Dungeon Siege II Constantly Crashing?

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Guys,

Anyone else have problems with this game? I can play for around 20mins
max before I get the blue screen of death. (Using XP, newish PC, 128MB
ATI graphics card).
 

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michael.nosiara@shell.com wrote:
> Guys,
>
> Anyone else have problems with this game? I can play for around 20mins
> max before I get the blue screen of death. (Using XP, newish PC, 128MB
> ATI graphics card).

More details please -

What is the error shown on the BSOD? Is it the same each time?

Does it crash at the same point? ie. same time elapsed (you said around
20 mins - has it ever crashed in <10 mins?) or same area? same piece of
dialogue/cutscene/etc. Can you reproduce a crash reliably (ie. predict
that it will crash when I do THIS)? Does it crash if left unattended at
some point during the game (paused or not)?

Do you have a hardware temperature monitor?

Does your system crash under any other circumstances?

Etc. etc.

There are a truckload of reasons why this could be happening - it's
never happened for me (yet) - my system is

AthlonXP3200+, 2x 512Mb DDR400 RAM, Asus A7N8X, RadeOn 9600 Pro 256Mb.

I could get DS1 to crash reliably at the same point every game -
something to do with fairies - but not DS2 so far (but I've hardly
played it at all).

CC
 
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The most common error says something like...creating exception
data...then everything freezes. No BSOD in these situations.

It happens in various parts of the game, normal gameplay, while buying
items, most commonly when going to a new area by opening a door.

Once I paused and left the game running for 20 mins, when I returned it
had the blue screen of death. Can't remember the details here, I'll
post the exact message after I run it at home again tonight.

I get very rare crashes in other applications, usually traced to a bad
driver. I've updated everything and had to rollback my audio driver to
get it to work (AC97 Realtek). Sounds works perfectly in DSII though.

Don't have a temp monitor.

Will give more exact details of errors later.

Regards,

Misha
 

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Ok. Since it's crashing at multiple different points, relatively
quickly (less than an hour), my first guess is the video driver. My
guess is that you have the very latest video drivers from your card's
chipset manufacturer (which is likely to be Nvidia or ATi), and that
these are somehow upsetting DS2 on your system. If I were you I would
try rolling back to gradually older versions of
Detonator/Catalyst/whatever, and see if the problem goes away.
Alternatively if you don't have the latest version, try it.

Just checking - you do have the latest DirectX, don't you? 9.0c

If you have an ATi card then FWIW my driver version is 6.14.0010.6497

Most other possbilities would tend to affect other apps as well (eg.
bad RAM) - do you have any other graphics-intensive games? If you can
run something like FarCry or UT smoothly then you know there's no
problem with your card or RAM and the problem is specific to DS2. I
know DS1 was a pretty flaky game for crashing so it wouldn't surprise
me if DS2 is the same. Have you tried posting this on
alt.games.dungeon-siege?

CC
 
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I think the problem is fixed. Installed another 512MB of RAM, to get to
a total of 1024MB and haven't had a crash playing the game since.

Maybe this is an undisclosed minimum spec?
 
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I think the problem is fixed. Installed another 512MB of RAM, to get to
a total of 1024MB and haven't had a crash playing the game since.

Maybe this is an undisclosed minimum spec?
 
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michael.nosiara@shell.com wrote:
> I think the problem is fixed. Installed another 512MB of RAM, to get to
> a total of 1024MB and haven't had a crash playing the game since.
>
> Maybe this is an undisclosed minimum spec?

Maybe they got a memory leak and you haven't had a crash with 1gb
because you haven't hit the memory limit yet?

Knight37
 

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Sadly I suspect Knight37's theory is more likely to be correct. If it
was below min spec it wouldn't necessarily crash, but you would notice
a slow-down from lots of extra swapping to disk.

With a bit of luck they will patch it soon, if it is a memory leak,

CC
 

Werewolf

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michael.nosiara@shell.com wrote:
> I think the problem is fixed. Installed another 512MB of RAM, to get to
> a total of 1024MB and haven't had a crash playing the game since.
>
> Maybe this is an undisclosed minimum spec?
>

More than likely indicative of a massive memory leak. Which means the
crashes will still occur - it'll just take longer to get one.