I've had 2 random crashes so far. No warning or error dialog. Just complete quit to desktop. Happended first time when i exited Irenicus dungeon - crash right after Imoen and Irenicus was teleported away.
Then 2nd time somewhere in bridge district. Don't know what caused the crash.
You may be able to recover from a small amount of the issues you're experiencing with the aid of the console and setting globals. This won't fix your save by any means, but if it's all you have you may be able to proceed forward more.
I am also getting frequent, random game crashes. Often seems to slow down just prior to the crash. I don't know exactly how often, but it's happened 6 or 7 times in the past 5 hours. No apparent connection to area/quest activity, as it has happened all through Chapter 2 so far. Setup is below:
Windows 7 Pro SP1 Intel Core i7 930 @ 2.8GHz Dual Radeon HD 5970 12GB RAM 500+ GB free disk space
This is exactly what happens to me. Always a big slow down right before crash. I've crashed several times so far, sometimes after hours of play sometimes after maybe only an hour. I can live with it but it is annoying, especially when it happens near the end of a tough fight or right after one before I get a save in.
Hopefully they get this figured out. I don't recall hardly ever crashing in the original BG2.
THey're working on it. If you look at the timestamps on the messages in the other thread, Avenger_teambg and aVENGER have been up all night working through diagnosis of the problem with the other person reporting the issue.
Honestly, the big thing they're going to be fixing is the memory leak...as soon as they nail down where the leak is coming from (looks like either UI or Save, and it looks more UI related to me), they'll likely have this entire issue solved.
Mind you, a crash during save (unless they take extra steps) will still cause this problem. The difference is if they take out the crash bug, then the likelyhood this will happen again is rare to nil.
just a note to confirm what @Illydth said... it is being nailed down to the exact cause. I have not had a crash yet personally, but the memory leak does exist.
THey're working on it. If you look at the timestamps on the messages in the other thread, Avenger_teambg and aVENGER have been up all night working through diagnosis of the problem with the other person reporting the issue.
Honestly, the big thing they're going to be fixing is the memory leak...as soon as they nail down where the leak is coming from (looks like either UI or Save, and it looks more UI related to me), they'll likely have this entire issue solved.
Mind you, a crash during save (unless they take extra steps) will still cause this problem. The difference is if they take out the crash bug, then the likelyhood this will happen again is rare to nil.
Good detective work Illydth and Avenger, this bug sort of makes sense now. So, as a non-programming guy my summation would be something like this: 1) memory leak causes crash during save 2) crash during save causes information on NPC's, maps, etc. to be wiped/reset because those need to be compressed into a .sav file (which the crash pevents)
Therefore, the solution is either to fix the memory leak causing the crash, or make some sort workaround like Illydth described.
What are the odds that a complete reinstall would potentially fix this problem?
I'm also thinking I could alternate between a regular, manual save and quick save so at least if the game crashes I can revert make to the previous save without everything being trashed. Still sucks that the crashing will inexorably force me to replay areas, but at least this way I could avoid the 100% game-breaking aspect of it, like the guy in the other thread who got to Chapter 6 and couldn't get Bodhi to appear.
edit (reinstalling now. Figured it's worth a shot - could be that this was somehow related to the pre-install that I did? I copied my save so I suppose there's nothing to lose by trying this)
Notes (mainly to self): The initial 3 (4. file was zero length) crash dumps all happen in a logger function that is used by the sql subsystem.
The one from @Alkalurops is different, it is in the visibility code (usually called when a partymember is moving), how is that related to quicksaves is an enigma to me. Can you tell me if it was in the black pits or elsewhere? This one seems more specific and possibly unrelated, so an area code where it happened would be great.
For what it's worth, I reinstalled and everything seems to be running fine (although I'm still alternating save files in case the game decides to crash and ruin one of the saves).
I wonder if it had something to do with pre-loading the game?
I'll let you know if any more crashes happen.
Edit: spoke too soon. Had a crash about 10 minutes after typing this. Guess it wasn't a problem with the installation or antivirus. Interestingly, this crash occurred out of the blue (I think most if not all of the other crashes occurred during attempted saves).
