Crashing on area change

[Rakhar]

I'm still new, but I've been playing on and off for a couple weeks now... I'm waiting for my fighter type to get deleted so I've been trying to play my rogue, but all day today I crash on area changes. It's about a 50/50 chance too. I have two computers I play on, I haven't fiddled with my NWN2 files, nothing's changed...but I'm either locking up on the load screen or flat out crashing to desktop every other time I change areas.

Is this a symptom of some problem on my end? Is anyone else having this problem? If I'd been installing new mods or something I could understand, but it's both my computers and I haven't changed my files around.

[Rob]

That's a NWN2 bug that's never been fixed. You might want to try some of these suggestions for reducing crashes.

[Rakhar]

All of the info on that page is well and good, but I've been playing for over a month now and had zero crashes before yesterday. I take care of the computer, defrag regularly, optimize video performance in game, virus scan runs every single day... Basically everything on that list I already do for performance reasons.

I understand it being a regular issue, it just seems like there would have to be a reason for going over a month playing every day and not crashing once, and then crashing every other time I zone. *frustration*

[Rakhar]

On a more productive note, would it make a difference if most of the crashes were freezing on load screen after the bar fills up? It's done that more than all out crash. It used to crash any time I tried to exit without backing out to the menu, but that only affected me when I was exiting the game anyway.

[Atharin]

Any new overrides/UI?

Any specific areas in which you crash?

Any specific characters present in the areas you crash at?

[Rakhar]

Nothing specific to it that I can make out. I haven't installed anything new, and like I said earlier I have the game on two computers and both are doing it. Also I've crashed at about every zone transition I can think of. Coming out of the inn, coming out of the vampire illusion quest, coming out of the gaol... Now that I think about it it does seem to happen more going to the main maps from a smaller area. I can't think of any characters that would be affecting me...it's been both inside and outside the city walls.

I wonder if there could be something wrong with my rogue to cause it. I'll have to try my fighter again to make sure he's doing it to. Can't recall at the moment.

[Peregrinus]

So North Cear and T&C. Not a huge surprise as those are two of the biggest outdoor areas on the server and were original built, well, before NWN2 was released with the promo toolset.

Graphically, might I suggest pulling in your fade out while in those areas, I've found that helped with both performance and load times when I had my old PC. Try lowering your graphics settings across the board, actually, see if that helps. Less detailed textures and such means less to load on transition, which means faster transition times, which means less likely crashing.

That said, transitions on Das2 have been taking longer than usual lately, not sure why, so that might play into it as well.

[superpoweredchimp]

That's a NWN2 bug that's never been fixed. You might want to try some of these suggestions for reducing crashes.

But it has certainly been improved to the point of practically being fixed.

If you're getting crashes nearly half of the time you transition, then there is certainly something screwy going on. If nothing seems to be working, you could try a reinstall.

[fazion]

Wait a sec, are you guys sure it's a NWN2 bug? It has never happened to me EVER when playing offline. It ONLY happens to me online. If it is a NWN2 bug then it has to be an online thing. If not maybe it's a graphics driver thing.

[superpoweredchimp]

While at its very core, it is indeed an NWN2 bug that only happens online, there are plenty of causes for it. I would imagine that bad graphics drivers can be cause. A laggy or highly-populated server can be big causes for this bug.

[Atharin]

Some people don't suffer from it. It's most likely to do with hardware.

[Wired]

Nobody knows. The longer you're in transition, the more likely you are to crash, that is the only thing that is certain. Areas with more people and things going on in them take longer to load, thus you'll tend to crash more into those areas. Its gotten better over time though.

Some people blame realtek onboard audio chipsets.

[fazion]

OK if it happens to some people and not to others, and only happens online, and it's "gotten better over time" then most likely a driver issue to do with graphics drivers. Gotten better over time means, patches and driver updates are slowly fixing it. I used to play NWN all the time on and offline and on my old ATi card I had crashes quite often, especially during area transitions. It was frustrating but the issue didn't exist on nvidia cards at the time and when I play now on my nvidia cards I don't have the issue.

Curious: do only users with nvidia cards (and therefore drivers) have this problem, or both nvidia and ati users? If it's both it's a nwn2-side graphics issue. if just nvidia users...