Cannot run Tiberian Sun on windows 10

[N3cro_Manc3r]

Hello,

First of all you guys do a great job with keeping these strategy games alive! I always wanted to play Tiberian Sun; when it came out the game was too difficult for me. I bought The First Decade when it came out but here Tiberian Sun was unplayable due to a high number of defects. I thought I give a change again using your website, but as the title implies I cannot get Tiberian Sun to run on Windows 10. I have installed all of your patches, updated my Nvidea 970 Card drivers. The Skirmish mode works. But when I want to start with the campaign it get stuck on the loading screen, saying:

''creating theories on likely enemy plan''

I hope you have some suggestions on how to fix this problem.

[FunkyFr3sh]

This has been posted here a few times already, I never managed to reproduce it and no one knows why it happens for some people.

But the fact that skirmish works is interesting, don't think anyone said something about that yet. With skirmish you mean playing via the CnCNet lobby, right?

 

If skirmish works via the CnCNet lobby, try the following:

Go to your game folder and make a copy of "game.exe" and name it "game-123.exe", now try to start the game via "game-123.exe" and see if that works. I know microsoft automatically detects old games by filename and some other conditions, maybe this problem is related to some compatibility modes that were applied by windows.

[N3cro_Manc3r]

Yes skirmish works via the CnC lobby. Ingame it has the same problem as with the campaign. Creating a exe copy does not work unfortunately.

[FunkyFr3sh]

Oh I see.

Well, I remember I looked through the code longer time ago but couldn't guess what the problem could be. If I could reproduce it then I'd probably be able to fix it...

 

If you're tech-savvy you might be able to help out, there is a tool from microsoft named "Process Monitor", you could use it to create some logs and we might be able to tell where the game gets stuck.

 

If you want to try it, start "Process Monitor" and add a "Process Name" filter for "game.exe". Then start the game (preferable in windowed mode), start a mission and once it's freezing you'll have to check the output of process monitor, the last lines in the log could, maybe, tell us what happened in that moment.

[N3cro_Manc3r]

Ok done, I think. I have attached the logfile.

/edit the logfile is from starting the game, to starting a skirmish ingame, to crash.

Logfile.rar

Edited December 2, 2018 by N3cro_Manc3r

[FunkyFr3sh]

That's nice! It looks like you exit the game before saving the log, is that correct?

I assume the last thing that happened was this:

00:14:09,4021551    game.exe    14640    50492    C:\Westwood\SUN\Civ03a.MMT    CreateFile    NAME NOT FOUND....

 

Could you maybe do it again (just to be 100% sure..)? Save the log before the game is being closed by you (run in window!).

 

 

It's searching for a lot of files, I assume if you do it again you might end up having a slightly different ending in the log. Maybe searching for the files is what makes it so slow... If you keep the game open for a minute or two then the log could be larger (Eventually the game will even start if you wait long enough).

Edit:

Wow, it took 6 seconds to search for these files! That's a long time... I guess we might have found the problem (kinda!).

 

I just did a comparision, for me it took only 100ms to search for the files... somehow you got extremely slow disk access... Your game actually doesn't freeze, it's just loading for ages (If you don't click, windows should not say that it froze).

What anti-virus you have? Something is slowing your PC down a lot...

[N3cro_Manc3r]

Hello,

Yes I exited the game before saving the log. I started the log before i started the game, and it is constantly searching for game.exe when the log is on. So 6 seconds is from the moment that the game starts as a whole to breakdown. How do I start TiSun in windowed mode? My anti virus is AVG free. I have no other problems with my pc being slow, the game is even installed on a SSD disk.

[FunkyFr3sh]

14 minutes ago, N3cro_Manc3r said:

Hello,

Yes I exited the game before saving the log. I started the log before i started the game, and it is constantly searching for game.exe when the log is on. So 6 seconds is from the moment that the game starts as a whole to breakdown. How do I start TiSun in windowed mode? My anti virus is AVG free. I have no other problems with my pc being slow, the game is even installed on a SSD disk.

 

Oh I guess we don't actually need another log, when I compared mine with yours it was pretty clear that your game actually works fine, it just needs very long time searching for all the files. I don't think there is anything we can do with the game itself to improve it, it's something external like an anti-virus or bug that slows down the CreateFile winapi call.

 

One thing that *could* be done is patching the game so it doesn't actually search for loose files in the folder since all its files are located in .mix file containers, but this would be a bad idea since it would break all kinds of mods that people created where certain files were placed directly into the game folder rather than the .mix containers. It's better if you could find out what is causing this issue. I assume it happens with other applications too, but it may not be as noticeable as with tiberian sun since it searches for a lot of files (Your log only contained a few of them, if you keep the game running for a longer time it would grow a lot bigger)

[N3cro_Manc3r]

Ok thank you for your help. I actually got the game running yesterday. Just as you said it needed a long time to load and I cannot interrupt it by clicking somewhere for instance. Other missions loaded quicker but every few minutes the screen freezes but the game keeps running. It can solve it by returning to desktop and then opening the game again but it is not ideal. I also tried shutting down al background software that I have but it did not seem to matter. When I have a final solution I will you know.