Sluggish performance

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Playing BG2 SOA, everything was running fine until I went to the underdark... Now, my system appears to be running sluggishly... my game runs slowly and lurches now... It was fine before the underdark, but now, it's kind of crazy and almost unplayable...

has this happened to anyone else?

It's running with the latest BG2 patch...
Athlon 1 ghz
512 mb ram

 

With your system you should not have any problem like that (I assume you have a decent graphics card as well).
Make sure you have no other programs running. Perhaps you have recently installed new programs and they are runnign in the background?

An idea is to try different pre-tiles percentages (configure... visual).

Finally something I used to do a lot before which was to manually empty the cache.
Could someone please comment on if this is useful or not!

This is how to empty the BG2 cache:
1. Go to your BG2 directory in Explorer and open the cache folder.
2. In the cache folder you find the data folder. Open it.
3. Here (in ...BG2/Cache/Data/) you see lots of AREAxxxx.bif files.
4. You can safely delete all these bif-files.

VERY IMPORTANT!
Only do this in the Cache/Data folder!

[Emptying the cache usually helps with unexplained crashes, since they're mostly due to corrupted files in the cache. It doesn't help with slowdowns, except in the case of PS:T, but that's not related.] -Tal

[This message has been edited by Taluntain (edited January 15, 2002).]

 

Nope, that didn't help...

I reloaded to just before I enter the underdark and it was fine. I'll assume it's just the CD...

you're right about the video card being ok... nvidia geforce2

thanks tho...

 

Maybe you should uninstall the game and re=install it? It worked for me a few timez.

 

Hmm, I only have an Athalon 700 with 128 ram and the game never runs slow on my machine. And I don't have an advanced video card either. Probably the CD like you said. Try doing a complete install by clicking custom and then checking all of the boxes. This makes it so the game doesn't run off the CD, I think.

[This message has been edited by Lord Sarevok (edited January 15, 2002).]

 

have you got 3d acceleration enabled?

that can usually cause major slowdown as you describe...

 

I've had a few problems with slow performance as well. I have a 1.3 AMD athlon and a nvidia geforce2 as well. When I had Windows ME installed on my system, it worked perfectly with a full install. When I installed Windows XP, however, it was as choppy as could be. I had to reinstall BG2 with a minimum installation for it to work properly, and I still don't understand why.

 

Try this site out to unload your start-up. www2.whidbey.net/djdenham/

 

Thanks for the suggestions... I was able to isolate it to that particular area of the first stage of the underdark... I went against the Balor, it killed all of my party but my character, and the sluggishness went away, so it's definitely one of the npc's I've got... It might just be the background music, coupled with the items that they've got...

I tried to remove the items and all but stripped them naked each one in turn by having them drop their stuff one at a time... I'm not willing to have them leave the party to prove who it is as I'm reluctant to have them "meet me" anywhere because I might not see them again...

 

"I went against the Balor, it killed all of my party but my character, and the sluggishness went away, so it's definitely one of the npc's I've got..."

Ah, another worthwhile reason to solo.

 

but it gets hard to carry all the stuff that you can't live without...

 

Yes, very. You have to practically sell everything you get right away if you don't stash it. Until you get the Bag of Holding, it's pretty frustrating.

 

From my experiece, it doesn't hold much... naybe it's because I can't bring myself to sell some of the stuff I find because I don't know if I need it later of not... did that before in BG1...

 

Have you defragged your hard drive? It always helps me.

 

Storage problems weren't that big when I solo, even before I got the Bag of Holding. Just visit a store every one and awhile and sell your junk.

 

That's part of the problem... who's to say I don't need that thing I killed before later down the road, or the thing I sold because I didn't think I needed it I now need and can't find it again...

I know about shadowkeeper, and I'm almost ready to use it to get me the pommel jewel... Someone somewhere said it was probably safe to leave stuff on the floor of Cernd's old house, and I dropped it on the floor, and it disapeared along with some other stuff I "might" need like +2 short sword...

Ah well... that's part of the fun of playing the game...

I'm not having problems saving things to my drive, I ust have aproblem that the bag of holding doesn't have enough space for what I have... of course, I appear to be a packrat hoarding as many magical items as I run across because I might need them...

 

Put rings and amulets in gem bags, don't put ammo in the bag of holding, and you should be all right

 

thanks. good advice.

Well, it seems that the problem's getting worse... now, instead of my party lurching across the screen due to the sluggish problem, there is about a 1 second pause as the little pendulum in the lower left hand of the screen swings... it pauses right in the middle... I'm going to reform my party one member at a time and boot them out until I find the cause...

Grr... I'm just trying to avoid a reinstall...

 

First off- Do you have any other graphics intensive games. Play them for a bit and see if they are effected in the same way.

Second- Check your Task manager. If there are any type of tasks that are run on a regular basis, this could do it. One example is Norton Anti-virus. It will start up in the middle of a game and start a scan.

If you are running a restore program like Go-Back, that may cause this.

What OS are you running?
Try switching display settings. Try 800x600, High Color (16 Bit)


[This message has been edited by Garret Jax (edited January 17, 2002).]