Sunday

ArmA2 – Definitive crash fixes that worked for me

ArmA2, being a bitch

A lot of people are having trouble with ArmA2 crashing a lot, and I was one of them. After a lot of research and experimentation however I’ve completely eliminated almost all of my crashing/freezing/CTD/BSOD problems. Almost all mind you, as the campaign still crashes from time to time (I’m on the Manhattan mission) but from what I gather the campaign has issues of it’s own anyway so I’m waiting on patch 1.03 for remedies there.

Aside from campaign weirdness the other sort of crash I was experiencing were related to my video cards (dual 8800GT’s in SLI). It took awhile and some luck to realize this, as most of the time the game would freeze forcing a reset without any error message. I got lucky at one point and managed to alt-tab to the error window which showed the dreaded n4v_disp error (aka the infinite loop error) which essentially means my GPUs had shit the bed, and stopped responding. This would happen totally at random when playing single missions, campaign, multiplayer or even experimenting with stuff I put together in the editor. Some research on the subject lead to a fix and there was much rejoicing. The campaign still had crash issues (as mentioned) but I could play as an infantry soldier in single missions, multiplayer or the editor all night long with no problem. That’s right, all night long baby. So accepting the campaign bugginess all my ArmA2 problems were resolved, until I tried flying. There was less rejoicing.

As it happens any time I’d fly a helicopter, I’d randomly crash (no, not into the ground). Sometimes after 30min and sometimes almost immediately. If I got into an airplane ArmA2 would crash within about 1 minute after take off, everytime. I was fine on the ground, but not in the air so I did some more experimenting. I dropped the view distance all the way back to 500m and got in an F35 and zipped all around the map with reckless abandon. I found I could fly almost indefinitely (with a frame rate up around 150+) but if I’m going to set my view distance to 500m I might as well wait for OFP2. I say nay. I then pushed the view distance out to 1600m and found I could fly for a lot longer than previously, but it did eventually crash. This time however I got a BSOD instead of a freeze and low and behold it mentioned the n4v_disp error again. There was a mix of rejoicing and muttering. Mostly muttering.

Enough of this back story, get to the damned fixes. Fine. Continue…