Dark Messiah of CRASH and CRASHING

Good lord.

I really want to like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. But DEAR SWEET JESUS THE CRASHING NEVER STOPS. Every 15 to 30 minutes, the game goes into a stuttering fit of repeating sound and I have to kill the process.

I’ve even reverted to Windows XP SP2 in anticipation of Vista RTM (which is available now on Torrent sites), so I can no longer blame Vista for this. Also, this very same system is rock stable playing bf2142 and bf2 for hours.

I’ve experimented with tons of settings, including disabling sound, reducing video settings to minimum, etc, but nothing really helps. I think it’s the game itself.

And one of the BINK-encoded cutscene videos was either corrupted or incompatible with my system somehow. I even get a crash when I play that video on the filesystem via the standalone bink player from their web site. I had to rename one of the other cutscenes to proceed.

And then on top of that, the PC version of Splinter Cell: Double Agent I just got has a crippling can’t-progress level bug for me. A door closes too soon after I bug the Secret Meeting Room in Kinshasha-- and all the characters in the room slam into the door, keystone kops style.

Sigh. PC gaming, what happened to you?

I still can’t play the game without minute-long sound looping freezing the action up every time a new sound is loaded in. It works okay on medium detail, but the difference between medium and high is night and day, and I don’t want to play on medium. Ubi claims the devs are working like crazy to fix the issues with the high detail settings, but I guess I’m stuck hoping they actually pull it off. At least the last patch made the load times a lot faster.

It’s a damn shame, because this is the first game to convince me that HDR (high dynamic range) lighting is worth the performance penalty. Wow. The game looks 2x, 3x better with HDR lighting. Turn it off and the world is drab and flat.

Wow, you actually got the game to install? Gratz!

I on the other hand, run setup.exe, Process Explorer shows it start, then exit. And that is all. Went a few rounds with Ubi tech support (which was pretty good, alas, not helpful) and it ended with “Search InstallShield’s KB since the problem is with the installer, not our game”.

It works okay on medium detail

Hmm. This did the trick. I was able to complete the game without any more crashes. Thanks Matt!

FWIW, I liked it; the first person slasher genre is severely underrepresented.

Well not the same thing, but when I had trouble installing GRAW at my dad’s place I had to delete the installshield folder in my programs directory to fix it. I couldn’t say if that’s at all helpful in this case, but it may be worth a shot.

As for the people with the sound bug, have you guys tried just putting the sound quality to medium and seeing how that works? When I use my headphones (that have a built-in sound processor) I do that and any stuttery source audio issues go away. I’d pretty much forgotten it since I’ve done it so long for CSS that it’s just habit. I don’t have to do it when I use speakers since it doesn’t seem to happen when the game uses my sound card instead of the headphone sound processor.

I’ve had zero tech issues with the game. No crashes, very little studdering. Using the steam version BTW. The only issue I’m having is I’m at the half way point and I’ve kind of bored with it.

The demo overheated my video card. I actually got to the end of the demo and was reaching for what I assume was the last door when…frazzz…my whole screen goes bonkers. I rebooted the computer and just past the login it did it again. I ventilated and let the computer sit for a bit and it eventually came up and has been running fine for over a month. I uninstalled the demo. I wouldn’t touch that game with my wife’s computer.

Yeah, I had the exact same problem with GRAW, but in that situation Ubi support was able to get it resolved for me in less that a day.

I think I will take your advice and go with the InstallShield engine folder nuking idea. Thanks!

I had no technical issues with the game either. I loved it from start to finish as primarily a caster. I did want to play it again as a melee focused character, but all the negative reviews lead me to believe that’s the way most reviewers played it, and it wasn’t as much fun. And apparently the kick is overpowered if you take the trait that gives you extra stamina.

I probably will go through it again one day, but now I’m nervous that it won’t be as fun. I want to keep my good memories of the game, and if playing through as a melee character or thief sucks, then I’d rather not replay it.

The only issue I’m having is I’m at the half way point and I’ve kind of bored with it.

Try kicking some stuff. KICKLORDS REPRESENT

I swear, kicking enemies off ledges just never gets old. Also, the slo-mo beheadings and limb chopping is kinda nice too.

