Game freezes in town screen

[Kelben]

Is the game bugged? It hangs up very often in town screen while building and such. It hangs after loading also.

New PC, new install.

[Naki]

Is the game bugged? It hangs up very often in town screen while building and such. It hangs after loading also.

New PC, new install.

What version of Windows?
Nvidia GeForce videocard, I presume? If so, that is a known issue. It seems it started around September 2012, when a new Nvidia GeForce WHQL/Stable driver was released, and broke the Heroes VI town screens, causing these freezes. The most recent WHQL GeForce from before that were from May 2012.

If so, downgrading the GeForce video drivers to the May 2012 or older version seems to help for some people.
Closing all browsers + any other programs that use Adobe Flash (some chat/instant messenger clients do) seems to help, but does not solve the problem 100%.

Not sure what you meant by "It hangs after loading also. " ---> please can you clarify that?

EDIT: By the way, your thread title is bad - a better one would be "Game freezes in Town screen - known bug?" or some such.
Links:
See here:
http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/71 ... ce-drivers
and here:
http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/71 ... quot-issue

[Kelben]

You are right Naki, sorry was 1am here and got pissed off this stupid game that is not capable of running properly.

windows 7 x64
Asus NVidia GT630

I am certainly not going to downgrade my drivers, they do some good to all others games in the market...
I run the game and only the game while playing, no background music, skype or others.

Since it freezes often in town screen, I have to ctrl+alt+del my way out and thus load the game again, a couple of times, the adventure map appears but clicking anything is not working (the game freezes again).

[Naki]

You are right Naki, sorry was 1am here and got pissed off this stupid game that is not capable of running properly.

windows 7 x64
Asus NVidia GT630

I am certainly not going to downgrade my drivers, they do some good to all others games in the market...
I run the game and only the game while playing, no background music, skype or others.

Since it freezes often in town screen, I have to ctrl+alt+del my way out and thus load the game again, a couple of times, the adventure map appears but clicking anything is not working (the game freezes again).

It is not supposed to freeze on the Adventure map. It doesn't for me - it only freezes in the Town screen. It only freezes on the Adventure map if you give (or un-equip) a movement boosting artifact from a hero who has no movement points left.

Anyway, a better way than Ctrl+Alt+Del is to press Alt+F4 - then wait a bit - game closes cleanly. Then run the game again, and load the last Autosave.

By the way, I reported this bug to Nvidia, and they said it is a known bug (someone reported it before me, I think you can see that in the game official forums). I am not sure Nvidia will be able to reproduce it easily, however - they said they can't for now...

EDIT: Nope, seems it freezes on the Hero screen (not while in Town) too. But in the Hero screen it is much less often.

[honeyfree]

You just need to copy the file to C:/Users/*yourname*/Documents/Might and Magic Heroes VI/Scenario. If the folder doesn't exist, create one. Then it should show up in the screen where you select a single player mission, just start it with any hero you want and grab all the shiny stuff lying around.

As for the map editor, yeah, apparently that's the case.

[Naki]

Um, honeyfree, what?

[Kelben]

This is really confusing... And also disappointing... I seriously give up on this game until this issue is fixed. Since it won't be fixed through patch because no patch is going to be done prior to expansion, i guess i can simply say, i'm giving up.

[Naki]

This is really confusing... And also disappointing... I seriously give up on this game until this issue is fixed. Since it won't be fixed through patch because no patch is going to be done prior to expansion, i guess i can simply say, i'm giving up.

Um, did you try the latest WHQL/Stable GeForce drivers from this Monday?
Does the game still freeze with those too?

[Kelben]

I did not notice any new drivers on my Asus GT 630. Maybe I will give it a try again then.

[Naki]

I did not notice any new drivers on my Asus GT 630. Maybe I will give it a try again then.

You are not on a laptop, right?
If so, you should be using the drivers from Nvidia, and not the ASUS drivers, at least in my experience doing that is best. (Nvidia updates drivers more often/etc.)

[chazztizer]

I had same problem in town and rolled back my nvidia drivers and it seems to have solved my problem. I am confident this was the problem because I auto updated my drivers and then the crashes started.

[Kelben]

Thanks for the tip Naki since I think by default, the drivers are auto-updated from Asus and not NVidia, so I should probably check manually Nvidia website and see what is available there.
Chazztizer, I find it ridiculous to have to get older drivers to run the game properly. I am not only playing MMH6 (I am actually not playing it at all because of that annoyance) and new drivers do good to every single other games on the market...

