Since a few days my game is crashing randomly and I don’t know what’s causing it. Perhaps someone here can help ?
Except for the random crashes, the game otherwise runs fine and without problems. Last monday I had been playing for about 10 minutes when I tried to inject a new skill into my character, and the game just froze up and died (crash to desktop).
I restarted the client but it soon became obvious that the game crash had corrupted my shared cache files. I did a verification scan, it found 2 corrupted files and after that everything seemed to be fixed. I logged in, the game was working again and I continued to play. About an hour later, I had been busy on the market buying and selling stuff when at one point I hit the sell button and the game just froze up and died again.
I spent the next evening checking my PC, running virus scan etc. to make sure there was nothing funny going on, but I can’t find anything wrong. Yesterday, the game seemed to work normally after the second crash from the day before (no shared cache corrpution). I played for a few hours (!) but eventually it crashed again - this time when I was undocked and wanted to stack the items in my ship cargohold. I clicked the “stack all” option and that was it - freeze and dead.
This last time I had the presence of mind to check the Loglite messages, and it says client crashed with exit code -1073741819.
The thing is, I don’t know what to do here. This particular exit code indicates that the program was terminated due to an access violation; I don’t know what that means exactly but it doesn’t sound good. Is this error caused by Eve ? It seems that way to me, because nothing has changed on my end and I used to have no problems. Any help or suggestions are welcome.
First, I would file a support ticket to get in line
Second, access violations are supposedly related to memory, so I would probably start by running Memtest86.
If that doesn’t show any problems, I would run a HD test (get from manufacturer) to test your SSD or HDD
and set everything back to stock if I was overclocked
And if you’re desperate, here are some generic troubleshooting steps you can try.
Use HWmonitor when playing to make sure that the CPU and GPU aren’t overheating (max temps for your particular hardware can be found with a google search).
Clear Eve’s Cache (this will reset all your client settings, so you might want to back it up first. That way you can restore it if it doesn’t work).
Update your chipset and graphics card drivers (try to get them from the hardware manufactuer [i.e. Asus, Gigabyte, nVidia] and not the system builder [Dell, HP] if you can).
Reinstall windows (obviously, this is the nuclear option, so it should be attempted last, but it did once fix my CTD’s).
And please come back and tell us how you managed to get this issue resolved. Might help the next guy with the same problem.
I’ve had no more client crashes since I posted here last week. Right now I am just playing the game and waiting to see what will happen.
Random crashes are the worst to troubleshoot, and your suggestions are certainly helpful. In fact, I had already checked most of them before posting on the forum here. I cleared the Eve cache (in game, esc menu), and verified the Shared Cache integrity (option in the launcher). I should have mentioned that I checked for overheating as well; I always do that in case of problems.
As far as I can tell, my system is good. If my game happens to crash again with the same behaviour and exit code, I will be looking at my GPU as the main suspect. My PC is 10 years old and that in itself is beginning to cause problems with driver updates. A few years ago I had an issue where my game would randomly go to a black screen and then crash the PC (full reset). I thought it was overheating but it turned out to be a video driver issue.
Apparently, access violations can also be caused by programming errors in the software (bugs) and Eve is being updated all the time these days. It could have been a bug, I’ve seen many of them. Either that or it’s my crappy old PC acting up. The best solution would be to buy a new one. Seriously. Thanks for the help, and fingers crossed I won’t have to come back here to report more crashes.