Steam: Lockup, forced to restart computer

[kelderos]

Every now and then Kings Bounty locks up to the point where I can't ctrl +alt +delete to get out of the game and back to my desktop, I am forced to restart. Usually before this happens the game graphics seem to glitch out. I see shadows of light (in the second starting trial, the circle of candles for instance. when I moved my camera around the light from the circle of candles stayed in place)

Recently, it's taken to just locking up for no reason. Usually after I click to move around or pick something up. Anyone know what's up?

[katrazy]

I have actually just started having the same graphics glitch myself. although the timing is different. my game is fine up until i enter into any battle and then at random it will have the aforementioned graphical malfunction followed by a complete lockup.

I checked the hardware for overheat and functionality, i checked the OS and ran it on vista 64 as well as xp sp2, i checked drivers, the install and direct x. none of it made a difference.

however while i was troubleshooting i checked the patch vers. and noticed that i wasnt having this problem until "steam" auto updated my game with vers. 1.7. the timing and freezes match up perfectly and prior to that patch the game worked perfectly, and we arnt the only ones reporting this problem.

if your a steam user i hoped this helped. if not then please let me know so we can keep looking for things to fix

[StatMax]

Yes! Same thing happening to me. It's not predictable, but every 5-10 minutes (usually in battles) the screen starts totally freaking out, images flickering and lights flashing, tearing, all sorts of problems. And then it's a hard crash, can't even Ctrl-Alt-Delete. I even got a blue screen of death once. Have updated drivers, etc., no help. It's a software problem of some kind, and this thread makes me confident I'm not alone.

This is most unfortunate. Seems like a cool game, but it's completely unplayable like this. I purchased off Steam and am using version 1.7 (never had an earlier version, so I have no basis for comparison). If it helps, I'm using 32-bit Vista, nVidia 8600 series card. Please, please fix!

[Hypatian]

I've been having the same problem, and I've never run any version of the game but 1.7, which I installed via Steam. Sometimes I can go a while without a lockup, but sometimes it happens very quickly. It's happened in every area I've visited so far (around the starting castle, to the east and west), both in and out of combat.

I'm running Vista 64 Home Premium SP1 on a quad core Intel Core 2 with 4GB of memory, graphics card is a 512MB GeForce 9800 GTX. All of my drivers are up to date--I upgraded them when I began having this issue, and the problem has not gone away.

I'm somewhat surprised that it's causing such a hard lockup, since my experience with most games in Vista has been that the system restarts the video driver and recovers in the rare case that something goes horribly wrong.

I'm really liking this game, but the locking up makes it pretty much impossible to play. Even when I save after every battle, periodically rebooting and restarting the game is a bit much.

[Houdani]

Ditto, same problem here.

Bought from Steam on 3 May 09. Crashes every 10 minutes or less. Entire computer freezes and requires a hard reset to recover. Am unable to ALT+TAB or ALT+F4 or CTRL+ALT+DEL to escape the game.

So far, it's only been happening outside of combat. It seems to freeze most often when there is a dialog window open such as when I pick up loose gold on the map or when talking to a vendor/quest giver.

I first thought it was related to overheating my video card, but I manually set all fans in my rig to 100% (case, CPU, GPU) and the problem did not go away.

I have not encountered any crashes like this in any other game.

System Specs:
WinXP Home SP3
AMD Athlon 64 XP 4400+ socket 939 @ stock speeds
2GB DDR RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT
Shuttle SN25P case (with their custom power supply and motherboard)
On board audio with Via Envy24 codec

Yeah, I know. It's way past time to upgrade.

[Hypatian]

Aha!

I remembered last night just before I was going to bed that I had a similar lockup problem to this when I attempted to run World of Warcraft under Steam to get the Steam in-game overlay.

Today I'm playing with defaults settings, but the Steam overlay disabled in Steam config. It seems to be working so far with no mishaps. I will report back later this evening and let you know if it's still working.

[Hypatian]

Update: Nope. It lasted a good long while, but finally locked up in the usual way while I was in the middle of targeting an evil shoal. Bleah.

[duh]

Suggested Fix:

Re-release patch 1.6.5 as patch 1.7.1 (steam only) and send that to the people at steam.

[duh]

I downloaded a cracked version (dont get mad, i did this only after the version i paid for wouldnt work) And I experienced the same problem, it was patched to 1.6. Im thinking the problem isnt with steam or the 1.7 patch, but rather with the games own CD authentication, whatever steam is doing to bypass it isnt working.

System Specs:

Vista 32bit
Foxconn g33m motherboard
Intel e8400 3.0ghz
4gb 667mhz ddr2 ram
Nvidia 8600 256mb

[Houdani]

Update: Nope. It lasted a good long while, but finally locked up in the usual way while I was in the middle of targeting an evil shoal. Bleah.

Ditto. Tried the same and was met with more computer locking fun.

As an addendum, I'm now locking up in all areas of the game. In and out of combat, with or without dialog boxes on screen. Phooey.

[kelderos]

Seems like a few people are having this problem, any official word?

[Hypatian]

My latest attempted settings change was to disable Threaded Optimization on my nVidia driver for KB. No crashes yet, but I did have one graphical glitch (flickery icons floating above things) and immediately restarted the game. Can't ever prove a negative, but it's worth a try. I'll of course report back if I do crash later, but I have some other things to do right now.

[Hypatian]

Damn. Nope, that still doesn't do it. Longest session yet with no crashes, but in the end, still the same thing.

