Guild Wars 2

Glad to hear it’s fixed for so many people! If anybody is still having an issue, please let me know (with hardware specs too plz.)

Sorry again for the inconvenience!

-Dave

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

“We just managed to get our first reproduction in studio for this issue”….?

I’m glad.. but three days just to walk your character into the water?

Yep! Too busy farming sarcasm for this response…

GPU specs plz

Hi folks! We just managed to get our first reproduction in studio for this issue and are investigating. You could help the effort by:

1) Post the type of graphics card you have in this thread (or PM me your info) and
2) File an issue with Customer Support so we can get your DirectX Diagnostic info.

Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience!

-Dave

Hi folks, here’s some info on the issue.

There was some work done to how we build character textures (aka “composites”) in an effort to reduce memory fragmentation and out of memory crashes. There were two parts to the change:

1) Reduce the number of asynchronous composite builds in flight from four to one to reduce the total amount of texture memory used by the composite system. This should be reverted back to four soon enough.
2) Make the composite system allocate a small pool of texture to reuse during the composite build process. If there is no more room in the pool, the composite system waits a frame to give active composite jobs an opportunity to finish and release their textures back to the pool.

When a single character composite is built, as many as 122 separate ~1MB temporary textures are allocated, worked on, then discarded. These textures are too big to fit in the Windows Low Fragmentation Heap, so they cause massive memory fragmentation. Fragmentation occurs when a large chunk of memory is allocated from the OS then other smaller allocations occur “around” that larger allocation. When the chunk of memory is released back to the OS, this leaves holes in the address space so the OS can have a hard time finding large enough contiguous blocks of memory for larger allocations in the future.

In addition to fragmentation, character composites would allocate several hundred MB’s of memory during map load, starving other tasks of precious memory. When the OS either runs out of available address space or doesn’t have enough contiguous space for a large allocation, GW2 crashes. The texture pooling helps with both issues by both reducing fragmentation (by reusing textures) and limiting the number of textures that can be allocated at once.

We’re working on finding a good balance between the size of the texture pools and affected load times. Keep an eye out for future release notes related to the issue.

Hopefully this info is interesting to people

Sorry for the inconvenience!

-Dave

Hi folks,

This crash is known internally and we’re looking into it. Here’s some more info:

What’s happening is that some gameplay code is referencing a model file and that reference isn’t being handled properly on shutdown. We have some code to check any existing model references on shutdown to catch these situations in development, and unfortunately for you that manifests itself as a crash. It’s mostly harmless… mostly

We’re investigating the issue but we don’t have a good reproduction case.

If you regularly experience this crash on shutdown, could you please:

1) Submit your email address with the crash report so I can contact you directly if needed. (Please don’t post your email address in the forums)
2) Include exactly what you were doing before the crash and estimate how much time you were doing what. For example:
“I was farming Silverwastes for a few hours, then jumped into WvW and did Eternal Battlegrounds for an hour before shutting down.”
3) Please include your character name, class, race, and sex.
4) Include names of people in your party, if you were in one.

Thanks much and sorry for the inconvenience!

-Dave

Axiom.9742:

After a ton of debugging, can safely say GW2 is no longer playing nice with certain audio drivers. It’s apparently pre-loading/querying audio devices, even those NOT selected for use, then not terminating them properly on exit.

Completely removed all Maudio drivers (which prior to these buggy game updates GW2 worked perfectly fine with) , the 5 minute hang disappeared.

No such problems with TESO, GW2 versions prior to March, or any other software.

If you’re suddenly having these 5 minute hangs on every single exit, it’s likely drivers/resources not being properly released by GW2.

Basically stuck with the hangs unless Anet decides to squash this resource bug :/

Axiom could you try something? Run the game with “-nosound” on the command line for a couple days and let me know if you reproduce the issue.

Thanks!

-Dave

I’ve seen this internally a couple times but we don’t really have a good reproduction case. The current theory is that something is causing a “soft leak” with our model files so when the game closes it has to go through thousands of model references and close them down. This involves a lot of cross-thread communication which can be extremely slow on some hardware.

If you can get a solid reproduction case (WvW/PvP/world bosses/etc.) could you post here?

Thanks!

-Dave

DarkAsher.6520:

My friend has been trying to re-download Guild Wars 2, it worked in the past on said computer, but now whenever she tries to, it gives her this message about 10-20 minutes into downloading it.
I don’t know how to help her, but maybe someone here does. Thank you!

Hi there! I’ve been seeing this a bit in our crash reports and would love to get some more info from people. If you’re experiencing this crash while updating, can you try a few things for me and see if it helps? Try each of these separately:

- Run Windows Update and install any required updates.
- Update your antivirus and do a full system scan, then run GW2.exe and try patching again.
- If you’re still crashing, turn off any antivirus programs you may have running and try patching.

If you still crash, could you please submit your email address with the error report so I can get in touch with you directly? That particular error code means that there is an invalid parameter being sent to a C-Runtime library and requires some MATRIX STYLE debugging

Thanks!

-Dave