King's Bounty And the Underside Of PC Gaming
Aw, hell.I really don't want to make this post, because I'm a computer guy. I started gaming on computers, and I have over twenty years of mostly great memories.
As more and more operating systems piled on more and more hardware and driver revisions, unfortunately, PC gaming has become a bit of a chore, because issues with compatibility seem to be getting steadily worse. With my new system, though, which has almost nothing on it besides drivers and an operating system, I figured I could start fresh.
Hello, King's Bounty.
I love this game. Can't play it enough. I'm 30+ hours in and I'm enjoying it even more than when I started.
As I've played, the game has (very rarely) crashed during battles. Very politely, with a Data Execution Protection (DPE) error, and then back to the desktop. It had probably crashed every three hours or so. That's not unusual for a PC game, not at all, and reloading a save and replaying the battle always worked fine.
Until yesterday.
I'm probably about 75% of the way through the game, and I've hit an area where I'm suddenly crashing in at least a third of the battles, and reloading a save often leads to another crash in the same battle.
And so the PC game nightmare begins.
I go onto the 1C forums for the game and see that it's not just me. Mostly, it's happening to people using the 64-bit version of Vista, but there are people playing the game on 64-bit Vista who've had no problems at all.
If a game crashes on the console, here's what you do: wait for a patch. You know, with 99% certainty, that there will be a patch and that it will address the problem, because if your game is crashing, everyone else's is probably crashing, too.
In contrast, there's no guarantee that will happen with a PC game, because with any one type of crash, only a fraction of the users may actually be having the problem.
Like this time.
So here's a list (and it's by no means exhaustive) of what I could potentially do to try and fix this by myself.
1. Disable DEP (tried that, didn't work)
2. Run game in 32-bit compatibility mode (tried by several, doesn't seem to work)
3. Change video card drivers
4. Change sound card drivers
5. Turn sound off
6. Change from widescreen to 4:3
7. Change combat animation speed (2 settings)
8. Change visibility distance (3 settings)
9. Change water appearance (2 settings)
10. Change anisotropic filtering (4 settings + on/off)
11. Change shadow quality (3 settings)
12. Change landscape detail (3 settings)
13. Change object detail (3 settings)
14. Change unit detail (3 settings)
15. Turn off v-sync
If you tested each one of those possibilities, it's over 1,000 separate instances. Test every possible combination of changes and it's an unknowable number. Basically, if you try to test everything, dark spirits from a parallel dimension appear and suck out your soul.
Sure, some ways to do this are more logical than others. For example, you could turn every grahpics setting to "low" and see if it still crashes--if it does, then you could eliminate graphics settings as a possibility. But running the game in ass-graphics mode really isn't that appealing to me, even if it did work that way, because the vibrancy and detail of the world is a big part of why it's so fun to play.
On the game's "official" forum, there is a bit of discussion about this, but zero acknowledgement from the developers. Oh yeah, and the first post in the thread was made three and a half months ago.
That can't be a good sign.
With a console game, an acknowledgement from the developer really isn't needed for something like this, because (with only rare exceptions) they have to be working on it.
Like I said, I have almost nothing on this PC, and I've disabled all the Vista sidebar gizmos except for the clock. It's a very, very simple setup, just to avoid having to dick around with things to get games to work.
Like I'm, um, doing now.
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