Crash preceded by stuttering and beeps w/ every keypress

Gunnah · November 25, 2018, 2:27am

Fantastic game, devs. Thanks for your work. Falling in love with Half Life all over again.

But my game invariably crashes whenever I try to play. Sometimes after 15 minutes, sometimes an hour. Before it happens, the game starts stuttering like crazy, and soon any keystroke is accompanied by a beep. A crash always follows.

I don’t have a proper screenshot of the showbudget panel but there are huge spikes on SOUND and SWAP when the stuttering begins, even when there’s not really anything going on.

i7 quad core, Radeon Mobility 5860, 8G RAM, Win7(64).

I’ve attached a minidump. Any suggestions on what to tweak would be great! Cheers.
hl2_4104_crash_2012_9_16T2_1_34C0.mdmp (98.1 KB)

lexa2 · November 25, 2018, 2:28am

What soundcard do you have? Had you tried updating drivers for it? Had you tried switching your soundcard into stereo or headphones mode and select the same more in game? Also could you please try to play the game with the sound disabled (add -nosound to the game commandline parameters) to check it the crash is really related to a bug with either your sound card driver of sound subsystem of the BM?

Gunnah · November 25, 2018, 2:31am

Well, maybe after I’ve cleared the game… sometimes I play for upwards of an hour before it happens, and I don’t want to spend an hour of my first playthrough with no sound on.

I did just notice, though, that when the stuttering starts, it only happens with input from the keyboard. I can look around and shoot all I want - but moving, ducking, etc., starts it stuttering, and soon beeping, then eventually crashing unless I stop.

lexa2 · November 25, 2018, 2:31am

Really strange and smells like a driver issue. These beeps, if they are produced by the PC speaker a.k.a. “system buzzer”, were typical to get in MS-DOS age when you have your keyboard controller input processing queue overflow due to system not being able (or not wanting) to process keyboard input in time. Having something of such kind in IA32 protected-mode era is a bit surprising but there are a lot of thing in the world you don’t expect to happen in the long run :-).

Gunnah · November 25, 2018, 2:32am

Oh, I’m almost certain they’re not system beeps - old enough to know one when I hear it It really sounds like an in-game thing.

Gunnah · November 25, 2018, 2:35am

It’s not just the beeping, it’s the stuttering too - it stops when I release the movement keys. Like it’s a key buffer thing or something.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? It’s discouraging me from playing, the fact that it might start stuttering and crashing after ten minutes.

lexa2 · November 25, 2018, 2:36am

There’s not that much to suggest, really.
If you’re on PS/2 - disable USB Keyboard and Mouse Support in BIOS. Double/triple check that you don’t have some kind of Windows “accessibility helpers” kicking in.
Try changing the driver for your keyboard to some other: i.e. if it’s something like “Microsoft PS/2 Keyboard (or compatible)” try changing it to “Generic PS/2 PC Keyboard” and so on.

Try playing some other Source-based games, Half-Life: Source or EP2 could be a good “testing” choice. If you’d be able to reproduce problem there - try kicking Steam/Valve support with the report on this problem in hopes that they would be able to provide you with some “magic solution”.

It makes me really sad that I’m not able to help you with this issue but that’s how it really is for now :-(.