The melee combat is so worth it.

Fuck kick.

I’m curious, how much memory do you guys have? Is this just a matter of upgrading to gigs and suddenly everything works properly? Or is it more a 256 vs. 512 MB video card thing?

I’d like to give DMo’M&M a try, but I remember how much trouble I had with Half Life 2 stuttering when it was released. (Before I upped my memory from 512MB to 1GB, that is.)

I think I’ve contributed to fix the game :)

A few days ago I mailed Arakne some savegames where I noticed a memory leak that on occasions could bring my FPS to 1 and sound in perma-looping if I had HDR enabled.

The memory leak appeared after the tutorial chapter and used to affect FPS sometimes mildly, sometimes to an unplayable level. But it was always there crippling performance in a form or another.

Today I saw a post that seems to have fixed that problem I pointed to them:

For Steam User: In the “My Games” menu, right click “Dark Messiah of Might & Magic Single Player”, select “Properties”, then “Set Launch Options” and add: +mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0

For DVD User: Right Click the shortcut to the game and add on the target exe line +mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0.
With a default installation you should get:

“C:\Program Files\Ubisoft\Dark Messiah of Might and Magic\mm.exe” +mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0

It proved to fix:

  • Crash on Loading
  • Crash on Bink
  • FPS down to 1 on GeForce 6800 during gameplay
  • Increase Loading times a LOT

I’m the case of the 6800 card. I have only done one test but I think now I can play the game at high detail and HDR on with a 6800 GT.

I had a fantastic CRT monitor die on me in a similar way a month or so ago. Very sad. I’d had it for 5 years.

Yeah, it looks really great - with one exception. Is it really intentional one has trouble seeing the rest when you hold something that emits light? It may be realistic - but did they really want it this way? I mean, I barely used the fireball spell (strong version) because it made everything else too frickin’ dark. It was noticable, but still acceptable when one used the lighting daggers, too. It was still OK in open environments, but since most of the later levels are set in cave-like locations, I really avoided that one.

-Julian

What happened… what? PC gaming has always been like this. Always. Even in the olden thymes of DOS we saw this kind of thing. Remember the bug swarm around Interstel’s Star Fleet II which resulted in something like a dozen patch floppies being mailed out and wound up wrecking that company?

To be fair, I should update this thread: a lot of my recent gaming problems are my own fault. The game was innocent.

Thread necro: I tried finishing this a few years ago in Win7 and it kept crashing on exit 100% of the time.

Here’s a fix someone found:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=28043316&postcount=1

Hello all. 

Thanks to the efforts of a GOG community member I was able to obtain a fix for the crash on exit that occurs on Windows 7 64bit.

I have copied the instructions over from the page below; but as the fix was originally meant for PlaneScape: Torment, I have made the proper adjustments:

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/planescape_torment/windows_7_64bit_fix_for_crash_on_exit_screen_shaking_flickering


1.) Download & install the Application Compatibility Toolkit Setup from here http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7352

2.) Run Compatibility Administrator, the 32bit version. 

It will start with New database(1) [Untitled_1] highlighted. 
At the top, click on Fix. 

3.) Name the file to be fixed ( I put Dark Messiah ). Then browse to your mm.exe file. 

4.) Click next, to the compatibility mode screen. Ignore that & next again. 

At Compatability Fixes, tick the ones you want. 

EmulateHeap 
IgnoreCRTExit 
IgnoreFreeLibrary 

were enough to stop it crashing on exit. 
You can click Test Run to make sure. 
Then next, then Finish. 

5.) Highlight New database(1) [Untitled_1]. Above click on save. 

I saved my file in the same directory as mm.exe and named it Dark Messiah Fix. 

6.) Then right click on New Database(1) & install.


Here you can find the descriptions for each flag I used:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc779583(WS.10).aspx


I hope this helps those whom are bothered by the crash on exit, and I will post again if I discover any undesirable effects. 
But in the meantime it works rather nicely.

It’s fun reading hardware specs being discussed from 2006, which really wasn’t all that long ago. 1280x1024 resolutions, CRT monitors, 256 vs 512mb of video RAM, etc. :)