that you have at least a few dozen Gig free space on your main SSD or hard disk (where windows itself is located). And you should check that the games program and savegame folders are excluded from your anti-virus

 

 

 

 

[ProlificPoultry]

11 hours ago, meganoth said:

Usually when the game itself has problems you see something in the log. On the other hand, if you don't see anything in the log it most often is because of "external" problems like windows settings, not enough memory or some anti-virus stuff.

 

In your case nothing is in the logs so you should check windows if there is any error showing up there. The program to check windows errors and warnings is called eventvwr.

 

If you don't find anything in the logs then memory is a likely culprit. Your log shows that you are using 9G of memory for heap (=dynamic data) alone. I looked for a comparable log of another SP game here in "General Support" and he used only 4G of heap (with 20.6). This is far from conclusive, just a hint it might be actually memory-related.

 

You could check by playing a smaller world than 10k but that would mean starting a new game for unknown gain. You should make sure you have no browsers or other programs running while playing the game. You SHOULD specifically check that you have have "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives checkbox" checked in the performance settings of windows and that you have at least a few dozen Gig free space on your main SSD or hard disk (where windows itself is located). And you should check that the games program and savegame folders are excluded from your anti-virus

 

 

 

 

Uh oh. Um heh, I actually changed the "automatically manage paging file side for all drives" thing not too long ago to fix stuttering I had in my alpha 20 save. Um I'm going to change it back to see if that works. Heh ah I feel dumb now. I saw someone did this in a video to fix the lag in 7 days to die and I think it worked for me but right now I just want to save my alpha 18 game. Wish me luck, yeah?!

[ProlificPoultry]

Okay so I changed the paging file size thing back to default. I have almost 300 gigs free on my ssd. I tried a new game with the same settings in Navezgane and "fought" or more appropriately spectated a day 44 horde and day 7000 zombie horde (both max 64 zombies) with minimal killing and I experienced no crashing, only some frame drops when the building started to collapse a little. I tried running my other save with windows 8 a la compatibility troubleshooter  and I was almost able to play through an entire night. However right before I ran it with the compatibility troubleshooter  I also disabled the windows profile assistant thing because I saw that that wass throwing me some errors in eventvwr. So I dont know if that had anything to do with it. However before I finished the night (around 3am) I exited the game and rolled back the save to see if this was just a fluke and sure enough I froze up again. However this time and subsequent attempts to play through the night just have the game freeze but the "program not responding" prompt doesn't pop up anymore. My screen is jsut frozen and I only hear the sound of the crickets. So I'm back to square one again. Now the attempts mentioned in this were through the depot folder I keep it in, so I have yet to try it through the mod launcher but I doubt at this point that it will make a difference. Also thanks for your help by the way along with everyone else's. 

14 hours ago, meganoth said:

Usually when the game itself has problems you see something in the log. On the other hand, if you don't see anything in the log it most often is because of "external" problems like windows settings, not enough memory or some anti-virus stuff.

 

In your case nothing is in the logs so you should check windows if there is any error showing up there. The program to check windows errors and warnings is called eventvwr.

 

If you don't find anything in the logs then memory is a likely culprit. Your log shows that you are using 9G of memory for heap (=dynamic data) alone. I looked for a comparable log of another SP game here in "General Support" and he used only 4G of heap (with 20.6). This is far from conclusive, just a hint it might be actually memory-related.

 

You could check by playing a smaller world than 10k but that would mean starting a new game for unknown gain. You should make sure you have no browsers or other programs running while playing the game. You SHOULD specifically check that you have have "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives checkbox" checked in the performance settings of windows and that you have at least a few dozen Gig free space on your main SSD or hard disk (where windows itself is located). And you should check that the games program and savegame folders are excluded from your anti-virus

 

 

 

 

 

[meganoth]

Windows 8?  It may have less RAM usage but I doubt TFP is still testing the game with it

[BFT2020]

I don’t think you are going to be able to save your other save game file.  As soon as you used it for Alpha 20, the data in that file is looking for Alpha 20 assets and code.