[Houdani]

I just finished a 2 hour session with no crash and am pleased about that.

I made two changes at the same time so I don't know which one helped more, but I'm not about to undo either of them until/unless the game starts crashing again. Your mileage may vary. (Note that I'm using Win XP.)
Right click on the shortcut for King's Bounty. Select "Properties." On the "compatibility" tab, check the box for "Turn off advanced text services for this program." Click OK.
Find the GAME.CFG file in the ..\Steam\SteamApps\common\King's Bounty - The Legend\data folder. Open the file with a text editor (Notepad) and change the "setf ~windowed 0" line to read "setf ~windowed 1" instead (change the 0 to a 1).
/cross fingers

[Hypatian]

Ooo. You can play in windowed mode? That's good to know in any case.

Has anybody been crashing since the Steam Client patch the other day? (2009-05-19) I haven't crashed since then, despite playing for quite a few hours.

[duh]

Mine still crashes. And unlike you guys, i cant seem to get mine to last longer than 5 mins before i have to restart the machine. If i could get the game to last for 2 hours i would just save often and deal with it, but thats not an option for me.

[Cutter]

I have the same problem myself and it's not cool. This is the only game on my PC that actually forces me to do do a hard boot...not cool at all. From everything I've gleaned the people with these problems are primarily Vista 64 bit users - which I'm using as well.

1C needs to get it's shit together because they have such a wondeful little game here, but between these sorts of issues and f'd up patches on Steam I won't buy anymore of their products, and warn people off them as well. We all know it's hard for the small developer, but if they can't have a dedicated QA department, than get people to beta the games and patches FFS!

Oh yeah, I've found turning of AA helps, not a solution, but it crashes and glitches a lot less.

[duh]

Hell if they need a QA team theres plenty of people on steam with tons of free time (myself included) who would be willing to test their stuff for free.

[theyarecomingforyou]

I have the same problem myself and it's not cool. This is the only game on my PC that actually forces me to do do a hard boot...not cool at all. From everything I've gleaned the people with these problems are primarily Vista 64 bit users - which I'm using as well.
I'd like to point out that I'm a Vista64 user and have had absolutely no problems with stability. I'm using an ATI 4870, whereas I notice most people with problems have an nVidia card. Sounds like a graphics driver issue.

[katrazy]

any info on the progress of a fix for the complete computer lockup for steam 1.7 users. once again it looks like a texture malfunction (random split triangles of varying colors) and it occurs at a random time after we've been playing. Its made the game unplayable for almost a month now, even if it is only a handful of us. ANY eta would be appreciated

[Nike-it]

Guys, please send this problem to our support (support@1cpublishing.eu) and add dxdiag report. We'll collect all reports and try to fix this problem ASAP. Also screens of the problem are much appreciated.

[Hypatian]

Getting screenshots of the issue is pretty difficult, since the machine is locked up at this point. Kind of distressing--I'd love to be able to send some crash reports and so on--but it's not the game that's crashing.

Somebody mentioned in another thread that they were having overheating issues with their card while playing the game (although not with other games.) This was also with an nVidia card. Can anybody suggest a tool for monitoring video card temperature? If that's the problem, it could be a bad interaction of some sort between KB and the nVidia drivers/card that leads to runaway overheating. I've no idea what could cause that, but it would explain why things die in such a glitchy way.

It could also explain why people have less problems when they turn off various options like AA, since that'll task the card much less heavily.

Here's a screenshot I snapped just before the machine died one time. It has been resized since your size limits won't accept the native resolution.

[duh]

http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php


That will monitor CPU and GPU voltages and temperatures, as well as a number of other statistics.

Edit: my GPU (nvidia 8600 GT) hits 80 degrees Celsius while playing.

[Hypatian]

Thanks very much. I'll see if I can get a good feel for how my GPU temp behaves when I'm playing some other game with all of the bells and whistles turned on compared to when I play KB. (Although the other thread, the guy said that it would drop back down when he tabbed out. We'll see.)

[duh]

Yea, my GPU temp drops when i tab out, but you can still see for a brief moment what the temp was before the minimize.

[Hypatian]

Hrm. I'll keep trying, but this looks like it's not going to work well to spot the problem, if overheating is in fact the problem. I played a new game three times. The first time, up through killing the dragon in training. The second time, up through killing the necromancer. Neither time did the temperature get very high (a bit lower than max playing Team Fortress 2, in fact.) The third time was going to be through the treasure hunt, but the system crashed at the very start of the necromancer fight. I have no idea what the temperature was then, but it was just fine after I rebooted, so... *shrug*

Since the problem appears suddenly and without warning, and prevents any useful recovery of information after the machine needs to be power cycled, I'm not sure what to do.

[duh]

I ran the game in windowed mode so i was able to view the hardware monitor after it had crashed. Overheating is very unlikely to be the problem, as you said it runs at a slightly lower temperature than source engine games.

[andrew]

Guys, please send this problem to our support (support@1cpublishing.eu) and add dxdiag report. We'll collect all reports and try to fix this problem ASAP. Also screens of the problem are much appreciated.

Hi Nike,

Any news? I have just bought this game for like a week and never able to get through the first 2 trials (dragon / necromancer) without crashing my PC.
(having similar synptoms as those who posted in this thread).

It's a very critical problem and any, any help is most appreciated.

Andrew

[duh]

One thing i can suggest is to turn of anti aliasing if you have it on. It prolonged the time before the crash for me somewhat, so i am able to play a little bit at least.