EDIT: Still freezing... I had good hope though since I could play 3 or 4 rounds without issue but then, freeze.

[marc33594]

Glad to see I am not the only ones with this problem. Running an NVidia Geforce GTX650. I was running an older NVidia card which also was freezing. Ubisoft support suggested I upgrade to a newer card since the card I was using had no oncard memory. We have gone through a number of fixes including completely uninstalling and doing another load. One of their last suggestions was to reload windows!

It makes sense it is an NVidia problem as even with the old card I ran through the entire campaign without an issue. However I know I did upgrade drivers for the card and I suppose that was the issue. Not sure when I upgraded the drivers for the old card but bet about the time the freezes started. And makes sense still an issue since have the latest drivers for the new card.

Bottom line is unless NVidia or Ubisoft recognizes and fixes the problem my days of playing VI are pretty much over as a big hassle to continually reload. Like others I am not willing to go with older drivers just for one game.

[Elvin]

I decided to downgrade my drivers to 306.97 and I have no freezing problems anymore.

[Naki]

Good news (kind of?) from Nvidia finally!

03/04/2013 09:55 AM

Hello,

Our lab was able to reproduce the freeze finally. Development debug the problem and isolated the cause of the problem to be in the game itself. The latest comment from the bug suggest the game is doing something that is not supported in our drivers, thus resulting in the freeze. We've reported the issue back to the game developer and awaiting confirmation. Looks like the real fix will have to come from the game developers. We are looking into possible putting a workaround in our drivers but we don't know the full extend of the impact yet. We'll need to consult with the game developers before taking any action from our end. Ideally we want the game developer to fix this from their end and release a patch.

I'd suggest you report the issue back to the game developer as well. Let them know you've been working with NVIDIA on this issue and that we've isolated this to a possible game issue. You can also let them know that our developers relation team have already forwarded all the details from our investigation to them to confirm.

Best regards,
X.

EDIT: Also, here is another possible solution:

...If you are still experiencing this issue, we have found some options that work with the most recent NVIDIA drivers.

1.Start the Game.
2.Start task manager
3.Select the Game.
4.Right Click the game and hover over the “Set Priority” option. Select Realtime.
5.Right Click the game and click on “Set Affinity.”
6.Deselect CPU0 and click ok.

Please can you guys (NVidia GeForce videocard users) try this and report back?

[kueff]

Computer would not let me set to 'realtime'. It popped up a message saying it changed it to 'high' instead.

Thus far, no problems but have only been playing 15 mins. Lately, I would have had at least one lock-up of the program in that time.

I'll update and let you know more if things improve or fail to change.

Running windows 7x64. NVIDIA EVGA GTX 660ti with latest driver from Nvidia.

[Yurian Stonebow]

Since I am one of the unfortunate Nvidia customers who just so happened to make a serious miscalculation and buy Heroes VI when the buggy thing was first released, and who of course is a guy who at the moment is not able to enjoy the "great" game, well here's something oddly humorous we can all stare at for some time just for a good laugh's sake. This screenshot comes from an add for the Heroes VI public beta test:



Yes, we all did indeed get a chance to "enjoy" the "great" stuff offered by H6:
-those buggy maps and campaigns
-the typo plagued broken English found there within
-confused AI
-and some other "treats" as well (" unique" heroes, conflux, units being poorly balanced... the list is quite long as the players know all too well!)

Oh well, Heroes games parts V and VI sure did cause some good to come out of all that which went bad: I started to make maps of my own for H3 and later for H4 as well. The NWC made games had much better map editors than those later Heroes games published by Ubi ever did. To me there certainly is something of great irony to be found in it all. A man must first go and try in vain the newer stuff before he can fully get to appreciate the quality games he played in his youth!

-Yurian
(Certainly not a fan boy of Ubi's "Heroic" effort)

[Ribannah]

I have a Radeon card, which means that the town screen shows a black & white checkerboard instead of the town image, but at least I can play the game.

With issues for two different types of graphics cards, the problem must be in the game software.

[Naki]

I have a Radeon card, which means that the town screen shows a black & white checkerboard instead of the town image, but at least I can play the game.

With issues for two different types of graphics cards, the problem must be in the game software.

No, that does not mean that.
Just set the Textures to Low or High, and the Checkerboard town bug should be gone - it ONLY happens on the Medium textures setting.
Please tell us if that helped, or not.

The Nvidia GeForce Town Screen Freeze and the Checkerboard Town bug are two completely different bugs that have nothing to do with one another.

[Ribannah]

The checkerboard remains regardless of the video settings.