Icewind Dale 2.5 crash on load game screen

meowmeowfuzzyface

Game crashes immediately when going to the load game screen. Quicksave can still be loaded by starting a new game and pressing the quickload hotkey, but clicking "Load Game" or "Resume Game" from the main menu causes an instant crash. Clicking "Load Game" from the pause menu while in-game also causes an immediate crash.

I was unable to find a crash log in the game directory or in /var/crash/.

Ubuntu 17.10
i7 4790k
Fury X with open source (mesa pkppa) drivers
16 GB RAM
Game is installed on an SSD


Aside from this unofficial bug report, I would really like a way to downgrade to the previous patch on Steam. I've been playing Icewind Dale on and off for about 3 1/2 years without any problems until this patch. Now it's unplayable due to constant crashes. I think this patch needed some more testing before being pushed to everyone. It seems a lot of people are having these issues, especially Linux users.

JuliusBorisov

There have been a couple of reports where this was resolved by uninstalling, and then re-installing the game.

meowmeowfuzzyface

JuliusBorisov said:

There have been a couple of reports where this was resolved by uninstalling, and then re-installing the game.

Hi Julius,

I'm going to copy paste my response from the Steam forums here:

Uninstalling/reinstalling fixes the new/load game crash where the game crashes upon starting a new game or loading a save.

However, it doesn't work for this problem where the game crashes simply by selecting the "Load Game" option from the main menu. As in, it crashes instead of showing you the list of saved games. I am able to start a new game just fine, but I can't navigate to the load game menu option without a crash to desktop.

JuliusBorisov

The ticket has just been updated:

Could people with this issue advise whether they are using the Beamdog Client or Steam.
For distro's with Wayland (such as Ubuntu 17.10), does switching back to X.Org make any difference.
Does anything change after using the Verify element of Steam or Beamdog client.

For the remaining issue (crash on load game from main menu), does this still happen on non-AMD chipsets.

For AMD chipsets, mention is made of using open source drivers. Does using relevant drivers from https://support.amd.com/en-us/download/linux make any difference.

Does temporarily moving all saves to another location allow you to see an empty load screen or does it still crash.
Does then adding one new save work, or still crash on load.
Is this being seen with English, or an alternate language.
Are any custom files being used, e.g. a dialogue file other than included in the retail packages (such as for translation activity).

Thanks

Kamigoroshi

@JuliusBorisov

Linux Mint 18.3 x64
Steam client
Newest Nvidia drivers for Linux are installed.
Unable to start a new game because of crash to desktop.
New installment and thus no saved game files.
Verify changes nothing.
Switching languages from German to English changes nothing.
Fresh install with no mods.

Also, the game worked flawlessly prior to 2.5. All in all IWD is completely unplayable on linux atm.

JuliusBorisov

@Kamigoroshi Please, add this information to the Redmine ticket: https://support.baldursgate.com/issues/36929#note-6

JuliusBorisov

@meowmeowfuzzyface @Kamigoroshi

Are the AMD drivers compatible with a LTS version of Ubuntu, e.g. 16.04, 18.04. If so, are you able to add a LTS install and try that.

It would help to know exactly what combinations we are talking about here. I think we have something like this:

1
CPU: i7 4790k
Integrated graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4600
Graphics card: Fury X
Graphics driver: Mesa 18.0.1
OS: Ubuntu 17.10
Crash: After clicking load game and before any list of saves is shown

2
CPU: FX-4100
Integrated graphics: N/a
Graphics card: nvidia 960
Graphic driver: 390, 396
OS: Ubuntu 16.04, 17.10, 18.04
Crash: After clicking load game and before any list of saves is shown

3
CPU: Ryzen 5 1600
Integrated graphics: N/a
Graphics card: nvidia 960
Graphic driver: 390, 396
OS: As 2?
Crash: As 2?

4
CPU: ?
Integrated graphics: ?
Graphics card: ?
Graphic driver: ?
OS:Gentoo Linux with a 4.15.12
Crash: After clicking load game and before any list of saves is shown?

For the Nvidia driver please confirm appropriate reboots were used to uninstall and re-install. e.g. as example below

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo reboot

followed by (replacing NNN with the version to install)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-NNN
sudo reboot

Thanks

Our QA decided to check a non-English instance in case that threw up any differences to previous installs.

Cinnamon Mint 18.03 with German language and game worked OK (start new game with default party, move a few steps, save, load from menu).

Installed the OS
Ran updates
Installed Nvidia driver
Installed Steam
Installed retail IWD:EE

n.b. Our QA used sudo apt-get install nvidia-390 instead of sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-390 and it seemed to work fine.

JuliusBorisov

@Meowmeow Can you provide a video capture of your crash (and attach it to the ticket)?

meowmeowfuzzyface

JuliusBorisov said:

@Meowmeow Can you provide a video capture of your crash (and attach it to the ticket)?

I'm not sure how a video would be useful. You click "load game" and the game immediately closes. That's it.

But there is a temporary workaround I wrote on the bug report. The crash only occurs with the 32 bit version, which is the one used by Steam by default. If you navigate to the install directory and enter:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/.steam/bin32/ ~/.steam/bin32/steam-runtime/run.sh ./IcewindDale64

inside a terminal in that directory, the crash no longer occurs. However, if you instead use ./IcewindDale (without the 64) as the last argument in the above command, then the game crashes at the Load Game screen.

Do you know of a launch command I can set in Steam to use the 64 bit version? For now, I'm launching the game through the terminal with the above command and everything is working fine.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I am now on 18.04 with all default open source AMD drivers. I'm not a programmer, but judging by this workaround, I don't think it has anything to do with video drivers.

meowmeowfuzzyface

Kamigoroshi said:

@JuliusBorisov

Linux Mint 18.3 x64
Steam client
Newest Nvidia drivers for Linux are installed.
Unable to start a new game because of crash to desktop.
New installment and thus no saved game files.
Verify changes nothing.
Switching languages from German to English changes nothing.
Fresh install with no mods.

Also, the game worked flawlessly prior to 2.5. All in all IWD is completely unplayable on linux atm.

Just to make sure, did you install the game before or after the patch? I had this same issue and it was resolved by uninstalling and reinstalling.

Also, the above workaround might work for you as well, since you are on 64 bit.

meowmeowfuzzyface

Ok guys, so unless Beamdog figures out a way to stop the crashes, this is a more-or-less permanent workaround for this issue (as long as you have a 64 bit Linux OS):

The problem appears to be the 32 bit executable on Linux. If you trick Steam into launching the 64 bit version instead, the crashes stop, at least on my machine.

1. If you updated from a previous version, uninstall and reinstall the game through Steam.
2. Right click the game in your library, go to properties -> local files -> browse local files.
3. Find the file called "IcewindDale" and rename it to "IcewindDale32".
4. Find the file called "IcewindDale64" and rename it to "IcewindDale".
5. Now you can launch the 64 bit version through Steam.

If, for whatever reason, you need to reverse the process, just change the names back OR delete the two files and verify integrity of game cache through Steam.