Has anyone ever had slow or no response from keyboard issues playing GTA IV online?

[sportinlife54]

On occasion when playing GTA IV on line, be it from the regular game, or either add-on, "The Ballad of Gay Tony" or "the Lost and the Damned" my keyboard will stop responding randomly and for different lengths of time.

It almost always happens, or at least becomes most noticeable, while driving a car. Suddenly there is no steering response. It happens occasionally with the character when he is walking. He won't move when an arrow key is pressed, crouch, run, use a weapon, etc.

Sometimes it lasts for only a few seconds. A time or two I have not been able to recover control and had to exit and restart the game. It does not happen in single player. In multi player the problem is independent of how many other players are online. At first I thought it may have been caused by the Games For Windows Live servers being stressed when a lot is going on. But, it has happened with no other players, one or two other players, and times when it had to have been full to capacity with other players, it didn't happen at all. There does not appear to be any correlation to what other activity is going on whether it's chaos at the airport and all the different things going on there or if my character is standing against a rock wall on a deserted beach. It also does not happen every time I play, but it happens in probably 75% of gaming sessions.

My only other means of comparison as to whether this is exclusive to GTA IV is that it does not happen with any other game. I have hundreds of hours in Test Drive Unlimited 2 and never saw it. It doesn't happen in Dirt 2 or Dirt 3. It doesn't happen in any other games from Battlefield 2 multi-player to anything else I play on or off line. Between my Steam account and what's on my PC I have about 140 active games and GTA IV is the only one I have seen this random loss of response from.

I have not had any problem with any other type of software I run. Whatever patches there are for the game itself, GFWL, my OS, hardware, etc. are current as I'm very obsessive about that. My PC specs are correct and current. The only additions would be my keyboard is a Logitech Wave Wireless and I use a Logitech M570 wireless trackball as my main input devices. I am not playing GTA IV with any other device and no other device such as a wheel or joystick is connected during play sessions.

Any suggestions, comments, confirmations it happens to others would be appreciated.

 

[sportinlife54]

Nobody else has seen this?

I did see one reply from Turkey that roughly translated from "Oh, bu yüzden bazen görünüyor. Çok net değil." into "Oh, so it seems sometimes. Not very clear." I think it means the poster has seen it as well but isn't sure of the cause. For some reason this response appeared in my email as a notification but is absent from the thread. He may have removed it.

Game play since the original post has had the same thing occur at some point in every gaming session while other online games such as Test Drive Unlimited 2 and Battlefield 2 don't have the problem.

 

[Aphelion]

Keyboard response generally has nothing to do with your game. Probably safer to assume that it's an issue with your drivers. I'm not sure if GTA IV uses DirectX, but if it does, you might want to re-install the latest version of DirectX.

 

[sportinlife54]

I guess I should have been clearer- there is nothing wrong with my keyboard. It's fairly new, the drivers are current, everything on my PC including DX11 is current..

The problem I see is ONLY with that particular game, GTAIV. The game is running along with everything working just fine and then without warning if I want the character to walk, run, jump, get in a car, whatever, he just stands there and won't move. I can change views with the trackball, I can 'esc' out and any other thing I want to do. Sometimes I can 'esc' out and then go back and it works; sometimes it works again on its own.

I do not have this lag with Battlefield 2, TestDrive Unlimited 2, Medal of Honor Pacific Assault or Airborne, Mass Effect 2, a conversion of MS Combat Flight Sim 2, DIRT 2, Dirt 3, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Shift and Shift 2, the 3 STALKER games, F1 2010, Metro 2033, Crysis, Crysis 2, and about another 5 or 6 games I have in various stages of active play. I don't see it in any of the 80 some games on my Steam account if I try them to see if I can duplicate the problem or in about the same number of games physically installed on my PC.

I don't see it in any other software be it in the MS Office Pro suite, or in any video or audio editing software I use.

I have reinstalled GTAIV a couple times and tried it before applying upgrade patches. The problem is there no matter what. It may not show up for an hour or even 4 or 5 hours, but it always happens eventually.