A second patch?

[lassel]

When I just bought the game it was unplayable.
10 minutes max before a crash.

Now I get from 30 minutes to a couple of hours before it crashes on me.
I have seen all kinds of crashes but most of them are BSOD or a freeze where the music keeps playing and I can still move the mouse but the system doesn't respond to anything. Crashing becomes more frequent after midgame.

I have a low-end system, but well above the minimum requirements. I think that it is fair to demand that I can run the game to the end with minimum settings.

I have a Athlon XP 2400 CPU, 1.5 gb ram and a nVidia 6600 GT gfx card.
All my drivers are updated and the system runs cool and can run other games. Just finished HL2 and FarCry without a single crash.

I certainly hope that they provide a second patch with much needed stability and performance fixes since I have no way of getting a refund now (but I should have asked for one when I had the chance).

 

[AlabamaCajun]

What I'm finding as I have 2 systems/ I've tried it on both with the following results.
The game needs more than 1Gig of memory to avoid the crash with routing.
64 Bits windows has a problem with Railroads.exe will remain hung in memory.

I've since moved the game back to my older P4 system with 2gigs of RAM as opposed to my game box!

 

[zycore]

Runs like a champ for me. No crashes. P4 3.06 GHZ hyper threading CPU. 2 Gigs Dual chanel ram PC3200, Audigy 4 Sound card, Geforce 7800 GS CO AGP 256mb ddr3 ram. Did you patch the game?

 

[Tae]

I have a rock solid stable system and I have pretty damn high specs, this game still crashes now and then. Usually after I have been playing a while and when I am laying track. I don't think it likes you are thinking about the track without laying it and an event happens at the same time.

It is actually the only game I have the regularly crashes, it definately the game and not the systems. I play Oblivion and Civ 4 too, and neither of those games have ever crashed on me, which from what I have read is a near miracle.

 

[Jobeo]

I have a rock solid stable system and I have pretty damn high specs

do you have 2 gigs of ram? i read in another thread where a guy tested it on two of his systems and the one with 1 gig crashed a lot where the 2 gig system didn't...


i have a 4ghz (overclocked) p4 with a 6800 ultra and 2 gigs of ram the game has never crashed once... it does get a bit sluggish near the endgame when there are tons of trains running and 3 ai's...

 

[eriador]

I am running a 3 Ghz Pentium D with 2GB RAM, MSI NX7800GTX with 256 MB of DDR3, Creative Soundblaster xFi sound card.

I have yet to have a crash. I did notice last night that I had some serous lag after I bought out the last ai player. I was trying to fix track that I had created to cities (formerly serviced by the first ai player I had bought out) from resources I had track to. I had created a loop and my trains were taking long routes to get to cities right next to the resource location they started at. So I was trying to recreate my dead ends at the resource but create another dead end at the same resource to the new cities I was hooking up. Well I would hit delete and wait about 10 seconds as the game paused and thought about it. I had more track than I ever have had, and more trains so I figured at that point I was hitting the limit.

I have been playing 3-5 hours at a stretch and at about the end of my game time is when I have noticed lag or oddities. Like trains that are halfway to a location and suddenly disappear and appear as totally different consists. Luckily these were the ai and not mine.

 

[Tae]

do you have 2 gigs of ram? i read in another thread where a guy tested it on two of his systems and the one with 1 gig crashed a lot where the 2 gig system didn't...


i have a 4ghz (overclocked) p4 with a 6800 ultra and 2 gigs of ram the game has never crashed once... it does get a bit sluggish near the endgame when there are tons of trains running and 3 ai's...

AMD X2 4200+ @2.6ghz
2gb Corsair TwinXMS PC3200 Ram
ATI X1900XT

With this system I am running either a solid 30fps or 20fps, nothing in between which makes me believe it has some issues relating to rendering which they coded around to lock in a certain FPS. If I started seeing 20fps consistently, closing Railroads and reopening seems to solve the issue for a while. Reminds me of the leaking memory issues (or cache problems) in Civ 4.

Yes my system is Overclocked, but it is 24 hour Prime 95 stable and No other game I play crashes except Railroads. And Railroads really doesn't crash a lot, just seems to once in a while in situation I described above. So I think it has some stabilty issues that may rear its head more often depending on the PC systems it is running on.

I was not complaining, just mentioning I do think it could use another patch addressing stability issues. I also have seen the oddities descrobed in the post above, the funniest being flying trains when the routing seems to gets really confused and just fixes itself by having the train fly from one track to another.

 

[Tae]

Funny story. The patches install to the default install directory (2K Games/Firaxis Games )and does not care if you did a custom install to have the game installed into the Firaxis Games directory that your other Firaxis Games were installed.

I have been playing an unpatched game all along.

 

[AlabamaCajun]

I will say both patches improved playability and stability. The addition of one extra parallel track (4 in total) improves the functionality at large stations.
Prior to P1.01, crashes where inevitable but now only happen when laying a lot of track. I can observe this crash coming when it does. The game just freezes after dropping in a new section of track. When you see this start then take a snapshot save. I now only see one crash in about every 6-7 games I play. I haven't gone back to the machine with the 1 gig to see if it is still a problem.