[SOLVED] [Vanilla] Unresolvable crashing with WYVERN animations using ATI/AMD graphics on WinXP OS
JustChip
Member Posts: 21
In a single-player game, I am trying to complete the wyvern requirement to retain Coran's membership in my party. The current party is full (6 members). However, each time I battle in the wyvern cave, the game freezes and then crashes out with the standard Microsoft report error screen popping up.
The same crashing occurs if the party is waylaid by wyverns traversing the Cloakwood areas. At least in those cases, I can keep reloading over and over until my party doesn't get waylaid. Unfortunately, the wyvern cave cannot be bypassed if I want Coran.
There seems to be some sort of animation gliche associated with wyvern rendering that is causing this but I have no idea how to adjust settings (possibly via ini or other file???) if that would even help.
The game ~has~ crashed in other situations but generally, just reloading at the previous save was enough to get past the problem area. As far as I can tell, the wyvern encounters are the only ones causing this problem 100% of the time, though I haven't finished the game yet. I've reloaded previous saves at least 10x trying to "jump" past the crash but without success. I don't think it is a bug of the game. It ~seems~ to be the way my ATI is trying to deal with the graphics demand of the game. Dunno.
I reapplied the 1.1.4315 patch (game originally loaded as the vanilla 5-CD version of BG; no EE version or expansions installed) but there is no change during the encounter (still crashes in wyvern battles). I am assuming that patch is the latest.
Any ideas? As it stand right now, my plan to enlist Coran into my party has become a futile act since he is scripted to leave unless a wyvern is killed. Theoretically, I suppose I ~could~ use the console to spawn a wyvern head into inventory but I suspect this would not fulfill the requirement needed to satisfy Coran's permanent status anyway. I was even considering spawning in a single wyvern in a field just to see if a single wyvern animation was enough to cause a crash (the cave and waylaid encounters contain multiple wyverns).
Pretty frustrated here, folks. I never had this problem before and would like to enjoy the game as I had years ago so would appreciate some direction regarding this matter.
The same crashing occurs if the party is waylaid by wyverns traversing the Cloakwood areas. At least in those cases, I can keep reloading over and over until my party doesn't get waylaid. Unfortunately, the wyvern cave cannot be bypassed if I want Coran.
There seems to be some sort of animation gliche associated with wyvern rendering that is causing this but I have no idea how to adjust settings (possibly via ini or other file???) if that would even help.
The game ~has~ crashed in other situations but generally, just reloading at the previous save was enough to get past the problem area. As far as I can tell, the wyvern encounters are the only ones causing this problem 100% of the time, though I haven't finished the game yet. I've reloaded previous saves at least 10x trying to "jump" past the crash but without success. I don't think it is a bug of the game. It ~seems~ to be the way my ATI is trying to deal with the graphics demand of the game. Dunno.
I reapplied the 1.1.4315 patch (game originally loaded as the vanilla 5-CD version of BG; no EE version or expansions installed) but there is no change during the encounter (still crashes in wyvern battles). I am assuming that patch is the latest.
Any ideas? As it stand right now, my plan to enlist Coran into my party has become a futile act since he is scripted to leave unless a wyvern is killed. Theoretically, I suppose I ~could~ use the console to spawn a wyvern head into inventory but I suspect this would not fulfill the requirement needed to satisfy Coran's permanent status anyway. I was even considering spawning in a single wyvern in a field just to see if a single wyvern animation was enough to cause a crash (the cave and waylaid encounters contain multiple wyverns).
Pretty frustrated here, folks. I never had this problem before and would like to enjoy the game as I had years ago so would appreciate some direction regarding this matter.
Post edited by JustChip on
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In the meantime, I'll try circling my party around to force them to confront the wyvern attack whilst facing the opposite direction, as difficult as this might be in that tight area. TBH I've never even read of this before so appreciate at least one member of the community recognizing the existence of the anomaly. Can't tell you how many wyverns my parties have killed in the past in many random orientations during previous play-throughs but it is LOTS. Seems so odd that this would be the first time I've experienced it as a critical failure.
Once the .bam "fix" file was removed from override, and after a few attempts to reorient the party to attack from West instead of East at the back of the cave (charname died along with other members attempting to move to the back of the cave without attacking... several times), I was finally able to clear the nest successfully. So I can confirm that the direction that the wyvern animation tries to animate and drop the item DOES influence whether the graphics will synch with the hardware properly or not.
This is really a shame, though. In the past, my party depended on wyvern kills to level since by Cloakwood, the party has reached it full size and needs high-XP kills to level members. Not sure what has changed in the installation and/or hardware/driver integrity but the result is I will be avoiding any further wyvern encounters like the plague. I'd really like to at least finish ONE game. This does influence whether I would invest in the expansions and/or BG2, though. They all use the same game engine and this is the only gaming machine I have. Of all the games installed, Bioware's BG has the distinction of being the only one that causes an unresolvable crash consistently.
Unless someone can furnish a fix that works, consider this thread as Closed but not Solved.
This is doubly difficult to troubleshoot on vanilla BG1 since it does not support error logging (like BG2/Tutu/BGT) or crash dumps (EE). Also, it only seems to happen on certain machines. I have never encountered the crash personally on any machine. It might help if you can attach a saved game from a point right before you can reproduce the crash (though if I can't reproduce it locally, it might not help me much).
I am attaching the SP save outside the cave in Cloakwood. (The subfolder name within the /Save folder is the same as the zip's (without extension). ) As I already stated. it crashes 100% of the time if the party attacks at the entrance, but I have eventually been able to position them in the farthest lefthand corner using concealment spells and potions, moving undetected and then attacking from there. Most of the time I have been able to get the skulls to spawn on death from that position, but not always. It seems so very touchy to find a valid attack angle that won't cause a crash and, well... it's just not worth it to me with such limited gaming time available.
As far as the Windows diagnostic from the crash... theoretically, I ~could~ grab that report data off the screen with about 50 or so screen prints which would probably take an hour or more (there is no other way to copy from the error screen to clipboard, unfortunately) to grab each image separately and that isn't including the hex dump information either which would be insane to collect that way.
TBH, I don't even have an account on that Spellhold site and didn't know it existed until you furnished the link. I'm not a modder so there's likely no reason it would come up in my researches. However, I would be glad to create an account there and restate this problem if you feel a resolution can be more easily investigated that way.
Just to be clear... I had been successfully playing several different run-throughs of vanilla BG to completion... 3 or 4 years ago... with the exact same installation as today on the same machine but never experienced this crashing business. Well... the game HAD crashed before but only rare random occurrences than a well-regimented one like this one seems to be.