hazelnut on 24/6/2002 at 10:44
Hi,
I waited for MW for years and really enjoyed it when I finaly got it (later than you yanks - I live in the UK - and that extra month was torture! ;-)
The problem is I am finding it harder and harder to enjoy now. The reason is that it crashes with greater frequency. When I first started playing I got a crash after about 3-4 hours play. Now I get one every 1/2 hour, usually wasting 10 mins (I save every 10 mins) of effort. Not only is this completely destroying all immersiveness, it's making it very hard to get anywhere with the game as I have a young family and limited time to play. When the game crashes, I have to reset the PC - there is no way to resuscitate windows! This takes around 10 mins because scandisk runs (40 Gig disk... takes a while). So when the game crashes, it takes 15 mins to get back to 10 mins before where I had got to... in other words 25 minutes of play time lost!! :nono:
This happens 2-3 times before I give up and watch TV :tsktsk:. I am about level 8 and don't feel that I've done more than the start of the game. I'm trying to work my way up the ranks of the Telavanni which means that I am travelling more than I have previously - maybe that contributes?
Anyway, I am desperately hopeing that the patch (when the UK version comes out) makes the game more stable - can anyone from the US who has experienced similar stability problems tell me whether the patch has improved the situation and by how much?
The wierd thing is - I am not bothered by the performance with my not-quite-cutting-edge-PC. I can live with 7-10fps in towns. The frequent loading pauses are the worst thing.
Thanks,
Andy.
(P3-600, Gf3Ti-200, 160Mb RAM, SB Audigy)
Gothik on 24/6/2002 at 18:06
You can use the current patch (I have) as I discovered a while ago, Ubi Soft mark their patches for English versions of the game "US Patch". I found this out when trying to decide whether to patch my UK copy of Pool Of Radiance with the "US Patch". Indeed, if you check out the POR official site you'll only see the "US Patch" and the European patch covers the versions in French, German etc.
I had the odd crash early on, but I haven't played the patched version enough yet to tell if it's improved the situation or not. I think some more RAM might help you loading problems, you're only just over the minimum specs for it and if you're using Windows XP then you need at least 256 MB.
Red on 24/6/2002 at 18:34
I find that after say 6 loads of a save game the performance seems to dip slightly. To a small extent I've also found the more new areas you enter (areas requiring a loading bar) the more your performance suffers after a prolonged amount of time.
I have 256 RAM and the game runs fine with just a very slight freeze just before entering a new area.
I don't have any experience with the patch because i was also undecided whether the US patch applied to the English version of the game.
I am interested to see what people think of the patch and whether it has any undesirable 'side-effects' - an issue I've become increasingly aware off with patches for other games.
john turner on 25/6/2002 at 03:36
the one thing that i have noticed with the patch is that after a small amount of time playing - 5 to 10 minutes, the mouse becomes unworkable. really sucks. it works controlling the weapon, but if i go to the menus the click event seems to not register.
have to quicksave and then ctl-alt-del to get out of the game. never had this issue before.
hazelnut on 25/6/2002 at 11:25
Quote:
Originally posted by Gothik You can use the current patch (I have) as I discovered a while ago, Ubi Soft mark their patches for English versions of the game "US Patch". I found this out when trying to decide whether to patch my UK copy of Pool Of Radiance with the "US Patch". Indeed, if you check out the POR official site you'll only see the "US Patch" and the European patch covers the versions in French, German etc.
I had the odd crash early on, but I haven't played the patched version enough yet to tell if it's improved the situation or not. I think some more RAM might help you loading problems, you're only just over the minimum specs for it and if you're using Windows XP then you need at least 256 MB. Thanks for the reply Gothik - nice to have a reply from a fellow brit. I used to live near you (Croydon) but moved to Cambridge 5 months ago.
Anyway, luckily for me I'm using Win 98, so 160 should be enough. i may plonk another couple of 32meg sticks in and see what difference they make (since I am not using my Linux box at the mo). I actually got somewhere last night by using F5 followed by F9 every 20-30 mins. Only had 2 crashes in 3 hours play (when I did too much travel) and both times was when trying to reload a save to clear the data buffers.
I have mailed UbiSoft but no reply. I think that I will hold off on the patch since it doesn't seem to address these issues (according to the readme) and the only things in it I care about are the NPC health bar and the fix to the armour that couldn't decide whether it was medium or heavy...
Can you let me know how it goes with the patched version when you get back to it please? These damn Telivanni really are making me travel for my supper!!! Now I have to go to Vivec to buy some books!! I Hate Vivec and still don't have enough magicka to cast a nice fast & long levitate spell to allow easy travel (al la Daggerfall, oh how I loved flying while riding a horse - straight over city walls at night!!) ;-)
Cheers
Gothik on 25/6/2002 at 17:58
I played last night for over an hour and did not encounter a single crash or any type of mouse control problems. I'll have to experiment a bit more but it all seems stable - so far.
I'd say you probably want 256 MB for the game anyway, as it's certainly a resource hog. The thing I find most strange about the game is the fact I can run it at either 640 x 480 or 1600 x 1200 and get exactly the same framerate! Weird. I haven't actually played Daggerfall, but I did download the demo and I found that it runs perfectly happily (with sound!!) under Windows XP.
hazelnut on 26/6/2002 at 12:28
I hear you about more memory, but surely this should just affect speed of the game. There is definately something dodgy with the memory management / cell pre-cacher (which tries to eliminate the loading bits.. an fails. Oh how I remember reading about MW was gonna cache new cells in the background so there would be no loading pause!!! hahaha)
Have yet to play the game again, trying to get up the enthusiasm - which is really sad after waiting for so many years.
Andy
