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Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick ObscuraGame freezing during battle(14 posts)(14 posts)
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Posted October 09, 2010
Looked around the forum and couldn't find this exact issue.

While playing the game, it often freezes or slows down to the point of showing one frame every 30 seconds or so. I can't figure out anything I'm doing to trigger this as it seems to happen at random intervals. Often it happens when initiating combat and other times after I click on something in the battle field.

Any ideas?
No posts in this topic were marked as the solution yet. If you can help, add your reply
Posted October 09, 2010
Could you post your system specs and OS please?
Posted October 10, 2010
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Ralackk: Could you post your system specs and OS please?
Intel Core2 Duo E6750 @2.66ghz
4 gigs DDR2 RAM
Nvidia GeForce 8600GT
Windows XP SP3
Posted October 10, 2010
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JoshuaJClarke: Looked around the forum and couldn't find this exact issue.

While playing the game, it often freezes or slows down to the point of showing one frame every 30 seconds or so. I can't figure out anything I'm doing to trigger this as it seems to happen at random intervals. Often it happens when initiating combat and other times after I click on something in the battle field.

Any ideas?
Have you tried switching between the two combat modes (spacebar)? I know it sometimes seems to hang for awhile for me. I just hit the space bar and it staps back. Not sure if that's your issue or not.
Posted October 10, 2010
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JoshuaJClarke: Looked around the forum and couldn't find this exact issue.

While playing the game, it often freezes or slows down to the point of showing one frame every 30 seconds or so. I can't figure out anything I'm doing to trigger this as it seems to happen at random intervals. Often it happens when initiating combat and other times after I click on something in the battle field.

Any ideas?
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Painboy: Have you tried switching between the two combat modes (spacebar)? I know it sometimes seems to hang for awhile for me. I just hit the space bar and it staps back. Not sure if that's your issue or not.
If we are talking about the same thing, that what Painboy posted is a solution. I encountered this quite a few times.

Unfortunately Sierra wanted real-time battle system so badly, that as a result both systems seem to be not working properly sometimes.
Posted October 10, 2010
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Painboy: Have you tried switching between the two combat modes (spacebar)? I know it sometimes seems to hang for awhile for me. I just hit the space bar and it staps back. Not sure if that's your issue or not.
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Lilim: If we are talking about the same thing, that what Painboy posted is a solution. I encountered this quite a few times.

Unfortunately Sierra wanted real-time battle system so badly, that as a result both systems seem to be not working properly sometimes.
I know exactly what he's talking about, and unfortunately that's not the issue. What you're talking about is when the game acts as if a character is taking its turn, but no one is moving. Pressing the space bar puts the battle into real time and unclogs it.

My problem is that the game freezes altogether and messes with my system.May have found a solution. Turned off my external HD and the game ran without crashing last night. Going to attempt again today.Turning off external HD did not solve problem. This is very infuriating. Almost makes the game not worth playing.
Post edited October 12, 2010 by JoshuaJClarke
Posted October 12, 2010
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Lilim: If we are talking about the same thing, that what Painboy posted is a solution. I encountered this quite a few times.

Unfortunately Sierra wanted real-time battle system so badly, that as a result both systems seem to be not working properly sometimes.
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JoshuaJClarke: I know exactly what he's talking about, and unfortunately that's not the issue. What you're talking about is when the game acts as if a character is taking its turn, but no one is moving. Pressing the space bar puts the battle into real time and unclogs it.

My problem is that the game freezes altogether and messes with my system.May have found a solution. Turned off my external HD and the game ran without crashing last night. Going to attempt again today.Turning off external HD did not solve problem. This is very infuriating. Almost makes the game not worth playing.
All your drivers up to date?
Posted October 12, 2010
Try disabling hardware acceleration. It's solved all my problems running these old, isometric games. You never notice how smooth the game will run till it's off. Sure enough, I had similar problems when I started this game, but turning it off cleared the problems right up.

I can link you a download to a program that let's you turn off hardware acceleration if you're unable to do it yourself (it may be outright impossible on Vista without it).
Posted October 12, 2010
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Adokat: Try disabling hardware acceleration. It's solved all my problems running these old, isometric games. You never notice how smooth the game will run till it's off. Sure enough, I had similar problems when I started this game, but turning it off cleared the problems right up.

I can link you a download to a program that let's you turn off hardware acceleration if you're unable to do it yourself (it may be outright impossible on Vista without it).
If you're talking about the DirectX SDK I would also recommend giving this a shot as well. It fixed 99% of my issues with Planescape:Torment, also an old isometric game.
Posted October 12, 2010
Yup, that's what I mean. It fixed slowdown and spell glitches with Planescape. Now, it is about a 400 mb download (maybe it's possible to download on the parts you need, I dunno) but it's very simple to open the program and turn off hardware acceleration from the direct draw tab.

Here's a link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=572BE8A6-263A-4424-A7FE-69CFF1A5B180&displaylang=en
Post edited October 12, 2010 by Adokat
Posted October 12, 2010
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JoshuaJClarke: Looked around the forum and couldn't find this exact issue.

While playing the game, it often freezes or slows down to the point of showing one frame every 30 seconds or so. I can't figure out anything I'm doing to trigger this as it seems to happen at random intervals. Often it happens when initiating combat and other times after I click on something in the battle field.

Any ideas?
Do you have -no3d and -doublebuffer settings set in your game shortcut? These tend to fix most of the problems with the games. (should look something like this C:\games\GOG.com\Arcanum\Arcanum.exe -no3d -doublebuffer)

Edit: also have you installed unofficial patch and/or high resolution mod?
Post edited October 12, 2010 by Petrell
Posted October 12, 2010
What does 'doublebuffer' do, if you don't mind me asking? I already have no3d enabled to deal with the cursor issue.
Posted October 12, 2010
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Adokat: What does 'doublebuffer' do, if you don't mind me asking? I already have no3d enabled to deal with the cursor issue.
In short it improves performance some systems (here is complete list of Arcanum command line arguments) but if you want technical details, read wikipedia or google. Basically it makes system store more drawing information in memory for fast access.
Posted October 12, 2010
ah thanks. I'd seen that page before, but had completely lost it somehow.
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Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick ObscuraGame freezing during battle(14 posts)(14 posts)
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