FFXI Sound goes, then soon after game crashesFollow

Is it just sound or are there graphic errors as well?

Edit: Wait you're the same person who posted a few days ago. Did you reinstall a fresh FFXI? Or did you copy over your directory from steam to the new install? It sounds like you have corrupted files. Running the file check might help.

Edited, Mar 24th 2012 7:36am by Telaki

Ya I was the one with the steam issue, Acutally, I got rid of steam and deleted all left over files of FFXI and what not, fresh install with actual FFXI disk, this issue was happening since day 1 with steam and i thought it was steam so I went the different route. I'll look into some of those option you guys listed above and will post back. Thanks

Load-out can vary somewhat based on where you got it from. Many of the gaming laptops will run soundblaster software, but may not necessarily have an actual Creative Labs sound chip, and this is where some of the issues come in--the emulation layers can cause all kinds of wonkiness. Switching to the chips native drivers and removing that extra layer from the equation is sometimes needed to stabilize things again. If you've got the WaveMAXX with Soundblaster option, this may be your issue.

The HD Audio WDMI driver can still be causing a problem, even if you are not using the HDMI interfaces. Just having it loaded and active can cause issues. Sometimes just disabling the device in Device Manager will allow you to resove the problem---sometimes not, as the problematic library is still being loaded and used elsewhere in the driver layer. Sometimes the Audio driver from an older package works better with this issue, but you need a different driver to resolve issues with the video portion. Don't know about nVidia's driver models, but ATI releases the HDMI Audio drivers as standalone packages that you can install alongside the Video packages to resolve such issues. I would expect the same would hold true for nVidia, Realtek, Creative, etc. The trick is in finding out exactly what hardware you have installed (the actual hardware, sans any emulation software if it is running--ie, you have non-Creative Labs Audio hardware, but Soundblaster software installed) so you can go to the appropriate vendor for the drivers.

And yes, 9.0c is the last directX that contained some of the specific files that might be needed by older games like FFXI. These files are not always present in Post Windows XP installations. In Vista/Win7 it is emulated within DX11. As such, some core files may not be installed. Some older games will expect to have access to these libraries and make specific calls for them. When they aren't there it can cause issues if there is no recovery programmed to catch the exception in either the drivers, DX11, or the game itself. The fix for this has often been to download and run the DX 9.0c offline installer.

NOTE: The web installer will not always install these missing files (because you have a higher version already installed, it thinks some are no longer needed, hence the problem). The offline installer may still unpack/register these particular libraries if they are not present.

Start with your sound card. Do you know what kind of card you have?

that's a start, but it only narrows it down to roughly 3 dozen possible audio chips. IDT (Integrated Device Technology) cranks out all kinds of designs for various fabricators to use on their motherborrds. A quick Google brought up a lot of hits on problems with some of their drivers in Vista/Win7. So yeah, I would be holding your driver suspect at first glance.

You'll need to be more specific with actual hardware specs if you want to get the drivers from IDT (they list them by chip number), or get them from Dell, HP--whoever you got your system from (those may lag behind a bit compared to what may be more current from IDT, but likely a safer place to start). To get them from your laptop vendor, you may need to provide the Serial ID of the laptop or some other similar product code to make sure you are getting the right driver package.

Also the desktop is running win 7 pro, and is using HDMI right now, so the sound is going through the Nvidia Geforce GTX 480x2 to the TV itself, and it crashes also.

In that case, you might want to add the POL folder to your AV's real time scan exceptions and see if that makes a difference.

Not to sound like an arrogant douche (as would be normal actually), but I think I found your problem.

Never has a computer builder company had such shady, shoddy, sh*tty hardware vendors as Alienware. They have always been a nightmare of sketchy parts. Hard-Drives DoA, Video Cards artifacting out of the box, and in one case with a personal friend every part in the machine needing replacement on subsequent RMAs (later theory that it was a bad power supply burning up everything).

This is before they were bought out though. They actually had more issues with part quality than Dell... guess who bought them?

So are you having sound issues in other games too, but only FFXI is actually crashing because of them?

Edited, Mar 30th 2012 12:04pm by Raelix

Made exceptions for both mine and wife's computer to the playonline folder and now both games appear to be running fine with now sound issues or crashing. Let me know if this helped you out.

Confirmed, uninstalled bitdefender and works 100% now, have been running game for 12 hours straight, and no crashes.