[ProlificPoultry]

58 minutes ago, BFT2020 said:

I don’t think you are going to be able to save your other save game file.  As soon as you used it for Alpha 20, the data in that file is looking for Alpha 20 assets and code.

No. There is still something I can do. I have a backup save for the game that is two days before the last functional horde that I played. It was day 34, and the horde was on day 36 so I’m going to fast forward time to each horde night to see if the game still crashes. Night 40 is when the crashes started to happen. And I swear I don’t remember opening the save file in  alpha 20 because I’ve done that before with other versions in the past and the world completely breaks while my save now is still fully functional except for horde night. I put it in so much time and everything had gone so well and I’ve gotten out of @%$# that I shouldn’t have by being a clever little rat in the game and I can’t just throw my hands up and let the game kill my save like this. But just to be sure, I am going to now keep my alpha 20 save and my alpha 18 saves in the mod launcher so that there is no chance they will ever meet

[SylenThunder]

Be aware that using settime has a strong chance of breaking your save. 

[BFT2020]

2 hours ago, ProlificPoultry said:

No. There is still something I can do. I have a backup save for the game that is two days before the last functional horde that I played. It was day 34, and the horde was on day 36 so I’m going to fast forward time to each horde night to see if the game still crashes. Night 40 is when the crashes started to happen. And I swear I don’t remember opening the save file in  alpha 20 because I’ve done that before with other versions in the past and the world completely breaks while my save now is still fully functional except for horde night. 

 

Well, we do know for a fact that you did play an Alpha 18.4 save game on an Alpha 20.6 game version, as the logfile you shared with us confirmed that.  With your Day 34 day, post the logfile so we can confirm that it has never been used in an Alpha 20.6 version game.

 

And I am not trying to be rude or anything, but we need to confirm that your 18.4 savegame file is cleaned and not been corrupted by playing it in 20.6.  We need to verify what actually happened, not what we think happened.

[ProlificPoultry]

7 hours ago, BFT2020 said:

 

Well, we do know for a fact that you did play an Alpha 18.4 save game on an Alpha 20.6 game version, as the logfile you shared with us confirmed that.  With your Day 34 day, post the logfile so we can confirm that it has never been used in an Alpha 20.6 version game.

 

And I am not trying to be rude or anything, but we need to confirm that your 18.4 savegame file is cleaned and not been corrupted by playing it in 20.6.  We need to verify what actually happened, not what we think happened.

I know you’re not being rude and you’re just trying to help. Actually you guys are having me thinking I did open it and I don’t remember. Regardless I’m grateful you’ve been along on this little adventure of mine and I actually did roll back my save before I read your message and I have this save in the mod launcher and I fast forwarded time just to see if it would crash on night 36 and 40 respectively and it did not. Which further supports what you guys are or have been saying and that I’m a forgetful dummy 😔. I rolled back my save again to play from day 34 and now Imm on the morning of day 36. Here’s my log from the mod launcher which should be the same for if I got the log from the fun pimps folder yeah? : https://pastebin.com/6whdJ53s

Edited March 12, 2023 by ProlificPoultry (see edit history)

[BFT2020]

Save looks good and I didn't see anything in the logfile that would point to a possible issue.

 

Some general things to look at / ask / try:

 

• Do you happen to have any tree farms in the area?
• What is the amount of zombies you have set to be alive at once for the BM horde?  Have you tried lowering that amount to reduce entities on screen?
• Are you able to check the event viewer log and get more specifics on why it hung up / crash?  Sometimes the error code given will give us a clue to see what is happening.
• How long are you playing at the point that the horde night starts?  Does it change if you restart the game right before the horde night?
• Any overclocking going on?
• What is your ram specs and what is your bios set for (in regards to the ram)?
• Are you able to monitor and record the various temperatures in your computer as you are playing the game?
• Also do some memory testing (see link below from Tom's Hardware).

