Dragon Dilemma

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Hi there, it was a long time, but now I'm back.
And I have a big problem here. Actually, this is a really old problem, but somehow I forgot to write about this one before.
This is about Dragons. Every time I fight a Dragon in BG2 or ToB, the game crashes. Well, at least 8 times from 10 attempts. But only at a specific dragon skin, the Firkraag skin (the same like Abazigal, Draconis, or Tamah, the Purple Dragon). When I fight the Shadow Dragon or Nizidramaniiyt, there are no problems, but if I fight those other dragons, the game crashes almost every time. The game simply stops, the screen freezes, and only RESET can help (no CTRL-ALT-DEL).
This is a real pain in the arse, many times I spend hours beating those dragons, and not because of difficulty problems, but that annoying crash. For example I can only beat Draconis by saving the game at least 3 times during the fight - very hard, I must say.
This problem (bug?) happens many times, and as I see, it doesn't depend on the computer - many of my friends said they experienced the same crashes when facing those dragons.
Now I wonder: is there any way, to solve this? Is there somewhere a patch maybe? Or can you tell me ANYTHING about this bug?
Any help would be highly appreciated, thanks!

TGM

 

Hey man, what a bummer...ummm when you fight Firkraag, is that the first time you meet him or second ????..Cuz when I beat him first time, when saving Windspears child, I can beat him no problem, but havent tried beating him the second cuz am usually not a Paladin (am talking about the crash)

 

No, it doesn't matter. If I attack one of those dragons (for example Firkraag), the battle goes on, and with some luck, it ends without any problems. But in many cases the game crashes. I wasn't able to find out what causes this bug, it seems, it is quite accidentaly. But I repeat: this only happens at the "Firkraag" dragon-skin. It is VERY disturbing, however, in the expansion, where every dragon you meet has got the same type of skin.

 

gotcha, but see my game crashes every now and then, but that doesnt matter where you are or if you're fighting or not, its because of my VIA motherboard, tried the patch, still crashes, but not as frequent as before, thought it could be that too, but now you mention only when fighting those dragons, I really dont know, sorry I couldnt help you more

 

Yeah right, thanks anyway, pal.

However, if someone can help, please, let me know.

Ooh, and one more thing. Sometimes the game do not crashes completely (there is no need to restart the computer), just quits the actual battle. But if this happens, there is a message:
"An assertion failed in ChDataTypes.cpp at line number 250."
Does anybody know, what this means?

So please help.

[This message has been edited by TGM (edited November 17, 2001).]

 

It's probably not my place to say this, but you shouldn't be mentioning anything about ToB in this forum.
Sorry, I have no idea how to help you, but you shouldn't let anyone catch you again posting ToB stuff here.

 

LOOK! Up there!

It's not a plane but words say this IS the ToB forum.

Or perhaps the topic got moved? Sometimes, this need to differentiate ToB and SoA with caution will result in a mental state that's worse then the effects of an Umber Hulk's spell, albeit a very necessary thing to do.

[If people talk about it it's safe to assume that it was originally posted in the wrong forum, but got moved, don't you think?] -Tal

[This message has been edited by Taluntain (edited November 17, 2001).]

 

I had this problem for a while too... i found it to be related to having shadowkeeper.

 

Hmmm. You say that this is somehow related to SK? Interesting, but I think I do not have it already. All I know, is that I used it a few times before to look on the romances, and other 'global variables'. EEh, I will check this out, perhaps this is the cause.


EDIT

Well, I checked that, but NO. Shadowkeeper doesn't affect this problem in any way. I do not have it on my computer, and one of my friends never even tried it, so there must be something else...
Any ideas?
Imagine: every time you meet a Dragon, you have 90% chance that the game will crash. And now I managed to beat that damn Draconis -by saving the game 3 times during the fight- but now I'm at Abazigal, and this seems almost impossible to complete I use the improved AI, which also adds a Purple Dragon (Tamah) to the fight with Abazigal...every time I restart my computer, and I try to fight Tamah (I leave Abazigal in his human form) the game dies. I'm getting a bit embittered...this could be one of the most exciteing battles in the game, but this way it is annoying, and seems quite impossible

I do not know, what else I can do, so I try. And again. Again. But it still makes me sad. Such a damn bug...


[This message has been edited by TGM (edited November 18, 2001).]

[This message has been edited by TGM (edited November 18, 2001).]

 

I've had some crashing problems while fighting big battles too. I traced it back to the "Use 3D Acceleration" option in the BG2/TOB config program. Disabling this option for big battles kept everything stable.

Graphics card: Matrox G400 MAX

 

Hi,

I think it might be something to do with performance as HypoThermia mentioned.
The dragon fights seem to use a lot of computing power. I have the game cranked up to full settings on my pute (1GHz PIII 512MB RAM, Geforce 2) and the only time the game slows down a little is during those dragon fights.
I guess there is typically a lot going on in those melees.
Do you also crash during very large non dragon battles?

