Spring RTS Engine

2 days ago i got this strange bug out of nowhere. I did some potentially dangerous surfing on intet but i'm using Firefox, avast is on all the time so i don't think i got any viruses or such. Nevertheless i did full system scan with avast and adaware. They found nothing.
Game was running perfectly fine for years till now and i didn't change any hardware components too. I'm running Windows SP2.

Plz note that following problem happens only when i'm in game or have game running in background.

So here's my problem. When i play game using only mouse everything is perfect, but when i hit some keys on keyboard commands seem to start stacking up till my controls (keyboard+mouse) fail completely for few second. If i'm rly persistent i get beeping sound from PC's speaker. And no, i'm not holding all my keys at once. Holding shift + selecting ~30 waypoints will cause this problem. Some other random things like dguning or placing solars, mexes can cause this problem with first command i try to give.
The strange thing is that i still can see everything moving just fine with no fps lag at all. Every unit is doing what it's supposed to be doing. But on the other hand everything else starts stacking too. Typing in lobby with game on becomes rly slow and unpresponsive, ventrilo stacks up huge ping and every other windows program/function starts to lag.
My PC will slowly process every keyboard input i gave. If i get it to lag on me for example and than start hitting caps lock it slowly goes through all previous commands and when it reaches caps (could be 10s later) it starts blinking with that lil light. Blinking is slow but than it gets faster and finally PC gets unstuck.

I have tried:
-reinstalling spring
-clearing lobby and game settings registry inputs
-reinstalling keyboard software (Logitech)
-switching keyboard from PS2 to USB and back
Nothing helped.

Formating my hard drive is not an option.

System: AMD A64 2800+, ATI Radeon 9600XT, 1GB OCZ DDR, Segate Baracuda 280GB, Logitech Internet navigator keyboard, Logitech MX510 mouse running Windows XP with all updates and SP2.

Btw BA isn't working after reinstalling. It whines about missing default cursor or something like that.

Wisse wrote:Btw BA isn't working after reinstalling. It whines about missing default cursor or something like that.

i actually hate you

please read the goddamn stickies for solutions to problems like this

You could try helping bout my real problem not this btw thingy. I'm sure i would thinker that out on my own too. I was just all hyped couse of typing so i dropped another line XD

Wisse wrote:You could try helping bout my real problem not this btw thingy. I'm sure i would thinker that out on my own too. I was just all hyped couse of typing so i dropped another line XD

the thing is i have no clue about your real problem, but your other problem could be fixed so easy by just reading

Try it with a different game module and see if it does the same thing.

Gundam RTS and Evolution RTS are extremely stable and either is a good platform for testing this.

I tested it in CA and got same problem. It must be something wrong with my windows or some drivers. I'll try more reinstalling tomorrow :\

Install BA via the installer to solve the cursor issue. Dunno about the other one.

I got the idea everything works normal except when spring is running?

Yes. Even spring works normally till i use keyboard x.x

Maybe try *uninstalling* keyboard software, or give it higher priority? Not that I see why would process keyboard input, but then again, Logitech are still shipping keyboards with three key limits, nothing surprises me about them

I tested during reinstall process too. After uninstalling software i did reboot, tested and than reinstalled. Nothing changed.

I meant try it with a non ta based mod.

Ok, now i tested using evolution. I still have same problem but lags are a bit shorter which is not a surprise since i would imagine that BA is more cpu intensive.

Here are some new observations:

Spring engine appears to take up all of my CPU time and other system resources which leads to lag from keyboard and slow response in windows when alt+tabed. If i set game to low priority manually in Task Manager everything works better. Game doesn't suffer from huge fps drop and keyboard lag is almost unnoticeable.

I guess smth is wrong with my engine which causes it to use more resources than it should. I have no idea how to fix it tho. I tried reinstalling few times but it didn't help. It might be that the problem started with latest windows update.

Try to run Spring with lower priority (look for info about start command).

Wisse wrote:Here are some new observations:

Spring engine appears to take up all of my CPU time and other system resources which leads to lag from keyboard and slow response in windows when alt+tabed. If i set game to low priority manually in Task Manager everything works better. Game doesn't suffer from huge fps drop and keyboard lag is almost unnoticeable.

I guess smth is wrong with my engine which causes it to use more resources than it should. I have no idea how to fix it tho. I tried reinstalling few times but it didn't help. It might be that the problem started with latest windows update.

I would guess the issue is with a background program interfering.

I tested background programs compatibility step by step and found the one causing problems. Thx ZellSF x.x

EDIT:

ati2evxx.exe - Ati HotKey Poller was the cause of my and Dopewalka's problem. We both managed to fix it by disabling service and than killing process. Dopewalka had to do it in safe mode.
We both use ATI Radeon 9600XT.


usnsvc.exe - Messenger Sharing USN Journal Reader Service was the cause of my problem. This service starts with MSN Live Messenger and doesn't close with it, so it silently fucks everything up in background.

I had this service installed for a long time but i guess it got updated or something like that which caused it to mess with spring. Maybe M$ added key logger

I think that Ati caused that bug, but i'm leaving MSN's service as a possibility.

Thx for all the help guys,
now i can go back to pwning ur asses