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Jul 19, 2008
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Hail community,

Everytime one music track 'switches' to another in Deus Vult, and, in testing, Crusader Kings as well, there is a noticeable pause or hitch, where gameplay stops and moving the mouse is impossible, like a temporary freeze. This freeze lasts anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds usually and is extremely annoying.

Otherwise, wonderful game! I understand that a short pause between tracks is nothing extraordinary, but, given that the change happens every two minutes or so, it makes the game nearly unplayable with music on. Is there something I could do, other than simply disabling the sound?

(Forgive me if this is a repeat; I searched several pages before posting.)

Also: Using DV v. 2.01b (Jun 13 08)

EDIT: My system specs:

Windows XP Home, SP 2
2.2 Athlon Processor
NVidia GeForce FX 5500 (Latest drivers)
Sound Card (I can't recall; never had seemingly processor-related problems before)
1.5 Gigabytes of RAM

Hopefully, that's enough; let me know! Thanks in advance for any assistance.
 
Last edited:
Sure, here's what happened when I changed my music folder to 'music.bak':

Music was disabled, of course, but game performance improved. Pauses or hitches were slight to non-existent, and very tolerable, lasting no more than half a second at most, usually occurring at month turns and event notifications. Testing was as Byzantine Empire from 1066 for a few years, so area covered and processes being handled were high and intensive. This rate of performance would be ideal, if able to be maintained.

The music, then, seems the root; particularly, because there is never slowdown during a track. Only after a selection has finished and the next is being queued does the 5-15 second freeze occur, when a brief silence might normally be expected.

I had a similar problem in Europa Universalis II that I was able to solve by clearing the 'frontend' file in the music folder. The source of the issue was that the front end, which also extended to the tutorial, was loaded with every track available in the game, and would cause pauses when queueing files. By deleting the text there, gameplay would proceed as desired after starting a single player game.

Whether Crusader Kings is similarly overloaded, I cannot say, as it makes no distinction between the front end and single player music. Limiting, or removing, certain tracks from the playlist also has no effect. Identically, in EU II, my first attempts to simply halve the front end playlist were futile; only the complete removal of all selections proved successful in removing the freezes I had during the menu screen process.

Any suggestions? Thanks again for your first comment.
 
Have you tried to update your sound card drivers?

(Maybe not really helpful as a comment, but updating is always worth a try :D )
 
Do you also encounter freezes when playing an MP3 playlist with a media player like Windows Media Player?

CK uses a DirectSound interface to decode the MP3s, so I guess it would rely on existing codecs on your system. If a codec is at fault you should encounter the same freeze in media players (but not necessarily iTunes, VLC, or Winamp or other players with custom decoders -- only those that use MSACM).

I know that the CK music tracks were encoded with iTunes 3.0 (according to info in the files themselves), and files encoded with this version would cause random freezes for some people on Mac. I think I also heard that some versions of LAME (a common MP3 de- and encoder) also had issues with these files, but I'm not certain.

Since you're on XP you should have the default Microsoft Fraunhover MP3 codec, but if you ever installed a codec pack this may have been overwritten. If you have any codec pack installed, like the Kazaa Lite (K-Lite) Codec Pack, CCCP, Nimo, or other, try uninstalling it for now and see if it resolves the crash. Alternatively updating to a later version might help as well.
 
Hi guys,

I have exactly the same problem with 2.1 beta that is reported by C. FlaviusSilva. I hadn't experienced this issue before the newest beta patch (Jun 13), although this is the first beta patch I tried. If I rename the music directory to music.bak (as was suggested) the problem disappears.

I'm using Vista and I don't have any codec pack installed. Sorry for the rereport of this problem but I'd like to keep this thread alive.