Hi, everyone. Let me just say that I adore GOG for making games like this a part of their impressive catalog. Silent Storm is easily on my personal "best games ever made" list, and for good reason.

I am having a little bit of trouble with the game lately, however. After having apparently broken my game by attempting to install Blunter's All Uniforms mod (which made the game crash after the intro videos every single time), I uninstalled Silent Storm Gold and attempted to reinstall.

That's where things got funny. Lo and behold, there are shadows now! And quasi-reflections on glasses and windows! Whoa! Believe me, I'd never seen that before. It was like a completely different game presentation-wise. I also noticed my shortcut icons looked different than before. A quick internet search confirmed my initial conclusion, that the game had indeed been updated by the good, ever-dilligent folks at GOG. In this case, it came in the form of an updated launcher that fixed an Nvidia compatibility issue that I frankly never knew existed.

Long story short, this "new" version is, unfortunately, in my experience an absolute crash-trap. Honestly, neither of the Silent Storm games were overly stable to begin with, and crashes weren't an uncommon occurrence, but this latest version seems to have taken this problem to a whole new level. Crashes on map transitions, crashes on opening the menu, crashes on death, crashes on the map screen, crashes when I walk into rooms at the Sentinels HQ. It's infuriating. It wasn't nearly this bad before.

Anyone else experiencing this, or is this a one-off case of bad luck?

Thanks in advance for any replies/solutions/moral support. :-)

Try running the game in different compatibility modes, it could be that it's more stable in a more restrictive environment.

I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't actually tried compatibility mode yet. I just figured right out of the gate that it wouldn't be a solution because I didn't have to use it before. But you're right - I should probably start there. I'll give it a go with some compatibility settings and report back.

Thanks for the reply. :-)

EDIT: Hmm, no dice. Weirdly enough, both shortcuts are already configured for XP compatibility mode (whether that's the default or it's remembering old settings somehow, I dunno). I tried running with XP compatibility mode and without, with no luck. Tried Win 7 compatibility for the heck of it, too. Still crashes, but since the crashes seem kind of random, it's hard to know if any given setting is less "crashy" than another.

Looks like there's no simple solution. :-\ But again, I appreciate the reply.

If anyone else beats me to a solution, or can point me in the right direction, please do holler. :-) If I somehow work this out, I'll be sure to make a post in this thread explaining what I did and how I did it in case someone else runs into the issue.

EDIT EDIT:

No luck at all. Oh, well.

MM,

the most common reasons for crashes I've noticed so far are:

1) the mod was not properly installed
---- it needs to be extracted to the Silent Storm - Sentinels folder. It will form its own folder there (ex.: BlunterMod_v2.4).

2) external scripts were added (anti-durability, etc.) to the S3Common scripts.
---- Likely to conflict with Blunter scripts. If that's the case - remove them

3) multiple mods are activated
---- BlunterMod adds and modifies thousands of db entries and will conflict with other mods, most likely resulting in frequent freezes and crashes. Don't use other mods or multiple versions of BlunterMod.

4) a third party utility was used to add mod to a previous save (created using previous version)
---- my advice - start each new version from the beginning...and use the latest update.

5) game files are corrupt.
---- re-install

P.S. I haven't experienced the instability you mention. Unless I am experimenting with the editor, the vanilla Sentinels has been very stable. (extensively tested on XP, Win 7 and Win 8) The same goes for the BlunterMod. There is a known random crash in "Castle Linden" encounter that I'll need to address... Other than that it should be fine...
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~ Blunter ~