Game Engine Stutter/Hanging & Music Loop Restarting

[Grayvick]

Ever since the server maintenance on February 19th, I have been facing a significant issue where the game experiences sporadic stuttering and hanging, occurring roughly every 30 seconds to a minute. During these hangs, audio ceases, animations stop, and the background music for the current zone or dungeon resets to the beginning. This disruption is particularly frustrating during combat scenarios, where the server continues to operate normally while the local client hangs.

Troubleshooting Attempts:
I’ve dedicated significant time to troubleshooting this issue, trying various methods to pinpoint or resolve it, including:

• Directly used the DNDlauncher.exe instead of launching through Steam
• Reinstalled the game multiple times, including both the Steam and non-Steam versions.
• Launched the game using the 64-bit, 32-bit, and Legacy 32-bit clients
• Made sure this was not a latency spike or rubber banding by monitoring the network status of the game
• Downloaded and installed old DirectX libraries
• Downloaded and installed older versions of the .NET framework (I have 4.8.1 and older)
• Made sure the firewall and antivirus were both allowing the game
• Run it in Admin mode
• Logged into different servers, including Cormyr, the 64-bit server
• Cleared and reset DNS
• Made sure the RTX 4090 GPU was selected in the launcher options
• Checked the box to disable in-game audio
• Disabled all third-party software that may inject any overlays
• Made sure OneDrive is disabled
• Made sure the audio output device was set to exclusive mode in the Windows sound settings
• Capped the framerate at 30 and 60 fps
• Changed the Engine Speed in the game options from the lowest setting to the highest
• Manually replaced the OpenAL32.dll for both 32-bit and 64-bit in the game files
• Downloaded and installed Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2015-2022, all x86 and x64 versions
• Set the bitrate in my Windows sound properties to DVD quality (16-bit, 48,000 Hz)
• Tried different audio outputs, such as speakers and headphones, as well as no audio outputs
• Loaded the game without high-resolution game data
• Rolled back Windows Updates and updated to the newest version of Windows (11)
• Updated all system audio drivers, which happen to be Realtek and DTS
• Updated Nvidia drivers to the newest version as well as tried older Nvidia drivers (all cleanly installed using DDU)
• Booted the PC into a clean boot environment where all startup programs and non-essential services are disabled.

Despite all these efforts, the issue persists, occurring consistently within a couple of minutes of gameplay, regardless of the character being played, the zone, or the server as well as happening on the character select screen.

Examples:
In the Imgur link below are 3 video clips illustrating the problem. Each clip captures the stutter/hang in audio and visuals, as well as the music resetting. You may need to unmute the clips and turn up the volume on the clips to hear the music track reset. The video includes a frame time graph displaying active framerate and frame time to highlight the spikes corresponding to the hangs. The original resolution is 4k operating around 220-230 FPS, unfortunately imgur downscaled the quality quite a bit but the issue/bug is observable.

Here is the link to the examples:

https://imgur.com/a/SSgGhKW

I've already reported this as bug but I would appreciate any insights from others who might be experiencing this issue as well. If anyone has found a potential fix or workaround, your advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you for your attention to this matter!

 

[Mindos]

It sounds like a USB device causing trouble

 

[Grayvick]

It sounds like a USB device causing trouble

I went ahead and disconnected all USB devices except for the mouse and keyboard (also disabled mouse and keyboard software in case it was the cause). Unfortunately the issue still continued, so I decided to uninstall Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2015-2022, all x86 and x64 versions in case it was a corrupt version. I then reinstalled only the needed versions to play the game (2005 and 2010) the issue still persisted though.

I also went ahead and repaired/reinstalled DirectX to no avail as well, so I'm kind of out of ideas at this point short of reinstalling the whole OS. I thank you for your suggestion though and if anyone else has any ideas it's greatly appreciated!

 

[Mindos]

It could also be a network file sharing, maybe there is some other device on your home network that is not working correctly and keeps polling the shared pictures/videos/music?

You might want to turn everything off, and I mean everything electronic, from other TV's, computers, to handheld devices, to portable speakers, etc. just to get a good testing environment.

 

[J1NG]

Do you experience the same issues with other games?

Have you tried to see if the same thing haapens with a lower resolution? As it looks like 4K is being used there?

What are your poweer settings in Windows?

Do you have stuff like RGB fans etc, that rely on extra software to control?

