Client crashing a lot

[Bargeld]

I'm trying to troubleshoot this issue, as I have yet to find a working method to fix for me, and I know a lot of others deal with similar crashes.

One key piece of info that I don't have is how the NWN client actually deals with hardware and packetloss and out of order packets, becasue that seemes to be the downhome root of it all from what I can tell.

What we know about PC's:
Let's go back to the old days of PC's when we didn't have plug-n-play BIOSs. The first thing you had to do when building or rebuilding the machine was to yank all the PCI cards from it becasue the network (modem) always conflicted with the sound on IRQ 5. If I remember correctly, you always had to move something manually to IRQ 11.

Then came Plug-n-play and IRQ/resource sharing and now sound cards and netcards/modems could play together on IRQ 5 without (too many) problems.

I would wager that most out-of-the-box PCs and laptops nowadays use pretty cheap motherboards and sound/net equipment. Although windows is supposed to negotiate all of this instead of the game client, i am still wondering if the client is unable to handle it properly.

What we know from player experience:
The current consensus (i think) is that it is sound related... to which I agree. The in-game effect of adjusting the 3D positional slider is that you don't get the sounds from things farther away from your character (ground zero). If you go all the way left, you can't even hear casters buffing in front of you unless they are on the same plane horizontally as you. Basically anyone with any 'depth' distance from you gets the audio quelled. The audio slider adjusts this distance of effect.
I have turned my 3D positional slider about 1/3 from the left (low side). Which helped from my previous setting of 50/50.

I believe that the multiplayer client is a tad different than the single player client, as I have never had crash issues like this in sungle player. Ever.

Client crashes tend to happen during exreme periods of lag, or when a highly buffed toon comes into audible range (this tends to be visible range as well, but lets forget gfx issues as this is too widespread to be related to vid cards.)

When stuck in a lag spike, I have found that sending voice emotes or spamming a few knockdowns will have an effect of getting the packet flow going. Or the reverse, when on the verge of a lag spike, doing these actions can send you into a horrible spike and will often result in the pc/server thinking about it for 5 or ten seconds, then getting the sound card repeating itself over over till you get a microsoft error report.

This led me to the direction of the actual client itself. Voice emotes and KD actions shouldn't be heavy enough to noticably slow a DSL connection. If they are, then there is something either wrong with the multiplayer code of the game or there are some serious network issues going on (or both!).

This has spawned me to investigate the server's connection as well, which can be found here.

[Blystos Re]

Good theory.
Maybe take it a step further and disable all sound in the game and see if you still crash?

[Amoenotep]

check sound acceleration vs what the game says you have..sometimes it gets sketchy from there too...