Heliosphere crashes game, browser, and computer.

[Stormcrow]

While downloading a mod the website to game, I got a STORE EXCEPTION ERROR BSOD. I rebooted, researched that, found "faulty drivers" or potential hardware failure as a major part of the problem, updated everything from my SSD's firmware to my Nvidia 505 TI's driver, and a few mobo ones for good measure. Windows briefly loses my D: drive, but a reboot brought that back, though I had to remap it back to D: (and this is how I found out that Epic Games doesn't have a fucking function to remap to existing games, and all games have to be redownloaded to play via the app. So fuck those guys, for real.)

This takes about two hours of my time up. I don't log back into FFXIV because I want to chill for a bit, so I go play some other video games without any problems at all. But I know I owe my buddy some gposing, so I log in around 11pm-12am.

Game dies. Over and over again. Every time I try to interact with Heliosphere, the game dies. Not only does the game day, it forces my computer to restart something else or interferes with something else. Had to disable both Overlays from discord and nvidia. Still no fix. Has gone from "every time I open the game" to "every time I open the game and any browser at the same time." Sometimes it crashes the whole computer. I tried with Edge instead of Firefox. Same problem. If I have no browsers open anywhere, it will run, ish. If the custom repos are disabled, it will run just fine, no problems whatsoever.

What could be happening here?

 

[anna]

No idea, but this is definitely a hardware issue. I wish you luck.

Edit: my first place to look would be your RAM. memtest86+ would help there

 

[Stormcrow]

No idea, but this is definitely a hardware issue. I wish you luck.

Edit: my first place to look would be your RAM. memtest86+ would help there

How can it be a hardware issue when the hardware runs just fine when the game is not in operation? Or that the game runs just fine when the custom repo is disabled? What part of these things indicate a hardware issue? Serious question, not sarcasm.

 

[anna]

Having the game and a browser open creates an environment that surfaces the hardware (or possibly driver) fault. It sounds like a RAM issue to me because you list scenarios of high RAM usage as when things go wrong. Either way, Heliosphere is not the root cause of your BSODs or crashes; we would receive way more reports if that were the case. There is something wrong on your end.

 

[Stormcrow]

Turns out we're both wrong!

My hardware is golden. Ran every memory test, from RAM to VRAM, drive testers, nuke+paved, reinstalled FFXIV and felt very triumphant when nothing bad happened, even when use of Heliosphere was in play. Began to rebuild my mods from scratch (it was overdue anyway.)

[spongebob squarepants: four hours later]

Then I tried to play Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. And suddenly, the same shit happens. Tests get run. Nothing changed. Ran MORE tests. Finally got an error code is found in one of them, though -- but only one and it's supposedly an old test that's no good for gpu cards with larger RAM banks. Googled it. It's commonly associated with a faulty driver.. and what is frequently the driver cause... ? Memory leaks in the Nvidia driver.

Guess who updated her Nvidia drivers that same day?