Game Won't Start

[consolegamer]

I tried disabling the monitors and the secondary video card. No luck.

One thing I am convinced of now is that this is a problem with Bink decoder used by the game. I've read far too many similar problems with other games citing the same stuttering video issue.

I sure hope 1C can help me with this problem.

How important are the videos to the storyline? Can I play the game and understand and enjoy it minus the cinematics? I don't want to have to do this. I want a working game! However, I need to be prepared if I'm not going to have this issue resolved.

I even tried modifying the nvdd.ini file and running it in Windowed mode. No luck there either.

[consolegamer]

I took the time to unpack the archives (media.pk and media1.pk) to extract the videos and play them with the RAD Video Tools. They still skip. It's definitely in the videos.

I've attached the playback summary from the first intro (the 1C video) and it had 8 sound skips.

Anyone know what might be causing this?

I was hoping I could just watch the videos externally as I was playing the game. I would just Alt-Tab out, find the video, watch it, and Alt-Tab back into the game and continue. Annoying, but at least I could fully enjoy the game.

[Sneaksie]

Did you try to defrag the HDD partition where the game is installed? Either this or a codec problem. I would uninstall all third party codec packs like k-lite and try playing the videos, then reinstall codecs and try playing the videos again.

[consolegamer]

It's not an HDD issue because I when I used the RAD player, I selected the option to load the entire file into memory before playback.

I only had one additional codec installed, Xvid. It shouldn't matter since it's not used, but I uninstalled just for testing purposes. It didn't make a difference.

I now realize there are only 5 movies. 3 "logo" files, 1 intro, and 1 outro. So, with that knowledge, I just used RAD to convert the intro into an AVI and watched it. Since I won't run into any movie issues during normal gameplay, I'll just go ahead and start playing!

I guess in the end, I can just forget about it.

[Gniarf]

What happens if you replace the game's binkw32.dll with the one included with your rad player?

[consolegamer]

The RAD tools don't include a binkw32.dll.

From the Bink FAQ:

"Bink DLLs are NOT replacable! If you copy a different version of the DLL onto another pre-compiled application (like a game), then you are likely to crash. The RAD Video Tools don't even have the Bink DLL built into them, so this will have absolutely no effect. Please contact your game maker for support."

[Gniarf]

Duuh! My bad I had completely forgotten that.