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/how-to-test-ram

 

With no warnings in the logfile stating that the game is trying to load up something that is either missing or corrupted, it makes me think that the horde night might be stressing out your system to the point that unity crashes (I have had 7D2D crash on me occasionally, but nothing consistently or not tied to an error I introduced in my mod)

[Beelzybub]

On 3/11/2023 at 4:59 PM, ProlificPoultry said:

Here’s my log from the mod launcher

Why is your save game named "compopack A18" but there's no compopack installed?

[ProlificPoultry]

On 3/13/2023 at 5:03 PM, Beelzybub said:

Why is your save game named "compopack A18" but there's no compopack installed?

So I used king gen (remember when that was a thing?) to generate a world. I dug up an old version of the compopack and I moved the poi’s to my prefabs folder and generated a poi list off that to get a world with the compopack poi’s in it. However I just learned today that you don’t even have to do that. There’s instructions in the download to use the in game generator and a modified rwg mixer

[ProlificPoultry]

On 3/13/2023 at 3:19 PM, BFT2020 said:

Save looks good and I didn't see anything in the logfile that would point to a possible issue.

 

Some general things to look at / ask / try:

 

• Do you happen to have any tree farms in the area?
• What is the amount of zombies you have set to be alive at once for the BM horde?  Have you tried lowering that amount to reduce entities on screen?
• Are you able to check the event viewer log and get more specifics on why it hung up / crash?  Sometimes the error code given will give us a clue to see what is happening.
• How long are you playing at the point that the horde night starts?  Does it change if you restart the game right before the horde night?
• Any overclocking going on?
• What is your ram specs and what is your bios set for (in regards to the ram)?
• Are you able to monitor and record the various temperatures in your computer as you are playing the game?
• Also do some memory testing (see link below from Tom's Hardware).

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/how-to-test-ram

 

With no warnings in the logfile stating that the game is trying to load up something that is either missing or corrupted, it makes me think that the horde night might be stressing out your system to the point that unity crashes (I have had 7D2D crash on me occasionally, but nothing consistently or not tied to an error I introduced in my mod)

Alrighty so I do have a tree farm of sorts near my house which is also across the street from my base, however this hasn't caused problems in the past. But to test, I cut down most of the trees around my house and my game still froze. 

 

I have it set to 64 max alive but that hasn't caused issues in the past either. I have not tried lowering the number but I can. 

 

I literally saved like half an in game hour before the horde so I load in and I fight the horde pretty much right off the bat. I did not try restarting the game right before the horde starts.

 

I haven't touched the overclocking settings in CAM and I think its disabled in my BIOS anyways but I have just removed that panel from my CAM settings which apparently disables it. 

 

I have 16gb of ram. I'm not sure what it is set to in the BIOS. I did play around with the paging file size a couple of weeks ago because of some really bad stuttering in my Alpha 20 game but I have since turned it back to default as of like 4 days ago or something.

 

I am able to see what temperature my computer is at while I play and the highest it has went on an alpha 18 horde night is like 60 to 70 degrees C, however it only gets to about 40 or 50 before the game freezes. 

 

Here's the event viewer log details : https://pastebin.com/BjvfkWTh

 

Alright so I ran the windows memory test and it did not detect any issues

 

I tried the horde again with 32 max alive instead of 64 and my game still froze at about the same time (this isn't related to the problem but I have been playing 64 max hordes that I was just breezing through this one until it froze)

 

Something else I forgot to mention is that I can make it through the whole horde night by just leaving my player idle and doing nothing. It worked once, and it almost worked a second time except once I reached morning the zombies were frozen. I tried using that symbol on the number pad to freeze / unfreeze their Ai and that didn't work. I shot at them, still didn't work so I tried quitting the game and then it froze again. 

Edited March 15, 2023 by ProlificPoultry (see edit history)