@Avenger_teambg I've only been playing SOA for now. It happened pretty early in the game (some time after leaving Castle Irenicus) but I don't remember where... If I have to take a guess, either during the slaver quest (copper coronet or ship) or in the sewers / adjacent areas. Yeah I know, doesn't narrow it down much. I do take quick saves very often, so it might not be related.
@mforww: I highly doubt re-installing will help. Memory leaks in code come from the code doing something and then not cleaning up after itself. Doesn't matter how often you load the same code onto your system, it's still going to do the same thing.
ALL: Lets see if we can alleviate some of the illusions here and get some REAL and HELPFUL steps into everyone's hands on how to avoid losing your hard work on this game till an official patch can happen.
Everyone on this thread: Please help the testers and the coders by helping us pass along some of the information here (especially on how to avoid the issue) on other threads speaking of the same problems.
What's going on: ------------------ As the game executes it has to grab portions of your system's memory (if you don't understand this term it's ok, it's not hugely important to understand all the technical details) to do various things. Say you want to drop an item on the ground. The program has to know that item is on the ground and in that location so that the next time you come back to it, it's still there. When you pick the item back up, the code has to know that instead of being on the ground as it was a few minutes ago, now it's back in your inventory...that way you don't come back to the item as a duplicate.
The issue is that the game isn't properly cleaning up after itself. For those of you who are not coders, believe me when I tell you that this is NOT TRIVIAL. Many computer languages make cleaning up after yourself rocket science due to the complexity of managing memory. To use a VERY non-technical example: When you put the item on the ground and the game saves it's position, and you then pick the item back up, the game SHOULD remove the notation to itself that the item was ever ON the ground and only save the current state of the item (in your inventory). In this poor example, the game would not clear it's notation that it was on the ground so now it has 3 notes to itself: It was in your inventory, it was on the ground and it's now in inventory. Think about what happens if you do this multiple times...the game continues to make more notes to itself and needs more and more of your system's memory to store those notes.
There's only so much memory that this game can access. The operating system has to protect itself from a runaway program that could take all of it's memory and cause the OS to crash. Therefore at a certain point in attempting to allocate more memory for itself to continue to store these notes, the operating system is saying "nope, no more memory for you!" and the program crashes.
If you happen to be saving the game at the time the save functionality never completes. The process by which the game sucks up all the "here's the current state of the game" files into the save never completes and thus the save doesn't know what the current state of the game is. It only has a partial game state so when you load back up, you load with only a partial state.
NOTE: This bug can happen ANYWHERE and at ANY TIME. There is no zone or part of the game that will trigger this. It is purely an amount of time played and how many actions you take that will get the game to the unstable point.
What you can do to Help this Not Happen to YOU! ------------------------------------------- The biggest two things you can do to help this not happen to you are:
1) Make multiple saves at multiple places. - Don't just use the quicksave or auto save or a single save slot. Save to multiple save slots. That way if you do get corruption you can always go back a save slot and only have to re-do some of the game, not all of it. Remember that when the problem happens, only those changes in state between the last save and the current point in time can get corrupted. Nothing can destroy a successfully saved previous game state unless you overwrite it.
2) Save and Quit the program periodically! - The second largest thing you can do to alleviate ever seeing this issue is to periodically quit BG2. You can turn right back around and re-start the game, load up the save you just made and continue playing...a 2 minute delay in your play time every half hour or so and you should never see the issue happen. Remember that you're going to have to save and quit ALL THE WAY out to desktop...don't just go back to the main screen or the place where you can select BG2, ToB or Black Gates...go all the way back to the desktop and exit the program.
If you do these two things, you should never have any real problem with losing your entire game due to a crash happening during save.
And remember, this is only really needed till OverHaul can patch in a fix to the memory leak.
Just wanted to add that I've had this exact crash happen to me. It happened in the slaver's den in the slums. Gonna take a break from the EE until they figure this one out.
I just started a new game, and my game crashed as soon as I had the initial dialogue with Imoen when she come to break you out of your cage. I clicked on the first dialogue option, and then the screen froze and there was no way for me to get out of it. I never had the chance to save my game, and after all the time I spent doing the character creation. I am playing on a PC with Windows 7. There was no auto-save, so I have lost my character.
