Hi,

i've been playing DD for a couple of days now and am still learning the controls. Apart from a couple of crashes (and as I just read, the limited choice in music) the game seems to running fine. However the controls don't work as they should. Neither ALT nor SHIFT nor CTRL have any effect at all. Not even CTRL+S or +L are working. Using the F-keys for skills and potions works, apart from the F10 key.

So far I've been able to work around these problems but now I would really like to unlock the door to Dr. Elrath's house. Unfortunately the door is on the wrong side of the building and I can't see it. I searched every square inch of the wall with the mouse, but no luck.

Hope you can help me, I would really like to continue playing the game.

So Ctrl doesn't target the opponent closest to the mouse cursor, and Alt doesn't highlight loot, etc?

Are you shutting down all non-essential programs before starting the game, especially any hotkey or macro programs, etc, that may be monitoring keystrokes?

Do you have Num Lock, Scroll Lock or any alternate keyboard layout function enabled? The first two, at least, shouldn't make a difference, but it couldn't hurt to check.

Can you Alt-Tab out of the game?
In Windows does Ctrl-Alt-Delete bring up the Task Manager? In a browser / editor, if you hold the Alt key down and hit 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the number pad (with Num Lock disabled), do you get a ╥ symbol or just move the text cursor around? With Num Lock enabled doing the same, you would either get an Ӓ symbol (if the Alt key works in Windows) or the numbers 1234 (if the Alt key doesn't work in Windows either).

Affirmative, nothing happens. For a moment there I thought you'd found the problem, I have been running AutoHotkey. But shutting that down didn't help, nor did shutting down everything else. Only thing left that I know monitors keystrokes was AMD Vision Control Center. Can't really shut that down. They shouldn't and don't.
I usually have two standard layouts loaded. Deleting one of them didn't change anything. I can Alt-Tab (although it takes longer than with Skyrim... )and all keys work fine in Windows.

Thanks for the answer, I hope you have more ideas?

edit: typos. typos everywhere...

Do you have the latest version of DirectX 9c installed?

Click Start, (in XP click Run), type dxdiag into the text/search box and hit Enter. When the program comes up and finishes its analysis, switch to the Input tab and see if it lists any problems.
You could also click on the 'Save All Information' button and save the results to your desktop (or somewhere handy) to attach to an email to support@larian.com, with a description of the problem and maybe a link to this topic.

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If you kept the downloaded install file(s), you could try reinstalling the game, and see if that fixes the problem. You may want to zip or otherwise backup your saves first, just in case.

Each save is a separate subfolder in the '..\Divine Divinity\savegames' folder.
Under Vista/7, depending on how the user accounts are set up, if you install the game to the default Program Files path, Windows can create separate savegame folders for each user, and then map that folder to the game's savegame folder (so it will just see the saves for the relevant user).
C:\Users\ %account name% \AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Divine Divinity\savegames

Uninstall the game, make sure there are no files or folders left in the 'Divine Divinity' folder (other than possibly the savegames folder), reboot, shut down all non-essential programs, and then reinstall the game (run the setup / language pack as administrator).
If you installed to the default Program Files path, you could try re-installing it elsewhere (like in c:\games\ or something).

Can you disable it, or at least any hotkey options? Did you go through the settings and see if there was anything that would effect fullscreen applications / games, etc? I would assume the Alt and Ctrl keys would probably be the same in both layouts, anyway.

In the Control Panel, are the regional settings for your keyboard set correctly?

You could try deleting the keylist.txt file in the Divine Divinity folder, to get the game to recreate it the next time it is started, but the 'Alt' and 'Ctrl' functions are not configurable, so that probably wouldn't help.

I found that to get CTRL+S to work, I had to hold both keys down significantly longer than usual on my machine (64-bit Vista laptop). I thought it was just inherent to the game, but after reading your post, perhaps it's not. I haven't really worried with using CTRL to target (I'm so conditioned by BG I default to using spacebar pause, followed by right click), so can't comment to that. I just remapped quicksave and quickload to D and K for convenience.

Alt-Tab works okay, and Alt does highlight ground loot (but not containers with loot inside).

I'm running DX11, do I have to downgrade? It doesn't. Reinstalling didn't help, neither with the old saves nor with a fresh game. Turns out the hotkeys are monitored by a different service. Unfortunately disabling it didn't help. Also there are no setting pertaining to keyboard input. Regional settings are correct and the keylist was replaced when I reinstalled. Thanks for the hint, didn't help though.

I thought it might be interesting to see how it behaved on a different OS. So I tried running it in my WinXP VM. It installed without problem but won't start. It claims problems with the application configuration ("Anwen[d]ungskonfiguration" on my German system, just now noticed the typo ^^ ) when running the shortcut. When running div.exe directly it says "unable to execute file [...]\div.exe CreateProcess failed; code 14001."
Any ideas about that? I would be happy with it running inside the VM, I mostly use it for old games anyway.

I also tried an old keyboard I had, no change. So it's definitely a software problem. Speaking of software: uninstalling Logitech SetPoint didn't help either.

You do not need to downgrade. DirectX 9c can be installed along with DirectX 11 (which dropped backwards compatibility, which is why some games still require 9c). If you didn't specifically install DirectX 9c in Vista/7, it was likely installed with a game, and DD probably comes with the latest version, anyway.

A Google search of the error you get in the VM indicates it is generally associated with the MS Visual C++ Redistributable Package (one person reported it was .net that needed updating, but that wouldn't be the case with DD). If you don't have these runtime files, the package should show up in Windows Update, or can be downloaded here.

Did you try running the configuration program in XP or Vista/7 and setting it to run in Software mode, rather than Direct3D?

I remember something like that about DX 5, but didn't know they had done it again. Explains why some of the Steam installers keep telling me about a (to me) outdated version of DX. ;) So yes it probably was installed with some game. Yes I did the same google search, and came up with the same conclusion. MS Visual C++. So I installed the 2005 version. Didn't help. Nor did the 2010 version. Little did I know the answer lay in between...
So yes the MS Visual C++ 2008 Package at least lets me play the game inside the VM. There are some issues with hardware acceleration for the graphics, but if I can't figure that out I can always just dumb it down to running on cpu only. Yup.

I spent a couple of hours today trying to get AutoHotkey to remap my Alt key, but somehow even the simplest scripts and even the examples from the help files didn't work properly. I'm starting to think it might not be just the game. Although I did not have problems with any other software I'm running.

Anyway I can now continue my journey through Rivellon and that's what's important. (Although if you could tell me how to fix that 2 track music problem...)

Thanks for all your help!

Larian is looking into the problem with the music in the download version of DD, but no patch has been confirmed.

Is this recent news (last couple weeks or so)? If so, that would be HUGE.

No, I don't think that was repeated recently (they said they would look into the music problem after the Steam release of DD). Hopefully with the hectic nature of getting the anthology released that plan was just delayed, not abandoned.