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AoE 3 and other games (WoW and HOMMV so far)killing the internet

K

Keytachi

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 14, 2006
161
0
I first had this issue with WoW, where some addons made me crash. This wasn't a normal crash though, i was still in the game, could move around and send chat messages, only i couldn't see them.
I knew when this crashes were going to happen, because they were "announced" by the music getting chopped, and the frame rate dropping to 1-2 fps. I still haven't found a way to stop this crashes (other than disabling the addons, but sometimes i still get crashes like this).

I never thought this could happen on another game, but it did, twice. A few months ago on Heroes of Might and Magic V, and today on Age of Empires III. The same "announcement" happened on both games, choppy music and extremely low frame rates. But on these games, i couldn't tell my internet had died until i left the game, and tried to open a webpage.

The only way i found to revert this dead internet situation, was to reboot my computer (which is quite annoying if you are in the middle of a WoW raid).

Has anyone ever experienced a problem like this one? If yes, how did you solve it?
 
iSee

iSee

macrumors 68040
Oct 25, 2004
3,539
272
A few obvios things to check:
* Are you low on RAM? Check out Activity Monitor when this happens. Look at free and inactive RAM. If those are very low then that's it. Also look at all the processes. If something other than the game is taking up a lot of CPU time then that's a hint.
* Are you low on disk space?

Random thoughts:

Do you think your internet connection could be causing the problem? Not sure how to test for this.

If it was a bug in the graphics or audio drivers, others would have the same problems.
 
D

dgnhntr

macrumors newbie
Sep 21, 2006
2
0
San Diego, CA
I have had similar problems with world of warcraft crashing my computer and other times crashing my internet and or airport. I installed Leopard on my iMacs, changed my ISP and router. Additionally doing the "/console max fps 30" helped some in world of warcraft. I think that installing leopard helped the most but I can't be sure because I changed these things rather close together and the freezes are so intermittent it is hard to know if something worked. I get very few crashes now, but it still happens.

I have tried for the past few years to get an answer to why this happens, it is detailed a bit better in the forums below. Blizzard blames apple's hardware (overheating), and apple blames blizzard's software. Now you say that it happens in other programs as well, that is very interesting. I was never able to show that this happened with software other than world of warcraft (I stopped playing other games...). Which if you can, I think you have a firmer case with apple to get them to look at your machine and possibly fix it. I was told to call back applecare when it happens, it always seems to happen after business hours, and I can't recreate the freezes on demand. It is very frustrating. I would be very interested in knowing what you find out. I suspect it is apple's hardware, but I can't prove it other than I have changed everything but my iMacs.


http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=36583718

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1371472902
 
K

Keytachi

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 14, 2006
161
0
thank you for the replies.

it is hard to tell if I'm low on RAM, since the games are all fullscreen. I could play them in windowed mode, but only with world of warcraft i can recreate the crashes.
I currently have 15GB free on the disk, and around 60GB free on the external hard drive (where the games are located, but i only moved them there very recently, long after i found what was causing the crashes)

I doubt the problem is related with my ISP, since i called them, and made a crash happen. They told me the internet was as normal, and the other computer i have connected to my router could still access the internet.

I realized what was causing the crashes, when I totally re-did my UI, trashing all addons that weren't essential. I found out that MobInfo 2 and SCT were causing the crashes. But these only happened when the computer had to load a huge amount of graphics fast (teleporting, leaving/entering instances, releasing corpse, leaving a battleground/arena into Shattrath City).
After disabling the addons, the crashes almost stopped, although i still have them sometimes. I haven't tested this after installing Leopard.
 
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