I just started Shadows of Amn and I had 2 crashes so far. * Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit Service Pack 1 * CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500k CPU @ 3.30 GHz * GPU: Ati Radeon HD 7970
@Illydth Yeah but I wasn't being safe with my saves and now I have to go back a loong way... My fault, I usually have a lot of saves but I got caught up in the game.
Many of my crashes were the massive slow down then crash variety but I've also had some where I was just sitting idle and it'd crash to desktop with no error messages. This doesn't happen as often but I thought I'd mention it.
Hey guys! Just my two cents here... I also experienced the crashes. I noticed after playing for a long time, saving the game takes longer and longer... I also experienced random crashes and even if the game restarts it continues the save game delay cycle (maybe I should let it rest a few minutes before restarting the game:) )
I was going through and after I beat the thrall I quick saved and that crashed my game. When I came back to my quick save the map has restarted (the fog of war was in place and all the enemies had re-spawned.) That was fine (double loot woo-hoo), but when I killed the cambion and got the key Raelis was not there to save. So I had to console her in. After we teleported back to the inn it was like I was meeting Raelis for the first time. The play was about to begin and she asked me about the gem. Strangest of all the teleport was spawining imps and the fire elemental again. I don't know if anyone will be able to reproduce this but it was quite strange.
Yeah. Make sure you have lot's of hard saves and not to spam the quick save button. Like I said though, the bright side? Double loot from everything I had already completed...
Basically, any save you make can become corrupted (this may or may not be preceded by a crash). It that happens, and you then load that save and continue playing with it - your game becomes broken like this, quest progress resets and all maps are "unexplored".
If it's any consolation, they're already hard at work to nail it.
Mods/devs -- is there any way that we can get one of these threads pinned up top in here so that we can view progress on the issue in one place and hopefully head off yet more threads on this bug? Much obliged!
I was playing in the CC and simply picking up items of the guards' corpses when the game crashed without any sort of error message. When I loaded my quick save, I was in the right spot on the map, but the whole place had fog of war, all dialogues were reset with NPCs in the area, and my containers (bag of holding, scroll case, etc., were all empty.
Comments
Then 2nd time somewhere in bridge district. Don't know what caused the crash.
Win7 64bit
Core i5 3560k
ATI GT1900 XT
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24352/spectacular-mistake-i-require-the-aid-of-supernerds
You may be able to recover from a small amount of the issues you're experiencing with the aid of the console and setting globals. This won't fix your save by any means, but if it's all you have you may be able to proceed forward more.
Hopefully they get this figured out. I don't recall hardly ever crashing in the original BG2.
Honestly, the big thing they're going to be fixing is the memory leak...as soon as they nail down where the leak is coming from (looks like either UI or Save, and it looks more UI related to me), they'll likely have this entire issue solved.
Mind you, a crash during save (unless they take extra steps) will still cause this problem. The difference is if they take out the crash bug, then the likelyhood this will happen again is rare to nil.
Therefore, the solution is either to fix the memory leak causing the crash, or make some sort workaround like Illydth described.
What are the odds that a complete reinstall would potentially fix this problem?
I'm also thinking I could alternate between a regular, manual save and quick save so at least if the game crashes I can revert make to the previous save without everything being trashed. Still sucks that the crashing will inexorably force me to replay areas, but at least this way I could avoid the 100% game-breaking aspect of it, like the guy in the other thread who got to Chapter 6 and couldn't get Bodhi to appear.
edit (reinstalling now. Figured it's worth a shot - could be that this was somehow related to the pre-install that I did? I copied my save so I suppose there's nothing to lose by trying this)
The initial 3 (4. file was zero length) crash dumps all happen in a logger function that is used by the sql subsystem.
The one from @Alkalurops is different, it is in the visibility code (usually called when a partymember is moving), how is that related to quicksaves is an enigma to me. Can you tell me if it was in the black pits or elsewhere? This one seems more specific and possibly unrelated, so an area code where it happened would be great.
I wonder if it had something to do with pre-loading the game?
I'll let you know if any more crashes happen.
Edit: spoke too soon. Had a crash about 10 minutes after typing this. Guess it wasn't a problem with the installation or antivirus. Interestingly, this crash occurred out of the blue (I think most if not all of the other crashes occurred during attempted saves).
I posted a tool that backs up your saves if you want to avoid the world-reset bug from hell.
