Game will not play after computer sleeps

[admdavis]

When did you start the game: 1900
What nation were you playing?
A-H
Were there any start options that were not the default?
V. Large fleets. And I'm playing in "sandbox mode". I'm still learning the game some, and I wanted to work without such tight restrictions, so I added money on a save edit, but the error happened both before and after I edited the save. And in other games I've started and abandoned. I just didn't have the time to report the error before. 
Describe the issue in detail: 

Running RtW2 on my Dell laptop. When lid is closed or computer goes into standby, RtW will crash and not be playable upon wakeup. Any attempt to click any button, including top right close (X) button throws the following error:


First time I'm doing this, so I don't know if that's readable, but here's the text anyway:

Access violation at address 0044EF48 in module RTW2.exe
Read of address 00000004.

Happens every time the game is running and the computer lid is closed or goes into standby. I can repeat it endlessly. 


What version of the game were you playing (v1.00, v1.01, etc)?
v1.02, although I will say it has happened with every version so far. I just hadn't had a chance to report it yet. 

I tried to attach the game file, but it came back as bigger than 1MB and wouldn't let me upload. I can provide it via email if it is needed. 

[williammiller]

This is not very unusual for programs using an engine that has been in use as long as the SAI/RTW series...I'm not sure there is anything we could do from our end to prevent this behavior, so I would recommend saving your game when you are going to be away for some time, or perhaps temporarily turn off sleep/suspend mode while you are playing the game.

Thanks.

[rimbecano]

Jun 2, 2019 17:29:05 GMT -6 williammiller said:

This is not very unusual for programs using an engine that has been in use as long as the SAI/RTW series...I'm not sure there is anything we could do from our end to prevent this behavior, so I would recommend saving your game when you are going to be away for some time, or perhaps temporarily turn off sleep/suspend mode while you are playing the game.

Thanks.

Actually, in my experience it's more commonly an issue with games that use 3D acceleration, which RTW is not. In any case, it's likely not an issue with the game: hibernation (suspend to disk), and, to a lesser extent sleeping (suspend to RAM) are inherently fragile procedures that can easily be screwed up by bugs in the OS, the hardware, or the device drivers: bugs in the OS could corrupt memory (especially with hibernation, where the entire contents of RAM is written out to disk and had to be read back in), bugs in drivers could cause devices that an application depends on to not be initialized back to their last state before hibernation/sleep, and the application can't do anything to prevent either of these from happening with arbitrary severity. I stopped using hibernation on my laptop exactly because of this.

There are two classes of bugs that do rest entirely with the application that can be triggered by hibernation:

1) Dependence on wall-clock time from the OS, and not taking into account that two events that are close together in program flow can be separated by an arbitrarily long wall clock time if the computer hibernates (or, potentially, if the computer in question doesn't have an working real time clock and isn't able to contact a timeserver that the later event could appear to precede the earlier one!).

2) Race conditions between threads.

If RTW is single-threaded and never asks the OS for date and time, then the OP's issue is almost certainly due to OS/driver bugs and the inherent fragility of sleep/hibernation. If RTW is multi-threaded or asks the OS for date and time, then it would probably be good to give the code a once over to check for the above bug categories, but it's still most likely that the issue is external to RTW.

For the OP, if your computer is hibernating (suspend to disk), you might try sleeping (suspend to RAM), as hibernating requires fewer things to be done exactly right. In either case, for sleep/hibernate to work, the OS needs to record the state of every bit of hardware on the system, then set everything back the way it was, perfectly, and if even one thing is missed or botched, it can affect the stability of the OS or any given application. As I've said, I've run into this issue enough before that I eventually just took to shutting my laptop down and cold booting any time it needed to be disconnected from wall power for longer than the its battery life in un-suspended operation. Hibernation is a really nice idea in theory, but has some nasty rough edges in practice.

[williammiller]

rimbecano - I agree with your above post - In the past I have had so many issues when some of my machines hibernate, and then act 'wonky' afterwards, that I usually turn that off on them.

Thanks!