Hard crashes on ALT-TAB

[Jester]

Over the past several weeks I have been experiencing the same hard crash of my system upon entering ALT-TAB to leave the game temporarily to do things on my computer. This crash will not all pressing ESC or Control-ALT-Del to exit back to the computer or reboot. I am forced to hold the power button to restart the computer.

[Jester]

Bug report with attached file submitted on Discord.

[fusion-waffle]

That sounds very frustrating, good idea submitting a bug report.   Have you experimented with different display settings, such as varying the screen resolution, or switching the fullscreen mode?    E.g. if you hit this hard crash when alt-tabbing when the game is running in exclusive full screen mode, does the same crash happen if instead you configure the game to instead run as borderless full screen or windowed?   Maybe one of those could provide a workaround and let you keep enjoying the game:

If this hard crash is due to a bug in xenonauts 2, the devs will want to fix it, although if this is a rare bug that does not happen on many machines, fixing it may be difficult.  If you are unlucky, there is also a small chance that perhaps the hard crash is due to the game triggering an underlying hardware fault in your RAM/GPU/CPU or some GPU driver issue that is specific to your computer, that the devs may not be able to reproduce on their end or fix.    Do you experience similar hard crashes when running any other games or applications aside from xenonauts?

 

edit:   My understanding is that Xenonauts 2 relies on Unity engine. There are a few bug reports across the internet of Unity engine games sometimes crashing when alt-tabbed, which suggest a few other possible culprits (Discord) or potential workarounds specific to Unity engine games that you could also try

• one Unity bug report mentions that games using particular versions of the Unity engine can crash when alt-tabbed if Discord is open. If Discord is completely closed, then the crash does not occur. If you usually have Discord running when you play Xenonauts 2, you could try closing it and see if that helps.
• Another unity bug report mentions that sometimes an alt-tab crash issue can be worked around by forcing the game not to use DirectX12 when rendering, and instead use DirectX11 or OpenGL.  Assuming you use Windows and you launch the game from Steam, you can force e.g. DirectX11 by going to your steam library, right clicking on xenonauts 2, choosing "properties", then in the "launch options" text field of "general" tab, enter

  -force-d3d11

  then close the properties window, launching the game through steam as usual and try alt-tabbing and see if it still hard crashes or if things have improved.  Another alternative to forcing DirectX11 is forcing use of OpenGL -- same steps as above but instead fill the "launch options" text field with 

  -force-glcore

   

Edited January 20 by fusion-waffle

[Kouki]

14 hours ago, Jester said:

Bug report with attached file submitted on Discord.

I made a reply on the Discord thread (I presume you're azab0128?), I'll be pasting it here as well.

Thanks for taking the time to post a bug report! By a hard crash do you mean that your PC crashes or is it just the game? If it's the former, then we'll need more information, I'll list down a bunch of stuff below that would help us figure out what is going on. Have you also changed any hardware recently? If so, please let us know as well.

Error Codes - If this was a BSOD, then it should display a stop code. If you can send us the stop code then it'll help a lot in identifying what caused the crash.

Memory dumps - Press Windows key, in the search bar type '%systemroot%', this will open your Windows folder. Check if the folder 'Minidump' has anything in it or if there are any .dmp files generated.

Event Viewer Logs - Press Windows key, in the search bar type 'event viewer' and open it. Once it's open click Create Custom View on the right hand side of the window. On the Logged option, select the option that covers the timeframe when your system last crashed. On Event level, select 'Critical'. And on the Event Logs drop down, click on Windows Logs. Press OK then it should generate a custom view that lists down the critical errors that happened within the timeframe you selected. Next, click 'Save All events in Custom View As' and which will prompt to save the logs in .evtx format. Send us this log as well so we can give it a look.

Hardware information (dxdiag) - Press Windows key and type 'dxdiag' in the search bar, once it opens click Save All Information... on the lower right side of the window, then send us the file generated.

Hardware info pt.2 (msinfo32) - Press Windows key and type 'msinfo32' in the search bar, open the result named System Information. Once it opens, click File and then Save. Then send us the .nfo file which will contain information about your hardware.