Intermittent Black Screen in Angmar

[Artegall]

I left for around a year and came back to find that I can't navigate the Angmar zone without encountering intermittent black-screen events where my character keeps moving but the screen goes totally black for a few seconds (a dangerous combination). The zone was a little laggy at the time but this seems excessive. I haven't had this occur in any of the other areas to date, up to and including Moria, and I have a high-speed internet connection so the problem doesn't appear to be at my end. Any insights on this situation?

[Fr0striven]

I left for around a year and came back to find that I can't navigate the Angmar zone without encountering intermittent black-screen events where my character keeps moving but the screen goes totally black for a few seconds (a dangerous combination). The zone was a little laggy at the time but this seems excessive. I haven't had this occur in any of the other areas to date, up to and including Moria, and I have a high-speed internet connection so the problem doesn't appear to be at my end. Any insights on this situation?

Is this only while you are on a steed/mounted? I've had that occur all over the place, so assumed that it was just due to me travelling to fast for the game to keep up with me.

I haven't had it occur while just walking/running/fighting mobs....

[CLandry]

Any kind of mounted travelling in western Angmar is very problematic for me as well. If I move too quickly, textures don't load quickly enough, and eventually the screen goes black. There are also secondary issues such as invisible monsters attacking me, which I don't really notice until they pop up, accompanied by all of the attack sounds playing at once. In the eastern part, things aren't so bad.

The only other area in the game I ran into with major issues like that was Minas Tirith (pre-battle) and Pellenor (pre-battle) in general. I haven't adventured into Mordor and the remaining areas/expansions yet though.

[Strider5548]

I left for around a year and came back to find that I can't navigate the Angmar zone without encountering intermittent black-screen events where my character keeps moving but the screen goes totally black for a few seconds (a dangerous combination). The zone was a little laggy at the time but this seems excessive. I haven't had this occur in any of the other areas to date, up to and including Moria, and I have a high-speed internet connection so the problem doesn't appear to be at my end. Any insights on this situation?

I get this exact same problem. It happens all over Angmar, and fairly frequently. I also freeze in place when the screen goes black (I can tell because the radar is still there). In general Angmar has become super laggy too, perhaps because more players there than usual on Treebeard?

[Gandolf_TheOld]

First thing you should do, update your video drivers.
Then power down your system and then bring it back up, so the new drivers are loaded.

[Artegall]

Is this only while you are on a steed/mounted? I've had that occur all over the place, so assumed that it was just due to me travelling to fast for the game to keep up with me.

I haven't had it occur while just walking/running/fighting mobs....

No, but I had the hunter speed buff on, so combined with the lag it could have caused the glitching. Thanks for the input.

[Artegall]

Any kind of mounted travelling in western Angmar is very problematic for me as well. If I move too quickly, textures don't load quickly enough, and eventually the screen goes black. There are also secondary issues such as invisible monsters attacking me, which I don't really notice until they pop up, accompanied by all of the attack sounds playing at once. In the eastern part, things aren't so bad.

The only other area in the game I ran into with major issues like that was Minas Tirith (pre-battle) and Pellenor (pre-battle) in general. I haven't adventured into Mordor and the remaining areas/expansions yet though.

I think the game has regressed then, since I never had trouble in Angmar before. The previous zone (east of Esteldin) always had rubber-banding issues but I haven't seen any of that yet.

[Artegall]

First thing you should do, update your video drivers.
Then power down your system and then bring it back up, so the new drivers are loaded.

Good idea. I do that regularly but not since I came back to Lotro. Thanks!

[Artegall]

I get this exact same problem. It happens all over Angmar, and fairly frequently. I also freeze in place when the screen goes black (I can tell because the radar is still there). In general Angmar has become super laggy too, perhaps because more players there than usual on Treebeard?

This was on Arkenstone. I haven't played on Treebeard yet, but if I create a new character I may try it. So many toons, so little time!

[maartena]

The rendering of the zone is local to your computer, so whether you have fast or slow internet should not matter. For some reason, your computer is not able to read information fast enough from the data files that contain Angmar, which results in you seeing the black screen.

There could be several reasons for this, but my guess is that the large data file the data is in is in a defragmented state and the game is installed on a regular "spinning" hard drive. If this is the case, I would see if you could upgrade to an SSD instead.

Another issue could be video drivers. Maybe this only happens with certain types of video cards, so that is information you may want to post to see if others with this issue have a similar configuration. Usually the newest drivers should be the best, but this is not always the case..... sometimes an older, more stable driver will actually give you the best results.

[Tralfazz]

The rendering of the zone is local to your computer, so whether you have fast or slow internet should not matter. For some reason, your computer is not able to read information fast enough from the data files that contain Angmar, which results in you seeing the black screen.

There could be several reasons for this, but my guess is that the large data file the data is in is in a defragmented state and the game is installed on a regular "spinning" hard drive. If this is the case, I would see if you could upgrade to an SSD instead.

