Okay so, first, I friggin' love this game and want to play it so bad.

But, I'm getting constant access violation crashes randomly within any kind of mission. All the time.

I've tried to play the game...
Feb 08: 4 crashes
Feb 10: 1 crash
Feb 11: 4 crashes
Feb 12: 1 crash
Feb 14: 1 crash as of now

11 crashes total, within 5 days of trying to play it.

The days with 1 crash "only" are days where the crash discouraged me from continuing, not days where it ran fine. I've had 0 days of playing without crashes.

The crashes always happens when either a door opens for a new room, or combat is triggered [again, loading a new "room"].

Each crash leads to 4 to 5 minutes of waiting for the game to load back up, and re-play the stuff that I've already played before it crashed. So I've had to sit through close to one hour of waiting for loading the game because of crashes by now.
I mean, not even Crysis took that long to start and load a level, jeez!

Not once have I ever had the chance to use the "quit game" button, because the game keeps crashing like that.

Ohgod, please just let me play this awesome game...

_______________________________________

*Update:
And, 12 minutes later, I've had another crash.
subtracting 5 minutes for loading means, after just 7 minutes of gameplay, I've had another crash.

Side note:
Starting the game with "-force-d3d9" yields much more stable and higher FPS on my system - just below 60, if there are not too many light sources. Though in that case, disabling shadows helps limit the frame drop I get in these "intense" rooms so I'm still getting 30+ FPS. Using an FPS limiter set to 30 gives a much smoother experience now.

Still, the crashes persist, load times are unchanged.

I am dealing with this too. Super addicted to the game but nothing I do fixes these errors. I disabled all the graphics effects for performance, I followed all of the instructions in the GOG Starcrawlers support page. My graphics are up to date, User Account Control is deactivated, Turned my firewall off (and gave Starcrawlers firewall access too), reinstalled the game a number of times. I heard it was story missions causing the bug so I even tried playing the game without doing any of the starred plot missions and I still get the access violation crashes. Another user posted that using GOG Galaxy to revert the game to a previous version seemed to fix the problem for him, but he is playing a previous version that is behind the patches and he has to tolerate GOG galaxy, which I ultimately just could not bring myself to install because I dislike it conceptually.. According to him, this is a problem with the unity engine and the Starcrawlers Devs have their hands tied until Unity gets its shit together. I'm sure you and I are not alone and that lots of folks are having these errors. Lets hope it gets sorted out soon. :\

Well, there are plenty games using Unity without such problems, even on this very same system. You probably don't even realize how many games use Unity - you'd be surprised.

Point being, I don't know what exactly Starcrawlers is doing differently from all these other Unity games, but, from Unity's perspective, all of these other games have no such issues. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Unity to fix anything here, realistically. Of course Unity keeps evolving and updating the engine, too, but - usually for entirely different reasons.

But, what exactly did the dev say, and where?

It's just what I heard from other users on this same forum, or maybe somewhere else when I was poking around. Anyway installing galaxy and rolling back to previous edition has made the game playable. I still get the occasional access violation crash but sometimes I play several missions without seeing it now, and I am a ways into the story, about 12 hours into my current playthrough according to galaxy.

I'm not the "hold my breath" type, but it's like I'm going to die if the game doesn't get fixed. I already got my five bucks' worth many times over, I'd say. Definitely one of my all time fav games, would buy again <3

I have this same.Today i played almost 2 hours and 2 crasches.Its only one solution for this:often save the game:)

Only for the purpose of giving you some info: I have never had this problem and I've played over 100 hours on two different PCs (finally replaced my old one when it had some problems I didn't want to fix). I only have about 20-30 hours of play time on the new rig, though.

I am not saying that the problem is in your head. I am saying that there is some similarity shared by the people who have this problem, and that causes the problem. If you affectees would share data, maybe we could figure something out?

I can't tell you how frikkin' excited I am for that now.

Thanks so much for caring about fixing your awesome game when sooo many devs nowadays just don't seem to care anymore after the purchase. But it's devs like you that I'll happily continue to support and buy from in the future.

As soon as I've given it a try, I'll report back!

Update:

Can confirm, you dun fixed it! At least my constant crashes. We'll see if there will be any other crashes (let's hope not), but so far, so good! Finally, I can dive in!

On another topic - what's up with these awfully long loading times? I'm a dev myself, so, I can't help but wonder about that. Can you speed up the process of loading somehow? It's the loading of the assets, I think?

Well, first and foremost, thank you for providing that fix in the first place!

But somehow, since the Beta install, load times under the same circumstances [at least same level type] have about halved. While it used to be 4 to 5 min from executing the game, using continue, to being in-level - that same process now completes in 2:30 min. That's a whole lot more acceptable and doesn't have me keep on the SNES for bridging loading times =D

Though that means my progression in Yoshi's Island will have to wait, I'm very happy with that improvement. But maybe it's just the specific level back then that caused the issue, or something, IDK.

Something a bit off-topic:
How do I manage my team? Like, kick someone out of my roster completely, and / or rearrange the order they're in to pair up same classes next to each other for easier outfitting...?

Being able to sort the inventory by inserting an item in between two others instead of just swapping them around would be neat, too. I spend quite a lot of my time with outfitting decisions and sorting!

Once again, thank you for that quick fix! Really appreciated.
Other devs really ought'a be more like you.