The crashing is driving me nuts

[Dogg Thang]

I think I'm almost ready to call it a day for Pulse. The last two days, I have been plagued with crashing. Usually follows the pattern of going to the loading screen for no apparent reason then either freezing and switching off or, interestingly, throwing me to a random incomplete menu (like the team select screen with no craft, or a race grid with no races) and then switching off.

I have spent much more time waiting for the game to reload or load (now that the loading times have gone up dramatically with the packs) than actually playing the game. It's fairly infuriating.

I'd check to see if there's a quality assurance person listed in the credits but it has just crashed on me.

[wich]

I noticed that with the download packs, whenever I come back from sleep (even if I was just in the main menu) a loading screen appears for a few seconds, and then I get back to the menu. I never noticed this before I had the Mirage and Icaras packs. Could this perhaps be related?

[Dogg Thang]

Yeah, I'd say it's related. My loading times shot through the roof with the addition of the Mirage pack, with some new loading sections added where there were none before. And now that I've added the Icaras pack, my game is just crash after crash.

[wich]

Well, luckily I don't experience the crashes, but yeah, itseems the loading times have gone up a bit, but especially the loading screen appearing for a few secs at seemingly random points in the menu is quite annoying.

[Frances_Penfold]

Have you guys tried turning ALL the music off (both switching "off" each music tracks as well as putting music level at 0%)?

I know that with the Pulse and Pure, turning the music all the way off pretty much COMPLETELY removed all the bugs that I had been experiencing-- including the sleep bugs (Pure) and random crashing when resetting a race (Pulse).

Otherwise-- yeah, that sucks-- not especially motivating to get the DLC if it degrades the experience of the core game.

Hopefully this is something firmware-related that can be fixed in the future? For example, if the reading of the memory stick is not right, perhaps this leads to the problems with the DLC...

[lunar]

I`ve had terrible memory stick issues with Pulse, freezes, corrupted ghost saves and so on. Getting rid of custom skins seemed to help a bit, but the problem is more than that. I can`t save ghosts on Vertica or Outpost 7 no matter what I do. I guess you`ve tried getting rid of custom soundtracks and ghosts, and running on a freshly formatted memory stick? You can copy the download packs off and onto the same PSP freely to back up, they`ll still work. I can now use custom skins without the game crashing, but keep getting random save bugs. It could be your memory stick, there are several models that apparently haven`t worked at all well since firmware 3.7+, I think. Hope you can make it work.

[Dogg Thang]

Thanks for the sound tip, Frances. I'll give that a go.

I haven't got custom soundtracks or ghosts running but have been using custom skins.

While it's possible the memory stick might have something to do with it, Lunar, I play other PSP games fairly regularly and the only other game I've ever had similar (or indeed any) problems with is actually Pure. Yikes.

[Intera]

I agree, the crashing is pretty bad.

Unless I reset my router everytime I go online it crashes, and it also does it quite frequently after it's said "Loading 9,8,7" etc

[wich]

For the record, I haven't seen any crashes myself, only the weird loading screens. I don't have any custom skins, have a couple of ghosts, but have ghosts disabled and usually run with music at 0%, though I have custom soundtracks on my Stick.

Another thing which just now came up though:

I was playing the Icaras grid, I put the PSP to sleep on the grid, and when I turned it back on all the events say "NONE" instead of stuff like "SINGLE RACE", "TIME TRIAL", "ZONE", etc. very weird.

[stin]

Well, I`m still having problems with freezing but I now always constantly saves nearly ten to fifteen minutes.

The main point is, I`m still think it`s my psp is having problems with it.

So possibly FW? I`m on 3.71 atm

stevie

[tapioca]

I finally found a way to get the download packs (i'm on a mac and had to install a friend's Windows on it just for the month… thank you Sony, your PSstore is really user-friendly) and after half an hour of gameplay i already got my first bug with the Mirage ship on Vostok Reef :

Right from the starting grid, no controls were responding except the directionnal buttons and the nub. No airbrakes, no accelerator nor weapon etc, no start /select/home. After a few seconds trying to move my ship, the screen got a bit darker as if it was going into sleep. The only thing i could do was put the console into sleep mode. And when i set the power on again, the controls were back…

[Animagic]

wow, sounds like the download packs are bad news...

or maybe it's everyones firmware, what is everyone running?

[Dogg Thang]

I'm on 3.8 at the moment.

[tapioca]

I'm experiencing new bugs since i installed the 2 first packs yesterday. I tried to get online 2 times only and got 2 issues in less than 5 minutes !!

First time i was entering a game and all got frozen on the ship selection screen. I think the game was trying to display my last used ship (Mirage or Icaras for sure) but as it is forbidden online, that ended up with a crash… All i could see was the Assegai ship with a team name display bug, like 2 fonts on each other. >>> First reboot.

Second time I was in a 7 races tournament with Kandang and another racer, and got through a strange bug after the 2nd race on Outpost 7 : endless replay (fullscreen with no menus) of my AG-Sys with a weird slowdown effect and just ambient noises. My ship could even hit Kandang's one that was still on the track, frozen before the last chicane. Couldn't get to the 3rd race after the countdown !!! No button worked except Home >>> Second reboot.

I downloaded the new packs yesterday and the game is like filled with bugs…

I'm on 3.71 firmware

[Task]

I'd check to see if there's a quality assurance person listed in the credits but it has just crashed on me.

Man, that's awful news, but I can't help laughing with the way you put it!
I can just see you fighting with it, getting to the credits screen, waiting for it to scroll, you can just see Quality Assurance starting to scroll up, you'll be able to read the name in just a moment... *poof*, lights out and screen black! Hard crash!

If we're lucky, it's a FW issue, just like the 3.11 or whatever it was that messed up Pure, and a yet-to-be-released FW will fix it.

Well, I hope it works out one way or another.

[Dogg Thang]

As it turns out, there was a whole big title 'SCEE FIRST PARTY QUALITY ASSURANCE', with a huge team of people not fixing the bugs.

Found a new one today - the Alternate ship skins on the download packs disappear from selection for some reason.

[Razgriz375]

Hi, I have had the similar problems which often lead to me losing my saved data (which is annoying when youve just got half amount of loyalty points for a ship). Im using a 4GB which seems to have problems even when not in the game. But since ive updated to 3.90 i havent had any problems so far with saving in Pulse. (the saving of photos takes few seconds but thats probaly because its trying to find an available name as i have 350 screenshots!) I have had one problem since which was trying to overwrite a ghost, even though it stated a save fail, it still saved...weird? I havent tried removing the songs from the playlist infact i have 22 extra songs so....Its best to keep a backup of your data before it gets corrupted.

Have any of you had data corrupted when using Pulse?

[BARTgai]

The current versions have problems correctly reading a 4GB card. I think it said somewhere in the process of updating. That could be why you're having those other issues.

[bloseth]

Lately I've tried to refrain from using the sleep mode while playing Pulse (booting the game doesn't take that long time), and have had _no crashes_ since then! I think the sleep mode has some sort of influence on the crashing.

[BARTgai]

yeah same here, i just shut the whole system down when i'm done and let it boot up again when the system restarts. that way, it's more like a normal console in that it has to start up every time you want to play a game.