[mattkowalski]

Hey,

I hope this is a known issue with an easy solution!

Whenever I try and start a skirmish/multiplayer game, it fails to load. As soon as I've selected the skirmish/multiplayer options, and clicked start, the options disappear, and I'm left with the main menu background and no loading screen. After a while, the Vista "Command and Conquer 3 has stopped working" message is displayed.

The strange thing is, campaign missions and the tutorial levels all load and play fine - which I guess would at least partially point the finger away from a hardware problem.

For the record though I'm using Vista Home Premium and my hardware is;

AMD Athlon 64 3400+
1024Mb DDR2 RAM
ATi X800 Platinum Edition
Creative Audigy 2 ZS (Although I've tried a different sound card too)


Cheers for any help

[L.Armitage]

I havent tried any of the skirmish / multiplayer stuff on C&C 3 yet, so i'll have a go later and let you know if i suffer from the same issues.

[Sphynx]

Works fine on for me (see left for vista ver). Sounds to me like you may need a driver update. Or it could be something as simple as a bad install. Isn't there a repair option in the un-install menu?

[mattkowalski]

I tried copying the contents of the DVD to my hard drive and running the installer from there, in case the installer was having issues with my DVD drive. After it had finished, the installation size was identical to before, and it had the same problem.

On the driver front, my video card's up to date. My sound card isn't though, because the newest drivers seemed to disable my 7.1 setup. I'm using the previous drivers. I'm sure it's not my sound card anyway, because I've disabled it and tried my motherboard's onboard sound instead.

Any other ideas?

This post has been edited by mattkowalski: 05 April 2007 - 06:46 PM

[SD_Scooter]

I had similar problems when I first began to play C&C 3 on Vista. I did some troubleshooting and discovered it was because of my Nvidia video card. I loaded up the latest "Beta" version of Nvidia drivers...and all my problems vanished. In fact, I can now play several other video games that I had crashing problems with before the driver change.

if you have an Nvidia video card in your rig, make the change to the beta drivers from here:

http://www.nzone.com...betadriver.html

I still have problems with Battlefield 2142 though...damnit!!! I can only play one round before the game crashes with a memory.dll fault. I have seen many posts about this, and many solutions, but none of them work yet. At least if you have a Nvidia card. Luckily I have a removable swap drive. I just swap out Vista for my XP drive and I can still play BF 2142

This post has been edited by SD_Scooter: 06 April 2007 - 02:13 PM

[mattkowalski]

I'm using an ATi X800 Platinum Edition card, and another guy I know of that's got the same problem http://cnc3forums.co...hp?showtopic=54 is also using an ATi card as well. In that post, he mentions that his flatmate's system is more or less the same, but works.

I've just looked for the latest chipset drivers for my motherboard, but they're dated 2005. I'm guessing installing those is just gonna cause more problems, because Vista would have had more recent drivers.

I've also just tried disabling my Audigy 2 ZS card, and onboard sound, and it didn't make a difference.

So much for EA's technical support replying within 24 hours! It's been over 2 days now! I'm pretty sure the people frequenting these parts are more competent anyway!

[nilberg]

Ok, this might seem a bit daft to some of you, but I actually think this might be related to Vista's Desktop Window Manager.
Having the same problems; playing for about 15-45 minutes, the game suddenly froze, and exited to Windows.

I checked the EventViewer > Application log; and found the errors. JUST BEFORE these errors occured, this Information was listed:
"A request to disable the Desktop Window Manager was made by process (Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars™)"

And also followed by:
"The Desktop Window Manager was unable to start because composition was disabled by a running application"

Now, I just thought the game might be reacting to stuff like other windows popping up; say MSN Messenger for example...
So I logged off MSN, closed the application (and other apps that "pop up") while you're in games... and PRESTO! It's gone.
I've played for hours and hours, and never had a single glitch after this. I don't know if this solves your problem, but it sure solved mine.

Edit: Oh, and If my specs are relevant to this issue; I'm on a Abit Fatal1ty Mainboard, AMD Athlon X2 AM2 CPU, 2GB Corsair RAM, and GeForce 7900 GTX Videocard.

This post has been edited by nilberg: 07 April 2007 - 12:58 AM

[mattkowalski]

nilberg, on Apr 7 2007, 01:56 AM, said:

Ok, this might seem a bit daft to some of you, but I actually think this might be related to Vista's Desktop Window Manager.

Cheers for the reply....

I had a look in the application event log, and also found references to the desktop window manager.

The first of which says;

"A request to disable the Desktop Window Manager was made by process (Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars™)"

and the second two say;

"The Desktop Window Manager was unable to start because composition was disabled by a running application"

The puzzling thing is, the entries also appear if I play a campaign level (which works).....

.... but if they're definitely not caused by the game's normal operation, then we're getting closer to the cause of the problem! Are those desktop window manager errors definitely caused by things trying to popup in the background? I have however closed everything possible in task manager.

[Jibraill]

One thing you could try is right click the application ( game ) goto properties - Compatibility - and try a few of the settings in there and see if that doesn't help correct your problem with in game play

[mattkowalski]

Jibraill, on Apr 7 2007, 02:31 AM, said:

One thing you could try is right click the application ( game ) goto properties - Compatibility

No luck unfortunetely - I tried setting it to XP compatibility mode, tried changing the window decomposition option, and tried the disable visual themes option.

