The World of Avlis

Hi,

during the current event in mikona, NWN keeps crashing out on me a lot. It happened once or twice when a battle would start and lots of things would start happening on screen, and several times when I tried to transition to a new area. This used very rarely happen to me before, but it's happened every few minutes for the past hour and a half, so I think I just have to give up on tonights event. Just yesterday, I installed the latest MS auto updates to XP.

Is this just me? Do you think the problem lies with the XP patches, or with a slow internet connection today, or is it just an overloaded server? Hoping that it was just the last one, I rejected the invitation to the large event party the last time, but still crashed out on transitioning to a new area. Could the MS auto-update have horked my NWN a bit? (Horked is a technical term) If so, can I fix it somehow?

Also, I normally play with a ping of between about 300-1000 or 1500 with no problems, but I noticed Mikona seems to be spiking up as high as 3000 for me today. Could be causing the crashes too?

PS. Sorry to miss the event Verg

PPS. Would buying broadband help? I'm a bit cheap, so have put it off

I have a slow connection - Dialup, no Broadband out in the rural countryside.

I also get crashed out when the server is busy, especially when in a busy area as well.

The other possibility which you could try is to defrag your hard disk - particularly the partition with NWN on it. You might need to move the HAKs out to another partition, defrag and then move them back if it is really bad. However, it is not usually necessary to go that far.

Best of luck.


BTW - if you think your connection is slow - try the DM Client on a Dialup

Another option is that you could have too much clutter in your Override directory. As a rule, it's a good idea to keep your override dir as small as possible, so it'd be a good idea to toss any non-vital files. A good example is the extra CEP/UniversalHak heads that some people unhak into the dir to pick those heads on char creation... once you've made the char, you don't need those .mdl files in the directory anymore, so you should toss them. Same for soundsets.

This is in "Ask the Team", so I shouldn't really be posting .. but meh, its not really a "Team question" is it? It's a general one.. so here goes

Broadband will help for sure. If that isn't an option (due to lack of service or cost), then set graphics options to fastest, de-frag hard disk and buy more RAM. They will all help to reduce the weight on the system.

Moved to General Discussion - advice welcome from anyone for this sort of problem - it is NWN, not specific to Avlis.

Advise on please people

I just did the critical MS update this week as well and I haven't had a problem.

Thanks. I do notice my disk drive churning heavily before a crash, so I'll try emptying out the over-ride dir - uh, can I just delete the lot? Plus I'll defrag the disk overnight, though it claims to be fine.

Semley wrote:Thanks. I do notice my disk drive churning heavily before a crash, so I'll try emptying out the over-ride dir - uh, can I just delete the lot? Plus I'll defrag the disk overnight, though it claims to be fine.

This is the game flushing from RAM, not any overrides. By this point the game has already crashed. Any loading before hand are CEP models which are the main reason for the crashing.

I'd suggest you to try an override to get the pre-HotU animations back, it works for most people.

Semley wrote:Thanks. I do notice my disk drive churning heavily before a crash, so I'll try emptying out the over-ride dir - uh, can I just delete the lot? Plus I'll defrag the disk overnight, though it claims to be fine.

That's likely just dumprep.exe preparing the dumpfile. You can eliminate this as a possibility by turning it off under Control Panel/System/Advanced/Performance/Settings/Advanced/Virtual Memory

Otherwise the likely causes for excessive paging are:

- Hard Disk developing a physical fault or corruption. Eliminate possibility by doing a physical Scandisk (in Explorer right click C: Drive, Properties/Tools/Error Checking/Check Now/Scan for bad sectors)

- Insufficient Pagefile size. Simple remedy is to set to "System Managed Pagefile Size" (in Control Panel/System/Advanced/Perfomance/Settings/Advanced)

- Not enough physical RAM memory. Other than of course purchasing more, and in addition to the Override etc. tips the others have given you, you can get the most bang for your MB by unloading all unneccessary resident programs before launching NWN (you'd be surprised how much RAM they waste?) A few suggestions might be MSN/AIM, Kazaa, software firewall (if you're behind an ADSL router), or in a pinch your anti-virus (!). Basically anything that shows up with an icon in the system tray near the clock?

Hope that's some help!

Jhevon

I experience the same problem on my windows computer and on my
iBook. So I'm more inclined to blame the crashes during heavy lag on
the nwn client than the OS. But getting more RAM is allways nice