J1NG

 

[Grayvick]

It could also be a network file sharing, maybe there is some other device on your home network that is not working correctly and keeps polling the shared pictures/videos/music?

You might want to turn everything off, and I mean everything electronic, from other TV's, computers, to handheld devices, to portable speakers, etc. just to get a good testing environment.

I don't have any network file sharing setup for my PC, and have disabled windows network discovery I do all my backups manually to external drives (not the best best I know). The PC is also connected via ethernet to the router, wi-fi is disabled on the PC. I did go ahead and try disabling bluetooth as well made sure the PC wasn't reaching out to any other devices and tested the game, it did not circumvent the issue unfortunately.

Do you experience the same issues with other games?

Have you tried to see if the same thing haapens with a lower resolution? As it looks like 4K is being used there?

What are your poweer settings in Windows?

Do you have stuff like RGB fans etc, that rely on extra software to control?

J1NG

I tried other games to see if the same kind of behavior was exhibited and found no similar issue. Normally when I see stuttering/hanging in general I think there's some issue with the storage drive pulling files for the game to load, or a CPU bottle neck. I have a SK hynix Platinum P41 2TB M.2 drive that I'm using as the game drive (100% health using crystal disk info) and a i7-12700k for the CPU, ran the game fine before that service window on the 19th it's really quite confusing.

I've tried running the game in multiple resolutions, some times I run it at 1440p or 1080p because I get tried of the UI being so small and not scaling. I also tried other lower resolutions for testing with no luck.

I've had windows power settings set to High Performance, with hard disk set to never turn off and link state power management set to off. This is what it's been set to before the issue started and I have not changed it yet.

Yes I have RBG fans that are managed by OpenRGB (b/c I can't stand corsair iCue, it does not play friendly with other programs). I disabled OpenRGB so the fans were not being addressed and tested the game to no avail sadly.

I thank you both you for your input and if you or anyone has any other ideas I'd love to know them! Hopefully if someone else is having this issue they find this thread and collaborate, or with any luck the bug report I sent the devs will get their attention on this issue to be fixed in the long term.

 

[Warned]

Chiming in to say I am experiencing the same and have been for a couple of years with no solution. I even changed my pc and it's still ongoing

 

[J1NG]

Have you tried running Task Manager side by side with DDO (DDO will need to be Windowed)? See if something is claiming all CPU resources (100%) when it happens or if DDO suddenly hits zero (0%)? You want to eliminate DDO or anything to do with DDO as the cause of the issue. Either one of these will tell us if DDO is the problem child or if it's something else, but DDO just happens to be the one that experiences it.

J1NG

 

[Mindos]

Maybe joystick or other controller? Speakers?

 

[In_Like_Flynn]

Just to say that I have been experiencing these issues for a couple of years as well. The game also shuts down without warning during some of the stutters. I've "tried everything".

 

[Mindos]

Computer overheating?

 

[Grayvick]

Have you tried running Task Manager side by side with DDO (DDO will need to be Windowed)? See if something is claiming all CPU resources (100%) when it happens or if DDO suddenly hits zero (0%)? You want to eliminate DDO or anything to do with DDO as the cause of the issue. Either one of these will tell us if DDO is the problem child or if it's something else, but DDO just happens to be the one that experiences it.

J1NG

So I decided to do this and saw that DDO on average takes only about 6 to 9% of my total CPU processing. When the hang occurs it drops down to about 2 to 3%. The only other application I noticed coming close but not superseding DDO is the WmiPrvse.exe process. It spikes from 0% usage to about 4% CPU usage.

This obviously doesn't indicate the CPU being completely 100% consumed by one process but it did make me investigate if it's related at all to the issue. I have very little time to troubleshoot this so I'm still in the process of investigating it. I've mainly used this troubleshooting guide to investigate this process: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/t...t-components/troubleshoot-wmi-high-cpu-issues

I'm still working my way through it I'm at the point where I have found out the DLL file that may be associated with this. I'm hoping I can determine if it's DDO causing an issue for this DLL or if the DLL is causing an issue for DDO.

@Mindos I don't have any game controller connected to the PC when this issue occurs, additionally there's no overheating with the machine. I also went ahead and tested with unplugging the analog speakers from the back of the motherboard. Unfortunately the issue still persisted.

@Warned and @In_Like_Flynn that really sucks that you two have been dealing with this for years hopefully something can be found out or fixed by the dev team. @Warned the fact that you're having it happen on another computer is especially concerning. I did go ahead and try installing it on my girlfriend's PC to see if the issue was represented there and luckily did not have the problem. She has completely different hardware though, and is on Windows 10. So it's very hard to say what the difference could specifically be.