[Jibraill]

I found this looks like there was a patch released that fixed some issues - http://forums.ea.com...threadID=200658

have you installed this patch ?

[mattkowalski]

Jibraill, on Apr 7 2007, 08:41 PM, said:

I found this looks like there was a patch released that fixed some issues - http://forums.ea.com...threadID=200658

have you installed this patch ?

The fourth patch (1.04) since the game's release a week ago was made available in the past few hours, which I'm downloading as we speak.

Seems ridiculous to have that many patches already!!

[Jibraill]

Yeah that is alot of patches but better they release a series of patches in a short period of time then not release patches for issues that people are finding ( and people stuck not being able to play the game )

[mattkowalski]

I installed the patch and it still doesn't work

Jibraill, on Apr 7 2007, 08:50 PM, said:

Yeah that is alot of patches but better they release a series of patches in a short period of time then not release patches for issues that people are finding ( and people stuck not being able to play the game )

Yeah true... from what I've read, most of the issues people are having are with multiplayer - which for me, also suffers the same problem as the skirmish mode.

[Eddie25]

mattkowalski, on Apr 7 2007, 08:55 PM, said:

I installed the patch and it still doesn't work

Jibraill, on Apr 7 2007, 08:50 PM, said:

Yeah that is alot of patches but better they release a series of patches in a short period of time then not release patches for issues that people are finding ( and people stuck not being able to play the game )

Yeah true... from what I've read, most of the issues people are having are with multiplayer - which for me, also suffers the same problem as the skirmish mode.

I was having a similar problem (cc would crash before even loading a campaign, leaving me with the 'helpful' "cc3 has stopped working" vista error message).

I found a tweak that seems to solve this issue for me here:

http://boards.gamefa...;topic=34563387

Basically i changed shader detail up to medium in the cc3 graphics settings, and viola it's no longer crashing.

Makes no sense to me, but there ya go

hope this helps

[Nova]

I had a similar issue until I got the 1.04 patch then it was fine. Also if you use xfire it also conflicts with it as well so a lot of times I just run it with xfire off.

[P2iM-0]

Gents,
It's great to see that there are others helping!
Is there anyone other than Mr. Kowalski and myself that are having this same issue? The one difference I noticed between Matt and I is that I'm running Vista Ultimate while he's on Home Basic, seems that this in no way correlates to the problem. Also, I can vouch that I am receiving the same errors with Vista's DWM when I run the game. I also receive the same application error when I run the game in Campaign mode. Which, unfortunately, voids it as a potential possibility for the problem. I do think it is something worth looking into though. Last time I checked games shouldn't be throwing application errors every time they're run.

I'll continue to scour the web for forums/discussion on this issue and will update anything I find both here and on www.cnc3forums.com

My Specs:
ASUS P5B Mobo
Core II Duo E4300 - 1.8 GHz (also tried OC'd at 2.5)
2GB Corsiar XMS DDRII Cas 5
ATi X1800XT 512MB
Creative Audigy 2 ZS Gamer - Latest Drivers
Vista Ultimate x32

My Roomie's Specs:
ASUS P5B Mobo
Core II Duo E4300 - OC'd at 2.5GHz
2GB PNY XMS DDRII Cas 5
nVidia 8800GTS 640MB
Creative X-FI XtremeAudio - Latest Drivers
Vista Ultimate x32

[chrisbirch]

Hi

I too am having the same problem as Matt - the Campaigns seem to work but skirish and multiplayer crash on startup. No error messages however. I haven't tried the reducing shaders solution suggested above but I will next. In terms of specs, I am running:

ASROCK 4core VSTA motherbpard
Core II Duo E4600
2GB DDRII ram
XTX 6800GT vidio
Creative Audigy - Latest Drivers
Vista Home Premium x32


Looking forward to a solution!

Chris

[mattkowalski]

Well, the three setups that share the same problem have at least one thing in common - Creative Audigy-based sound cards.

The back of the CnC3 box mentions that Audigy cards need higher spec'd processors, so you can read into that, that EA know there's something up.

I tried running the game with my Audigy card and motherboard's on-board sound card both disabled in device manager. The problem was still there. Is there anything else I can try to rule out my Audigy card causing the problem?

This post has been edited by mattkowalski: 12 April 2007 - 01:19 AM

[Keveroo83]

Hey guys,

I am having the exact same problem but I don't have the audigy sound card. I'm using onboard sound.

Pentium D 2.8ghz
2gb DDR2 RAM 4200
EVGA Nvidia 7800 GT 512 mb
Intel D645PSN Motherboard
Windows Vista Ultimate

I haven't been able to find any solution to the problem so far, I've tried several different methods but the game locks up when I start any skirmish. My application log returns the following errors consistently leading up to the lockup:

A request to disable the Desktop Window Manager was made by process (Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars™)

The Desktop Window Manager was unable to start because composition was disabled by a running application (x2)

The program cnc3game.dat version 1.4.2620.25554 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Problem Reports and Solutions control panel. Process ID: c08 Start Time: 01c77b2096d80381

Please let me know if you find a solution! Thanks!