Try Hypo's fix and check some of your config settings to see if anything is obivously wrong. Try reducing the load on your computer by choosing slower pute settings and see if you still get crashes.

Good luck.

Cheers

WittyNewt.

 

While the most obvious time when it crashed was in a large battle, there were a few occasions when it was just a small battle against a single enemy.

While working through the planar sphere I had this crash every time when I tried to kill a second demon. The crash always happened when the creature died, so I'd associate it with either the creation of an item or part of the death animation (large monsters?)

At that time I didn't realise that it might be that setting, so I didn't clear it to make sure. On my second pass through I had no problems with the default software settings.

Most likely it's a small bug in the handling of the OpenGL drawing routines by BG code... or a small flaw in the graphics driver (unlikely if it happens on at least two different cards).

 

I have 650 MHz, 320 MB and an Riva TNT-2 Pro w. 32 MB ..... the only time my PC starts to slow down during BG-2 anyway is when I use multiple magic missiles ..... otherwise BG-2 runs absolutely flawless.

For me BG-2 only crashes when I switch between PSP and BG windows to save some screenshots ....

I'm serious: How about "format c:" , installing a proper windows and a new BG (of course, after making back-ups and storing the savegames and chars). For me this does more sound like a messed up operating system than like a BG bug.

[This message has been edited by Ragusa (edited November 26, 2001).]

 

I agree with Ragusa: I haven't got this problem so far (my videocard is a TNT2), but I can imagine that the good old Windows can cause problems like this.

 

You can blame Windows for everything. There's 99% change you're right

Ara
(What to do, what to do... Play ToB, read SbS or read the Truth? Decisions, decisions... And I seem to be misspelling that word all the time today...)

 

Hi all!

I have had no problems with BGII(ToB Updated) crashing with the exception of the Winged Demon type creatures referred to by HypoThermia a few posts up.

These winged creatures appear in a few parts of the game, including the Master of Thralls in the Planar Prison, the three in the Demon Plane accessed from Lavok's Sphere (where you need a heart from one of them) and two of the four Demon creatures summoned by Irenicus at the end of the SoA part of the game. There maybe other occasions too.

The problem happens less than 1/2 the time, but enough to be annoying! When one of these Winged Demon type creatures dies, just after the 'death animation' as it falls back 'into' the earth, my game often freezes up totaly and crashes. I am just using regular Windows 98 with the official ToB patch. It may be related to the graphics card, hard to tell because sometimes I get a message relating to 'OpenGL' at the point of crash just as it freezes up.

However, usually after I have done a complete reboot, I load up from the last save, kill the Winged creature in question and it doesn't crash. It is a wierd problem but looks like a few others have seen it as well. Anyone know if there is a permanent fix/patch for this minor annoyance?

Apart from that it is a great game - certainly I haven't had my game crashing upon slaying dragons or any other creatures apart from those Winged Demon types!

 

How about telling us what your graphics card is, as it sounds like that is causing the problem?

 

For me, the monitor is an ATI Plug-N-Play 'Magnum/Xpert128/X99/Xpert2000' (whatever that means!) - just looking in the 'display settings' box.

However, I have found a 'custom fix' for the problem and it hasn't crashed once. In ShadowKeeper, the latest version with the 'Creature Browser' feature, I just changed some of the 'winged demon' appearances to 'Big Wyvern' from 'Tanar'ri' for the following 5 creatures:

ABYDEM01.cre (Tanar'ri Demon - sphere) PMASTER.cre (Master of Thralls - Planar Prison) OBSDEM01.cre (Lea'llyl Demon from sphere)
JONDEM03.cre (Jon summonned Glazebru SoA Final)
JONDEM01.cre (Jon summonned Glazebru SoA Final)

IMHO the 'Big Wyvern' graphics are even cooler than the regular 'winged demon'/'Tanar'ri' graphic!

I have experienced no problems with this fix, and if anyone tries it and does have problems you can simply delete (or rename as .old maybe) the above 5 .cre files in the 'override' directory.

Thinking about it, the guy having the 'dragon' problems could change 'Firkraag' appearance from 'Red Dragon' to one of the other dragon appearances in Shadow Keeper and see if that helps?

 

The last topic here was posted in 2001, so we can probably assume that either the problem was fixed, or he gave up.

In your case, however, I'd say that the original cause of the problem is that ATI card. Unfortunately, many of their drivers do not work properly on certain machines and it causes problems similar to what you have been encountering. It's good that you have found a work around, but I have another one that might work as well, and let you keep your original models.

Try installing an older driver for the video card. That has been known to fix some issues with those cards.