GZDoom fails to terminate properly sometimes

Post by **wildweasel** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 4:14

Upon exiting the game (I have my F11 key bound to "Quit" via console, because I get sick of using the Press Y prompt while testing), GZDoom fails to terminate itself properly, leaving me with an almost entirely black screen (aside from the frames of any windows that I have running). I have to open WinXP's task manager and kill the task myself to get the desktop to return to normal.

Hardware:

Dell Dimension 8300 desktop system
CPU: Pentium 4 3.0 GHz
RAM: 512 MB
Video: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 (Dxdiag claims it's 128 MB), running ForceWare 78.01 drivers
Sound: SoundMAX Digital Audio (onboard) with latest drivers (no version specified)

Software:

OS: Windows XP Home Service Pack 1
Background Apps: ObjectDock Pro, Windowblinds 4.5, Winamp 5.1 (though it still happens with these disabled)

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 8:51

I seriously doubt I can do anything here. Most likely some driver fails to shut down and the program waits endlessly for this to happen. It's most likely a system specific problem.

Post by **wildweasel** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 8:37

I've determined that the problem seems to have gone away upon modifying my compatibility settings - it seems GZDoom doesn't quite enjoy running OpenGL in a window while I've got XP theming enabled. Whether this is a problem on my end or with GZDoom, it doesn't matter now that I've got at least a workaround.

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 9:12

Have you tested with other OpenGL applications?

Post by **wildweasel** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 17:22

It only happens in GZdoom. Not even Edge does this to my knowledge.

MartinHowe · Post by **MartinHowe** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 23:34

This is probably driver related and may well be the same as this problem: when using V1.18 of Vavoom in OpenGL mode, the game locks up when any monster comes into view. Does not happen with non-moving animated things like barrels and armour helmets etc, only monsters. The music still plays, but nothing else works.

Today, however, it happened with GZDoom (in Total Control). With Vavoom it is consistent; with GZDoom, today was the first time. Also, GZDoom lags like hell in Total Control (not as badly as CAH did in regular ZDoom, but enough to be annoying).

It also leaves the screen with the game display; so if you CTRL-ALT-DEL to kill the game, you can't see the CTRL-ALT-DEL window (or anything else but the game), which means you must reset or power-cycle the computer in order to regain control of it.

Sometimes you can be lucky to type a command by dead reckoning: eg Start|run|cmd.exe <return> <alt-enter> which runs then maximizes a shell window then exit the shell and the desktop gets repainted as normal. In other words, the rest of Windows is still working, but you just can't see it, because the game hasn't exited properly and is still running while locked up.

GZDoom was eventually killed, but it lost all the savegames when it died!

For the record, this is Windows XP Pro SP2 with an ATI mobile Radeon 7500.

Nuxius · Post by **Nuxius** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 4:57

Are you sure? You might want to check "C:\Documents and Settings\your login name" for a directory called save. Also look for a directory called save in the GZDoom directory itself.

For some crazy reason, it wanted to put all of my PWAD save games in the former directory, with any IWAD savegames in the latter. I finally had to open the .ini file and type in the whole file path just to get it to put every save in it's own gzdoom/save/ directory.

MartinHowe · Post by **MartinHowe** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 9:26

Nuxius wrote:Are you sure? You might want to check "C:\Documents and Settings\your login name" for a directory called save. Also look for a directory called save in the GZDoom directory itself.

Actually, it should get the location of "My Documents" from the registry and create a subfolder in that - raw use of the home directory in Windows is usually limited to system files or "application" data files - user files should be in "My Documents", which might have been redirected anywhere, "D:\Doc" in my case.

In any case, I found two save directories, but it didn't recognise the files in them - when asking to load a game, it showed no games present (except the autosave at the start of the level).

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 11:03

Somehow I remember that ZDoom does this on occasion as well. Anyway, it is most likely caused by some driver not shutting down properly and thus preventing the application from shutting down. I don't see anything I could do here.