Another issue could be video drivers. Maybe this only happens with certain types of video cards, so that is information you may want to post to see if others with this issue have a similar configuration. Usually the newest drivers should be the best, but this is not always the case..... sometimes an older, more stable driver will actually give you the best results.

This issue with a black screen and textures not loading fully/taking a long time to load in Angmar happens to me. It never used to happen, but began fairly recently. Now it is very frequent. I get it mostly on the road from Aughaire to Fail-a-Khro and between Fail-a-Khro and Tor Gailvin. My hardware (32gb of RAM and an SSD handling storage) hasn't changed, my OS hasn't changed significantly, my LOTRO settings haven't changed (64-bit client). But something has changed in Angmar – this began to happen right after a patch.

I've tested by lowering my graphics settings to the ugly minimum and it still happens in those areas.

Sometimes I notice that the textures haven't fully loaded in the middle distance so I will stop my toon and wait until things look right before proceeding. This usually prevents the black screen. Then I'll proceed a bit further, such as from just before Fail-a-Khro to just beyond it heading north, will again notice the textures in the middle distance have not fully loaded (things appear a bit fuzzy or otherwise off) and will again wait until I see improvement before proceeding.

Some people are reporting this in other zones but I have noticed it in Angmar only, only in the western part of the zone and (to repeat myself) mostly between Aughaire and Tor Gailvin.

[TharbadThief]

There are some weird things happening in Angmar landscape (to some of us, at least), and we had a brief "peer support" moment about a month ago in this thread:
https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...lems-in-Angmar

[maartena]

You could try re-downloading the data files.

I can't help you much more beyond that, as neither my gaming rig (NVidia GTX1060 6GB card) nor my laptop (NVidia Quadro M1200) have any problems with Angmar. I have no idea whether the fact that both are NVidia has anything at all to do with the fact that it is "working", but it may be something to investigate.

I know on-board Intel graphics cards usually are mentioned with "problems" in a variety of games but that is all very subjective and might also depend on the CPU. Nevertheless, it may be worth it to check drivers. If you remember it working say 6 months ago, try an OLDER driver for a change. I've only recently updated my NVidia drivers again, I was happily running some version from 2020 somewhere because if it ain't broke don't fix it

[Gildoriel]

I had black screens like this happen when I port into a new area, e. g. Osgiliath (after Battle). No idea how it could happen there in one of the most non-crowded areas in the game. It appeared like if the area graphics were slow to load and NPCs still looking for their proper place because their names were all in the same spot on the black screen. Looked kinda weird.

[JERH]

I have seen this on landscape as well as in missions. Sometime black screen o' death but almost always just a basic scene no textures, mobs, water, or grass. Then after a while (interval varies) the textures/grass will fill in, then more details and the mobs will finally arrive though not all at once. This is on an up to date 1 yr old comp with SSD and a low/medium end graphics card running at a medium resolution. My base assumption is that the information on what texture/detail maps to load is not being fed from the core server fast enough. Since each zone is broken into a number of display mini-zones you can see when you are crossing a boundary in a lotro display driver thread occupancy spike to load in the new texture maps. I used to watch this on a performance monitor with the main and nvidia.dll thread highlighted. Since this is intermittent for exactly the same zones and missions/characters my opinion is weighted somewhat against local PC/SSD/graphics card issues and more towards information feed issues. If this was just a local issue I would expect more consistency in doing the same mission with the same characters. Still, it would be a poor design to have the lotro server send incremental information versus "load mini-zone 12345" and have the client have all the information necessary. Weird.

[DavidmeetHal]

I left for around a year and came back to find that I can't navigate the Angmar zone without encountering intermittent black-screen events where my character keeps moving but the screen goes totally black for a few seconds (a dangerous combination). The zone was a little laggy at the time but this seems excessive. I haven't had this occur in any of the other areas to date, up to and including Moria, and I have a high-speed internet connection so the problem doesn't appear to be at my end. Any insights on this situation?

I haven't been to Angmar in some time, but I do experience this in the "tunnels" for lack of a better term in Minas Tirith

[Braer]

With Task Manager Performance tab up when this happens I'm getting zero activity on Ethernet beyond handshaking, the SSD a tiny blip and CPU most active core (2 of the 4) at most 60%. The Memory is the standard high use because I don't have that much, I never get the losses others get. Swap file on the SSD too btw so zero going on on the HDDs. GPU and Lotro have a difficult relationship not based on reason. Everything would point to waiting on the server.

Good test is a Misthallow mission, head off to the end as you arrive and it's always black behind the UI for my rig three quarters of the way down, long before any mobs become visible. As it clears spikes on the connection and a mass of fight data and sounds all at once.

Having the skill queue active for combat means that fights can be had and resolved throughout this period if you have non-targeting AE skills so there is some client server interaction going on just not with much in the way of visibility. I should be happy; some transparency, but not exactly what we implied...

What chance it gets a look at, esp. on a high pop server though?

I did do a quick ride through Angmar and only got a hint of the issue at the hunter port in location, no issues riding over to Imlad Balchorth.