My game freezes after entering new areas.

Belar · Post by **Belar** » Wed Feb 06, 2002 8:44 pm

After I loaded ToB my game started freezing after my party arrived in new areas. When the load screen clears there's about a second of movement and then the whole game locks up and becomes unresponsive for a little while, sometimes almost a whole minute. Anyone know a fix for this bug?

Curdis · Post by **Curdis** » Wed Feb 06, 2002 10:52 pm

Get a better computer!

Defragmenting your hard drive will 'fix' this for a while. I have a Celeron 333 with 96 MB of Ram and TOB seriously tests my system. If I don't defrag about once every 16 hours of game play the screen freeze can take up to about minute(seems longer). - Curdis !

Morlock · Post by **Morlock** » Thu Feb 07, 2002 3:09 am

I sometimes have the same problem, but it never lasts for more than five seconds or so. I'm running it on a pent. 3 500 Mhz.

ReignsOfPower · Post by **ReignsOfPower** » Thu Feb 07, 2002 4:53 am

I don't think it is his rig. I was able to run ToB perfectly with full effects and pre-caching maps to the maximum no problems on my old Celeron 333mhz, 4 gig ATA-33 drive with under a gig of space left (that's dinosoar material). However it did have a Voodoo 3 in there.

Could be a defrag problem, but not so that you have to defrag every 16 hours! I think it is advised that all hardcore games who frequently update their files do a fresh format every 6 months or so. Even the newst computers suffer for massive gaps and fragments of data on drives. But only minimal in comparison to new rigs.

I reccomend Windows XP as a gaming OS; for as when the computer sits Idel, XP swaps all the fragments and gaps in the background keeping your system super fast for ages without having to do a manual defrag. Good thing is, once you move your mouse it quickly finishes the current job and you get full performance back.

Belar · Post by **Belar** » Thu Feb 07, 2002 9:00 am

I don't think it's my 'rig'. I have quite a powerful computer: 128k RAM and 850 Mhz and I defrag fairly regularly. As an experiment, last night I reinstalled SoA and ToB without the ToB patch and it seemed to erradicate the problem although I haven't had time to play it much yet. We'll see...

Leonardo · Post by **Leonardo** » Thu Feb 07, 2002 9:14 am

In one of the official pages (don´t remember if Interplay´s or Bioware) I saw a patch that "should only be used if experiencing long loading times after latest TOB patch was installed"

Leonardo · Post by **Leonardo** » Thu Feb 07, 2002 9:20 am

Just found it at:

http://www.bioware.com/games/throne_bhaal/support/patches/

"Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal BETA Patch version 26499 – 4.2 MB

This BETA patch is being provided to fix a particular issue with the Throne of Bhaal 26498 patch. If you are having a problem with save and load times noticeably increasing, the new Throne of Bhaal 26499 BETA patch has been found to resolve the problem. The patch is applicable to the English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish versions of Throne of Bhaal.

Note: Please keep in mind that this patch has received limited testing and so is marked as BETA. You should only install this if you are having very slow save and load times in Throne of Bhaal. If you are not experiencing these problems, do not install this. Installation of the 26499 BETA patch must only be done after the 26498 patch is installed.

Instructions

To repair a slow saving/loading saved game, you must first have the BETA patch installed. The patch installer copies a new BGMain.exe into your Baldur’s Gate II root directory. Then start the game and load the affected game (with the slow loading time), and resave it (the saving time will continue to be slow at this point). The save game has now been fixed and future saving/loading of the saved game will now take the normal amount of time. This new BETA patched version of Throne of Bhaal is still multiplayer compatible with the 26498 patched version of the game.

Download BETA Patch version 26499 - BioWare (4.2 MB)

Still having problems? Just shoot us an e-mail at support@bioware.com and we will see what we can do!"

kopywrite · Post by **kopywrite** » Thu Feb 07, 2002 3:36 pm

I think Belar wasn't refering to load times, but a funny little pause that occurs just after you arrive in a new area. I run this on a 1.2 ghz machine with 256 ram and it still happens... weird. I'm pretty sure it never happened pre TOB... still its quite nice to have that little moment of calm and quiet

Belar · Post by **Belar** » Thu Feb 07, 2002 7:51 pm

Thanks kopywrite, now I know I'm not insane. This morning I played a little after having done the things I mentioned above but without re-installing the official patch (26498) and it kept happening. I think I've isolated it to a glitch with ToB. Like kopywrite says it didn't happen before I loaded it.

Hey kopywrite, do you have a dedicated 3D video card, or do you have video memory built into the motherboard like mine (11 MB, but skimmed off RAM)?

Beldin · Post by **Beldin** » Mon Feb 11, 2002 2:56 am

Originally posted by ReignsOfPower

I reccomend Windows XP as a gaming OS; for as when the computer sits Idel, XP swaps all the fragments and gaps in the background keeping your system super fast for ages without having to do a manual defrag. Good thing is, once you move your mouse it quickly finishes the current job and you get full performance back.

Just my 2 cents -> If you keep experiencing problems with XP make the changeover to Win 2000.
I haven't had ANY gaming problem since I've started using W2K and installing the latest patch...

(My rig is: PIII 500, 40GB Hdd, 458 MB RAM, Asus Riva TNT 16MB VGA)

No Worries !

Beldin