I highly doubt that your IT people are deliberately holding out on some magic fix to make everything better...
Either you all have rubbish PCs, or the editor is unstable - if it's happening all across the team and they're all on different hardware configurations, I'd consider that the latter is more likely.
Fact is, sometimes it's just bloody hard to find a solution when there are so many potential variables that could cause problems (dodgy software, drivers, hardware glitches, hardware/driver conflicts, poorly-installed software, users installing crap on their PCs).
you can also try to get some help from your programmers to figure out the cause and debug it.
if you are getting the blue screen with memory allocation gibberish then it could be a graphics card issue. it could be a graphics card driver issue, bad graphics card or not enough power for the graphics card.
Definitely try to communicate with support at Epic, or get the appropriate person from your company to do it; they stole your firstborns on that licensing fee, better get something back out of it!
In my experience development tools are always unstable.
The programming team are probably adding new features to your engine regularly. These features then have to be supported by the editor and those changes aren't debugged as thorougly as they could be. This makes the editor unstable. More ram or a better video card might help - but in my experience editors just tend to crash.
I have the first unreal editor in memory that shipped with the first unreal game and it was the most buggiest software I ever expierenced back then- it taught me for the first to save always in sequences every few minutes.
As others suggested try to upgrade to the latest bios firmware, GFX drivers ect. it might help a bit. Let Epic know that you have issues with their software- drop a note at their forums maybe others can help you because of similar expierences.
After being in IT and Technical support for Atari (we supported UnrealEd up to UT2004) I can say it's always been kind of buggy and prone to crashes, Gears of War was about the worst I've seen. BUT some of the latest releases have been amazing, and while they are more stable, they aren't bullet proof.
Careful what else is running. Mudbox/ZBrush, 3ds/Maya, PhotoShop, UnrealEd on top of mp3's, DVD's, chat ect... all running on a 32bit OS with a ram cap of 3.4gb could be kind of unstable. You might not think DVD's or itunes eats up that much resources but they do, even if you have a monster system, they can still cause conflicts.
You might also want to make sure the C: drive isn't full or near full. Quite a few apps use it as a swap disk...
Also companies are natorious for having overactive antivirus protection. The IT dept might need to set up a different scan schedule. You might want to suggest helping them by running some stablity tests on your system. Unplug it from the network, shut everything down but the app you're working in and see how long it lasts.
Since your company keeps standardized equipment, and it was 4 years ago they bought the equipment, (which was the limit for refresh at my old employer) Id say that the IT dept. have an optimized restore image on hand... IMaging and standardized equipment goes hand in hand that way. Since your rig is 4yrs old Id say it might have been through many hands and who knows what has been installed and removed ect. over the years...
Ask IT to rebuild your machine, and put up the latest drivers... could help a ton with conflicts and other problems/fixes mentioned below.
hmm, they handed you the cd's and network scripts? hahaha Is your IT department hiring? sounds like surf pron ground zero. Seriously though, you do all the work?
well, here is what I would do then, take all day long, with a long lunch break, and rebuild my own machine. listen to music and put my feet up while windows loads, make sure all drivers ect are up to date, then make my own image with ghost or driveImage or something, Acronis ect any of them are good... I use Acronis on my vista machine at home...even the trial version is ok, cause you can create an image, create a boot disk and after image is created.. use the boot disk / image when the time comes... Just dont forget to put the image on a network drive, not locally on the machine of course :P
You could also make a really bare bones image - without max ect, just OS and drivers, put it on DVD, and hand a copy of the image to the IT supervisor. If I was him I would feel like a total jackass for not having created it before, especially since it will work on all your machines.
There might be a decent reason for not having it, but to tell the truth I cant see how....
acronis is a 50$ investment every IT department should make... hell even every home user. For 50 bucks, you will ONLY EVER need to install everything once. And with the price of harddrives at 15 cents a gig, there's no reason not to have a stash of drive images hidden somewhere.
The last time my home system went down due to spyware, it was offline for a total of half an hour. 15 minutes of that was copying some files that were not included when I setup my remote file storage stuff.
Having said that.. I was also responsible for reinstalling my machine here at work, but that's because the artists here are weird, and we run all sorts of weird applications... according to the devs.
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Either you all have rubbish PCs, or the editor is unstable - if it's happening all across the team and they're all on different hardware configurations, I'd consider that the latter is more likely.
Fact is, sometimes it's just bloody hard to find a solution when there are so many potential variables that could cause problems (dodgy software, drivers, hardware glitches, hardware/driver conflicts, poorly-installed software, users installing crap on their PCs).
if you are getting the blue screen with memory allocation gibberish then it could be a graphics card issue. it could be a graphics card driver issue, bad graphics card or not enough power for the graphics card.
The programming team are probably adding new features to your engine regularly. These features then have to be supported by the editor and those changes aren't debugged as thorougly as they could be. This makes the editor unstable. More ram or a better video card might help - but in my experience editors just tend to crash.
As others suggested try to upgrade to the latest bios firmware, GFX drivers ect. it might help a bit. Let Epic know that you have issues with their software- drop a note at their forums maybe others can help you because of similar expierences.
if we ever had an unstable build we would be told about it and revert to the previous stable build.
I would n't say unreal was any worse in that regard that with any other engines i have worked with
Careful what else is running. Mudbox/ZBrush, 3ds/Maya, PhotoShop, UnrealEd on top of mp3's, DVD's, chat ect... all running on a 32bit OS with a ram cap of 3.4gb could be kind of unstable. You might not think DVD's or itunes eats up that much resources but they do, even if you have a monster system, they can still cause conflicts.
You might also want to make sure the C: drive isn't full or near full. Quite a few apps use it as a swap disk...
Also companies are natorious for having overactive antivirus protection. The IT dept might need to set up a different scan schedule. You might want to suggest helping them by running some stablity tests on your system. Unplug it from the network, shut everything down but the app you're working in and see how long it lasts.
Ask IT to rebuild your machine, and put up the latest drivers... could help a ton with conflicts and other problems/fixes mentioned below.
well, here is what I would do then, take all day long, with a long lunch break, and rebuild my own machine. listen to music and put my feet up while windows loads, make sure all drivers ect are up to date, then make my own image with ghost or driveImage or something, Acronis ect any of them are good... I use Acronis on my vista machine at home...even the trial version is ok, cause you can create an image, create a boot disk and after image is created.. use the boot disk / image when the time comes... Just dont forget to put the image on a network drive, not locally on the machine of course :P
You could also make a really bare bones image - without max ect, just OS and drivers, put it on DVD, and hand a copy of the image to the IT supervisor. If I was him I would feel like a total jackass for not having created it before, especially since it will work on all your machines.
There might be a decent reason for not having it, but to tell the truth I cant see how....
The last time my home system went down due to spyware, it was offline for a total of half an hour. 15 minutes of that was copying some files that were not included when I setup my remote file storage stuff.
Having said that.. I was also responsible for reinstalling my machine here at work, but that's because the artists here are weird, and we run all sorts of weird applications... according to the devs.