The game crashes frequently at start up screen (Mobile)

@Eika I thought I’d check in with you, how’s it going for you? Mine seems to be somehow fixed (perhaps the latest patch) or I’ve been incredibly lucky with no crashes. I’ve done no changes to my phone (no adding or removing apps).

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Mine is only crashing sometimes now. So at least better than before. :+1:

Mine is not crashing anymore. I hope it stays like this for a long time! :grinning:

Sorry @Eika I tend to miss the support section these days! If it keeps happening let’s open a support ticket, otherwise, please try all the steps in https://gemsofwar.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/333757034935-General-troubleshooting-guide-Amazon-iOS-and-Android-

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I am more than happy to forward crash reports to you guys—I seem to generate multiple such reports each day! If that would help, please let me know and I will start the process of opening a support ticket.

I have done it once about the issue. I couldnt be helped.

I just hope the Dev team knows how they fixed this issue, so it wont come back in future patches. I have now marked the thread as fixed! Thanks! :slightly_smiling_face:

I have the Xiaomi Redmi 4 (3GB RAM) and have been experiencing the same thing since 4.0, although I think it got slightly better after 4.1. I have also actually had the game crash while running, although that’s quite rare, and I think probably when I was playing/charging my phone at the same time, so it was quite hot. My guess is that it is related to the high graphics use and memory leak issues, if this helps, and perhaps the kinds of changes that helped load the troop menu better also helped the game not to crash. I could also see it being to do with the kingdom slideshows at the start.

Problem started again 2 weeks ago for me. How about you? Bloody annoying!

Here is the most reliable reproduction I can summon. I’ve spent weeks trying to make it happen on demand but it seems like every time I can actually take a screen recording, it doesn’t happen. But this uses one known issue to exploit another:

  1. Play PvP for 1-2 hours.
  2. When you try to leave the PvP screen, the game will take a long time to go back to the map. How long? I don’t know. After about 25 seconds I force Quit the game.
  3. GoW will 100% crash the next time it is started.

I just recorded a video of it.

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That is more or less exactly where it crashes every time on my phone. Somewhere around the 80% mark or so of “Loading Assets”.

It seems like a lot is going on on that starting screen, like a struggle of some kind.

A lot is going on, if I take “loading assets” literally.

In the worst case, a lot of game data has to be downloaded. Much of it’s in text form, remarkably large text files, actually. That text format is designed to be easy to parse, but it has to all be parsed at once. Worse: it arrives encrypted so it has to be decrypted before it can be used. Worse: the information in that text file is laid out strangely, and not often in the same files. For example, to get everything the Troops screen displays, information from at least two different very large text files has to be consulted. ALSO: the game’s got to start loading image data for a lot of things it’s going to need to display: the map, the main UI, several menus, etc.

When I last had a peek at the crash dumps, it looked like a null pointer dereference.

Here’s a short theory framed to try and explain things in a way that will be insulting if you’re fairly well-versed in programming:

On computers, “all zeroes” is never a valid memory address. That rule was made up because “all zeroes” is an easy/fast thing to set variables to by default. So if you make a variable, but fail to assign a value to it, then use it, you get this error.

So somewhere in those hundreds of lines of code that load everything, some code said, “Try to find this thing.” But whatever that thing was wasn’t found. But the devs forgot to write, “If you can’t find it, do this”. Instead they just wrote, “Try to find this thing, then do this to the thing you find”. But when you tell a computer to do something to “the thing it found” and there is no “thing it found”, it dies. You have to tell it, instead, “Try to find this thing, and if you find it do this, or if you don’t do that.” Every. Single. Time. It’s easier than you might imagine to forget.

Based on the circumstances I see, it feels like there’s some thing that fails to load sometimes. Likely if the phone is low on memory. When you ask a computer for memory, sometimes it says “no”. You’re supposed to check that, but again, it’s easy to forget and it looks messy when you remember. It may not even be the devs’ fault. It could be there’s some Unity code path that screws up. But it’s consistent with what I think I’m seeing:

  • The dumb Unity memory leak makes my game freeze.
  • I force quit the game, but now my phone’s memory space is really wonky.
  • I try to start the game again, but the memory space is wonky so some allocation fails.
  • The game crashes.
  • The OS does something defensive when an app crashes: this “fixes” the memory space.
  • Next time, the app launches.

Thanks, @Eika, for the video. My behavior is different from yours, but very consistent. If I get to the “Loading Assets” bar, the game will load >99% of the time. Before that bar shows up, though (while the ball is spinning at the bottom right), it’s roughly a coin flip if the game will crash.

Edit: less than a coin flip, perhaps. I only have 8 crash reports from GoW over the last 6 days. In the past I would have as many as 5 in a single day.

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Welcome. :smiley: This morning I had to try 3 times before I was able to play. It’s bloody annoying, especially when I am out trying to collect tributes.