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24491/multiple-quicksaves-please#latest
I do take quick saves very often, so it might not be related.
ALL: Lets see if we can alleviate some of the illusions here and get some REAL and HELPFUL steps into everyone's hands on how to avoid losing your hard work on this game till an official patch can happen.
Everyone on this thread: Please help the testers and the coders by helping us pass along some of the information here (especially on how to avoid the issue) on other threads speaking of the same problems.
What's going on:
------------------
As the game executes it has to grab portions of your system's memory (if you don't understand this term it's ok, it's not hugely important to understand all the technical details) to do various things. Say you want to drop an item on the ground. The program has to know that item is on the ground and in that location so that the next time you come back to it, it's still there. When you pick the item back up, the code has to know that instead of being on the ground as it was a few minutes ago, now it's back in your inventory...that way you don't come back to the item as a duplicate.
The issue is that the game isn't properly cleaning up after itself. For those of you who are not coders, believe me when I tell you that this is NOT TRIVIAL. Many computer languages make cleaning up after yourself rocket science due to the complexity of managing memory. To use a VERY non-technical example: When you put the item on the ground and the game saves it's position, and you then pick the item back up, the game SHOULD remove the notation to itself that the item was ever ON the ground and only save the current state of the item (in your inventory). In this poor example, the game would not clear it's notation that it was on the ground so now it has 3 notes to itself: It was in your inventory, it was on the ground and it's now in inventory. Think about what happens if you do this multiple times...the game continues to make more notes to itself and needs more and more of your system's memory to store those notes.
There's only so much memory that this game can access. The operating system has to protect itself from a runaway program that could take all of it's memory and cause the OS to crash. Therefore at a certain point in attempting to allocate more memory for itself to continue to store these notes, the operating system is saying "nope, no more memory for you!" and the program crashes.
If you happen to be saving the game at the time the save functionality never completes. The process by which the game sucks up all the "here's the current state of the game" files into the save never completes and thus the save doesn't know what the current state of the game is. It only has a partial game state so when you load back up, you load with only a partial state.
NOTE: This bug can happen ANYWHERE and at ANY TIME. There is no zone or part of the game that will trigger this. It is purely an amount of time played and how many actions you take that will get the game to the unstable point.
What you can do to Help this Not Happen to YOU!
-------------------------------------------
The biggest two things you can do to help this not happen to you are:
1) Make multiple saves at multiple places. - Don't just use the quicksave or auto save or a single save slot. Save to multiple save slots. That way if you do get corruption you can always go back a save slot and only have to re-do some of the game, not all of it. Remember that when the problem happens, only those changes in state between the last save and the current point in time can get corrupted. Nothing can destroy a successfully saved previous game state unless you overwrite it.
2) Save and Quit the program periodically! - The second largest thing you can do to alleviate ever seeing this issue is to periodically quit BG2. You can turn right back around and re-start the game, load up the save you just made and continue playing...a 2 minute delay in your play time every half hour or so and you should never see the issue happen. Remember that you're going to have to save and quit ALL THE WAY out to desktop...don't just go back to the main screen or the place where you can select BG2, ToB or Black Gates...go all the way back to the desktop and exit the program.
If you do these two things, you should never have any real problem with losing your entire game due to a crash happening during save.
And remember, this is only really needed till OverHaul can patch in a fix to the memory leak.
* Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit Service Pack 1
* CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500k CPU @ 3.30 GHz
* GPU: Ati Radeon HD 7970
Thanks for the tips Illydth.
Just my two cents here... I also experienced the crashes. I noticed after playing for a long time, saving the game takes longer and longer... I also experienced random crashes and even if the game restarts it continues the save game delay cycle (maybe I should let it rest a few minutes before restarting the game:) )
So far no further random crashes for me, haven't had slowdowns either, but been very judicius in quitting BG2EE when not playing actively.
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24462/eta-on-bg2ee-memory-leak-fix-or-first-patch
Basically, any save you make can become corrupted (this may or may not be preceded by a crash). It that happens, and you then load that save and continue playing with it - your game becomes broken like this, quest progress resets and all maps are "unexplored".
If it's any consolation, they're already hard at work to nail it.
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/24200/pretty-serious-game-breaking-bug