West bug ARRGH

[Strokker]

We can get no help at all from Soe regarding this infamous West Bug every post in Tech support gets shut down and rerouted to the dead letter office. I know this is not the forum to post about it in BUT this is after all the Primal Scream Room...AAAARRRGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!

[Ddemons Ddemise]

Wait till you get Westlook and Eastlook bugs as well as a bit of "northlook" XD

and have it happen midraid..

[tnexus]

Just because they haven't fixed it doesn't mean they haven't tried to fix it. Not every problem has a two minute fix. If I recall from a past post from a dev, finding the reason for this bug is like trying to finding a needle in a haystack.

[KyrosKrane]

A LONG time ago, I had a PC that would get something similar to the West bug. (I don't know if it was the same thing; it's been too long.) This PC only ran my traders, and they never really moved or left the bazaar. But if I left them up long enough, portions of the screen would blank out, much like what happens with the west bug. At the time, I attributed the bug to my video card overheating. Not long after that, though, I junked the PC in favor of a new one, and I didn't get that particular bug again.

Is it possible that the west bug is just an overheating video card causing some of the chips on the card to stop working right?

[Strokker]

Wait till you get Westlook and Eastlook bugs as well as a bit of "northlook" XD

and have it happen midraid..

Is that the one where you get Prisim like graphics? I have had it too on older machine.

[AB-girlie]

part of the bug can be a overheating issue, but....only a part of it.
for a while turning off dynamic lightning helped for me,but only for a while.
after that i had (and still have) to relog to get rid of it /

[Ddemons Ddemise]

Is that the one where you get Prisim like graphics? I have had it too on older machine.

nah, I just call anything where my screen goes blank in a certain direction the direct + look XD

And that can really screw you in a raid when 3/4 directions are blank screens..

[rarrazz]

Now

something I have noticed with this bug.. The first time I saw it a long with about 20 other people I know.. It started coming back after this, but only on my old machine..

There was a GM event on Saryrn in West Commons, this was before the merge, there was 3 GMs playing as werewolves, and we had to kill them, if you /who'd the zone, there was about 300 people there.. Meaning we had 300 people beating down on GMs playing werewolves, well once they were dead I know a lot of people who started getting this bug, four or five of my friends and I tried logging out, and still had the bug when we got back, yet many of us had never had this bug before..
I have no idea how relevant that is to the whole thing, but it was pretty weird..

[Jago668]

Just on adding information. I get this bug alot if I play for long periods of time. Logging out and back in fixes it, but camping to character and back doesn't. I've had it happen on two different mobo's with different processors and ram sticks. Only common thing was video cards.

[Ursawraith]

For what its worth I used to have this problem alot if I played for more then 7 hours in one session. I always attributed it to a memory leak in EQ and never thought about it again. I would just log out and re log to "fix" it.

About a month ago I upgraded my DX Drivers to their most recent, (I had to upgrade them for a beta test) and I have not gotten the West bug since. Sure it could be coincidence but it fixed it for me.

[rarrazz]

Today

After being on about 8 hours.. started getting this for the first time on my old computer.. And relogging did fix it.

[Drawde]

What IS this bug I keep hearing mentioned? Can't do much with the EQ website, since I got rid of Flashplayer.

[KyrosKrane]

It's hard to describe, and almost impossible to explain why it happens. When it does, though, you start seeing giant triangles, sort of like fractal designs, all originating at one point on the screen, covering over much of the game screen. As you turn your character around, the effect will disappear, but if you turn back, it will reappear in a new pattern. Most frequently, these effects happen when you face west, hence the common name. However, there have been reports of the same (or very similar) effects when facing in almost every direction.

[Syuni D'zpecyzczn]

I don't get the artifacting you mention, Kyros, I just have all rendered terrain vanish, as well as mobs, and all I see are things like spell effects, torches, and sky.

[KyrosKrane]

Huh. Odd. When the terrain vanishes for me, it's usually because my PC has run out of texture memory. (This is essentially the memory on your video card.) I usually get a message in the center of my screen saying something like "Texture memory low! 15MB" or some such. When it gets below 5 or so, Bad Things start to happen. I run a number of diagnostic utilities on my PC, so I'm not sure if it's EQ issuing the warning or one of them. It usually requires restarting the PC to fix this problem; for me, it doesn't get solved just by restarting EQ.