At unpredictable times Stonehearth is crashing to desktop. The game freezes for a few seconds, and then I get a popup message from my system tray that says “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered”. Music continues to play, and the game remains open for ~10 seconds though it’s nothing but an empty white window.
This exact same crash has happened at the transition from night to day, while designating a stockpile, while designating a trapping zone, while promoting a citizen, and even while doing nothing at all (I just set the speed to 2X and waited for the game to crash without touching the keyboard or mouse). So unfortunately I don’t have a set of reproducible steps which trigger the crash. This crash also occurred in the previous alpha, so it is not likely to be caused by any recent code changes.
I’m using two Radeon 4890s in Crossfire. I have the latest drivers, and re-installed them prior to making this post just to make sure that they aren’t causing this crash. I am using Windows 7 x64 Professional with a Core i7 and 12GB of RAM. I have downloaded the game through Steam if that matters.
I attempted to take a screenshot but was unable to capture the error popup, and unfortunately I cannot upload my stonehearth.log as I’m a new user and your forum software prevents new users from uploading files. Here’s a pastebin of my logfile’s contents: stonehearth.log - Pastebin.com.
I’ve also been experiencing some bugs related to workflow, but as the game is crashing at unpredictable times I’m not really able to help describe and diagnose those bugs until this one is resolved.
Thanks a lot, and best of luck finding what is likely to be a difficult bug to nail down.
I don’t know how many people use that combination… I think your graphics have to do with this problem, given the popup message you got. Even if you have updated your drivers, perhaps it’s a matter of some specific configuration or something else.
For example, we know that people using some programs to boost graphic capabilities had problems with the game.
I’m not an expert on hardware, I don’t really know. People here get random crashes, of course, but only a small group have them constantly, and some of them already resolved it.
As an experiment I disabled Crossfire (software only; I didn’t actually pull the second card), and still got the crash. I’m willing to actually pull the second card, but I’d like a dev to chime in first before I crack open my computer case. I don’t think there is anything wrong with my hardware or drivers, as every other game works just fine.
Yeah, well, this is a half-optimized Alpha, it doesn’t mean it’s going to run on every machine but devs try their best to cover a wide range of computers
So, this is the only game/program that makes the “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” error popup in your computer?
Did you play with many other programs in the background? Although your machine looks powerful enough to handle such thing (I’m talking from my ignorance in hardware).
This is the only program that gives that error. I’ve had this computer for quite a while now and haven’t ever seen that error message before.
Yes I do have quite a bit running in the background, but it’s an i7 at 3.4GHz with 12GB of RAM so it should be more than capable of handling it. The only thing that, to my mind, might have caused an issue would be VMWare Workstation, but I’ve encountered the crash both with that running in the background and not running, so I don’t think that’s causing the problem.
I’m going to go with faulty hardware or TDR in this instance - that bolded message in the first post is actually identical to one I regularly get for my NVidia card, though I’ve not had it pop up during a SH game, and games like WoW can for me at least recover fine.
Anyway, two suggestions. First, check your graphics card for faults - either via software or by taking it in for a check-up. Second, consider getting into the (potentially computer-breaking!) world of registry editing:
That link has more than just how to do the registry editing necessary BTW - it also suggests leftover drivers and such as possible causes, so it’s probably worth a read anyway.
Just uninstalled and re-installed my graphics drivers, and ran 3DMark without a hitch. I’ll try running Furmark for a bit. Any other benchmarks you’d suggest?
Honestly I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my hardware or drivers. Occam’s Razor would imply that the fault is in the alpha software, and not in the PC that’s been running without a hitch for five years.
Yeah, it’s just that I’ve had something similar to the message you were getting & so am wondering if it’s a driver update clashing with relics of past drivers or something.
I believe I may have found the problem. Since Stonehearth is an OpenGL game, it doesn’t take advantage of Crossfire by default. A special profile has to be created for it. However, AMD has stopped issuing application specific profiles (at one point you could download packages from them called Catalyst Application Profiles which would contain tweaks for various games).
A workaround is to copy Stonehearth.exe and rename the copy SeriousSam.exe, and then launch the game using the renamed copy. Since Serious Sam is an OpenGL Game it already has a Catalyst Application Profile included in the standard driver package from AMD, and renaming the exe tricks the drivers into using the profile with Crossfire enabled.
Since doing this I have yet to have a crash after two hours of gameplay, when before I used to have crashes every 5 minutes.
I suppose the developers will have to either include some sort of Catalyst profile with the game, or else have AMD include one in the next set of Catalyst drivers.
@Crowmower I must know what else you did, that can’t be all. When I look under the Gaming Tab - Application Profiles in Catalyst it says, “To create a profile using current 3D settings, go to 3D Application Settings page.” and if I check under Application Profiles there the list is emnpty with only <> available. Could you post what your settings are?
I’m just looking for something to get my game running for more than 5 minutes. From your original post it seems we have the exact same issue and specs with the exception that I dont run CrossFire, just a single Radeon HD 4890 card.
As an AMD user, The display driver has stopped working error is quite frequent with me as well. especially on minecraft and stonehearth. I think it could because those 2 games are using a lot of resources? even though I have 16gb’s of ram I don’t see how that would be the problem, I could be completely wrong.
There is probably a ton of grammar errors in this post. I’m tired and my hands are hurting.
I have not had this problem much before, with this game however it is constantly happening. Sometimes within minutes of loading and sometimes i can keep going (forgetting to save) and it works fine for a few in-game days.
On a side note however; I did have some issues when playing Diablo 3 today, I just got the expansion so. First level went fine, second level I had this strange freeze where i could do nothing once i entered; had to log out from windows to get control over my computer - task manager kept flickering couldn’t do anything on it. After that i kept getting stuck on a forever chewing loading screens twice, after that i just gave up. Maybe my GFX card is dying on me
but devs try their best to cover a wide range of computers 