Thank you all again for investing time in trying to figure out this problem!

 

[Warned]

So I got really angry and started binary searching settings on the character select screen to solve this.
I ended up finding a solution for my case, which of all things was chnaging the engine speed (no idea what does that even mean) from very high to high, but lower might work better, no idea. You can find the setting in the Troubleshooting section of the options menu.
Now all the stuttering I have is just regular lag stuttering.

 

[Grayvick]

Have you tried running Task Manager side by side with DDO (DDO will need to be Windowed)? See if something is claiming all CPU resources (100%) when it happens or if DDO suddenly hits zero (0%)? You want to eliminate DDO or anything to do with DDO as the cause of the issue. Either one of these will tell us if DDO is the problem child or if it's something else, but DDO just happens to be the one that experiences it.

J1NG

So I finally finished that troubleshooting guide and found that the Windows process was not the culprit but that it was being affected by DDO.

What I ended up finding out is that it's the DDO client process that's initiating a query to Win32_PNPEntity (which manages plug and play connections) that is handled by the provider CIMWin32 and hosted under WmiPrvse.exe. D&D online keeps asking Windows what devices are connected as plug and play. That WMI process gets hit hard by that query from DDO which causes that specific process trouble, but DDO is the source.

I was hoping It'd be the other way around, or another process would be the culprit so maybe I could fix or repair it in some way. I did go ahead and check the WMI repository to make sure it wasn't corrupted, it was not. I went ahead a reset the repository anyway to start with a fresh one just in case it was something that wasn't being caught by the corruption check command. That did not fix the issue as well.

Since the query DDO was repeatedly prompting is related to plug and play devices I tired using different mice to see if maybe that would work, just in case it really didn't like my current mouse for some reason. That didn't work either sadly, and I've already removed all other USB devices and tested as well before so I'm not sure what next.

@Warned I attempted that earlier in my troubleshooting with no luck, but decided to try it again since you had some success. Unfortunately no luck, the issue still continued for me. It seems like we have similar issues with maybe different sources. I'm glad you found a work around for now though!

 

[J1NG]

By chance, have you recently (physically as in hardware) installed or moved anything on the computer itself that you play DDO on?

Primarily, I would suspect either a connection somewhere is not fully seated in, or has developed a short and is constantly sending false signals to the system and why it keeps doing that. That, or the firewall settings are not correct and so when DDO is only supposed to poll devices as required (usually at the start only), it's constantly trying again and again because it never got the full OK from the OS in the first place.

J1NG

 

[Mindos]

By chance, have you recently (physically as in hardware) installed or moved anything on the computer itself that you play DDO on?

Primarily, I would suspect either a connection somewhere is not fully seated in, or has developed a short and is constantly sending false signals to the system and why it keeps doing that. That, or the firewall settings are not correct and so when DDO is only supposed to poll devices as required (usually at the start only), it's constantly trying again and again because it never got the full OK from the OS in the first place.

J1NG

This. Was gonna type the exact same thing. Something loose, a bad cable, a flaky battery, etc. It's not really DDO doing the polling, it's the OS telling DDO there's been a change in the PNP list, and then DDO runs the query. Or something close enought to that.

Don't forget to check wireless things, like network wifi cards, etc. They might be bouncing around from 5 to 2.5, and who knows that might be enough to start the problem.

 

[Grayvick]

By chance, have you recently (physically as in hardware) installed or moved anything on the computer itself that you play DDO on?

Primarily, I would suspect either a connection somewhere is not fully seated in, or has developed a short and is constantly sending false signals to the system and why it keeps doing that. That, or the firewall settings are not correct and so when DDO is only supposed to poll devices as required (usually at the start only), it's constantly trying again and again because it never got the full OK from the OS in the first place.

J1NG

I believe the issue is fixed, thank you! I don't know why the firewall would affect how DDO polls devices, but I deleted the entries for the game (there were about four duplicates, likely due to former installations) within the "Allow an app through firewall" settings in the "Firewall & network protection" settings.

I knew the game wouldn't be able to connect properly after that, but it normally asks for firewall access on first run, like after a new installation. So I launched the game, and it asked for firewall access. I granted it for private and public networks and tested it for a while with no issues!

