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Crash just prior to end (Spoilers)

I'm on the LeCroix Must Die quest. I kill the flying Giant-Bat-Sherrif-Thing. The scene fades away, a new location seems to be loading, but halfway through the loading the game just crashes to desktop.

I have had no problems up until now. Any idea what I can do to finish the game?

Edit: I'm so distraught I can't spell "crash".

How long were you playing to get to that point? And how much RAM do you have? I find my game crashes every now and then after I have been playing for 4 or more hours in a row... lack of virtual memory so it exits to desktop.

Have you tried to get back there again and it crashes at the same spot or just this once? I'm going to suspect virtual memory if this has been the only time it crashed for you. If you reload and it keeps crashing at the same spot then yeah something is wrong.

Seems it was a hard drive problem? I restarted my computer, and it said it need to check one drive for "Consistancy". After spending 15 minutes doing that, everything started up fine and I was able to finish the game. Now I am going to back up everything that is important.

Maybe I should have done that before finishing the game. Does this mean I am an addict?

I had similar problems the first time i played the game, stemming from different sources.

Firstly, there is the already mentioned virtual memory. If you have windows XP you will notice a little warning sign in the taskbar which appears for a couple of seconds after the game crashes, telling you that the virtual memory is low. I simply set the max virtual memory to 10gb or some other ridiculous high volume and never had the same problem again.

Secondly, the game sometimes crashed after cut scenes, notifying me that the (insert hacker mumbojumbo) value had stopped moving (????). I found no sensible way of fixing that, but somehow, after upgrading every driver, from graphic card to sound card and performing some voodoo rituals, it disappeared.

[QUOTE=Sapient]Seems it was a hard drive problem? I restarted my computer, and it said it need to check one drive for "Consistancy". After spending 15 minutes doing that, everything started up fine and I was able to finish the game. Now I am going to back up everything that is important.

Maybe I should have done that before finishing the game. Does this mean I am an addict?[/QUOTE]

The consistency check is merely a safety measure that the operating system supplies if an application crashed without properly flushing its buffers. It's ensuring the integrity of the data on the disk drive, not informing you of a problem with it. I'd be inclined to go with those who suggest it was a virtual memory overrun and nothing more.

Ok, well thanks to all for your ideas. Right now I am satisfied to have been able to finish, though, yrthwyndandfyre, you have given me some peace of mind.

Further to these swap file crashes, I dug up something of interest. Minimum system requirements include 1.4 Gb of disk space for the swap file. That means you need at least that much free space on your C: drive, and to be safe I would suggest at least 2 Gb of free space, since Windows uses that file, too. I noticed that they didn't go into any great depths explaining that, which might explain some of these game instabilities that people keep mentioning.

Most games seem to be asking for ridiculous amounts of virtual memory these days. The general rule is that your virtual memory should be 1.5* your RAM. So if you have 512, you should have 768 etc.

The game may ask for more, but it should be able to run for less.

One final thing, if you partion a drive solely for your swap file, and put no other files on that drive, you will notice that your computer actually runs faster. This is because when you use your C:, you are fragmanting the file, and then the virtual memory has to find all its parts again. But if you put it on another drive, then it always knows where its parts are.

Just thought I'd let you know.