Here's an Imgur link to the rules I had to delete:

https://imgur.com/a/3NNg0dQ

That screenshot was taken after I deleted and refreshed the firewall access for DDO. It also shows the advanced settings displaying the entries for TCP and UDP connections, as well as how DDO has two entries: one for the main client and one for the launcher, I believe.

After testing the fix for a while, I decided to reinstall the game to ensure that the launcher had the proper access through the firewall, as I had also deleted that rule. I'm unsure of any other way to restore the launcher's access through the firewall and wanted to avoid any potential issues with patching the game in the future.

One odd thing to note is that after doing this firewall fix, the "Disable DM Audio" box was checked for some reason. I had to search around for a bit when I noticed no DM audio was playing; I unchecked it, and it worked perfectly after that.

In the end, I'm still not really sure what happened, but I'm glad that refreshing those firewall rules worked! I'll update if the issue returns, and I thank you all for your contributions!

 

[Warned]

So I finally finished that troubleshooting guide and found that the Windows process was not the culprit but that it was being affected by DDO.

What I ended up finding out is that it's the DDO client process that's initiating a query to Win32_PNPEntity (which manages plug and play connections) that is handled by the provider CIMWin32 and hosted under WmiPrvse.exe. D&D online keeps asking Windows what devices are connected as plug and play. That WMI process gets hit hard by that query from DDO which causes that specific process trouble, but DDO is the source.

I was hoping It'd be the other way around, or another process would be the culprit so maybe I could fix or repair it in some way. I did go ahead and check the WMI repository to make sure it wasn't corrupted, it was not. I went ahead a reset the repository anyway to start with a fresh one just in case it was something that wasn't being caught by the corruption check command. That did not fix the issue as well.

Since the query DDO was repeatedly prompting is related to plug and play devices I tired using different mice to see if maybe that would work, just in case it really didn't like my current mouse for some reason. That didn't work either sadly, and I've already removed all other USB devices and tested as well before so I'm not sure what next.

@Warned I attempted that earlier in my troubleshooting with no luck, but decided to try it again since you had some success. Unfortunately no luck, the issue still continued for me. It seems like we have similar issues with maybe different sources. I'm glad you found a work around for now though!

The issue has unfortunately returned and it seems to have been a temporary fix. I'll try your firewall fix and report back, just in case someone comes across it in the future

Edit: So far so good, firewall fix did help. Hoping it wont just start up again like last time.

 

[Grayvick]

The issue has unfortunately returned and it seems to have been a temporary fix. I'll try your firewall fix and report back, just in case someone comes across it in the future

Edit: So far so good, firewall fix did help. Hoping it wont just start up again like last time.

I'm glad it worked for you!

I'll give you a heads-up, though—I don't know how well this fix will hold. I mention this because on Thursday, I restarted my PC for Windows updates, and the issue returned. I think it was likely due to the Windows update.

After the update and restart, I tried the firewall fix, but, sadly, it did not work as it had previously. I thought that maybe some of my other troubleshooting steps might be needed in conjunction with the firewall fix. So, I reset the WMI repository again, but that didn't work either, nor did reinstalling the game or multiple restarts. I tested DDO with each step to no avail. This eventually led me to perform a system restore to a point that was auto-generated the day the updates installed themselves (Tuesday), but were not applied until I restarted the PC on Thursday.

The system restore worked, so I'm keeping it there for now and have paused Windows updates until I have time to learn more. The system restore also removed more than just the Windows update; apparently, Windows installed some drivers as well that may have caused the issue to return.

Here is an Imgur link to what the system restore removed, affected, or restored, in case you're curious:

https://imgur.com/a/ZqtwnLd

I also went ahead and, while testing DDO after the system restore, made sure to restart the PC a few times to confirm that it wasn't a PC restart alone that was breaking the fix. It continued to work fine through multiple restarts after the system restore.

I made a system image of the Windows OS drive in case this happens again, so I at least have a snapshot I can revert to. For now, though, I'm going to leave things as they are since I don't have a huge amount of time to investigate this. I'll report back if it happens again or if I find any insight into why this issue is occurring. Good luck to you—I hope it holds for you!

 

[Warned]

That's a big oof. This issue has been around for years on quite a few threads with no fix in sight unfortunately - I am thinking of running the game on Linux through WINE to check what exactly is happening and if I am having the same issues as you as I haven't the slightest on how to check whether or not the game is polling USB ports on windows - do you perhaps have the steps to reproduce the checks on windows?