bioshock stability

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9 Sep 2007
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Anyone else find this game incredible unstable ?
It tends to lock up and make a strange buzzing noise .Then you have to reset all custom controls and settings each time .
Such a shame as I love this game but its almost unplayable .
 
Absolutely ****** awful in terms of getting it running, and working reliably under Vista 64.

First there were various problems that required me to reinstall one of the secondary bits of software that came with it, then the problems getting it to load (IIRC it needed XP compatibility to work), then it needed a specific driver/addon package for creative cards, then it required me to turn of UAC because it had a bug with saving in certain areas (the docks and the gardens).
Add to that the fact it lost every user setting after every single crash and wolfy was not impressed overly with it in terms of stability.

Once I got past those problems it ran beautifully, it's just a shame that it was almost as hard to get running reliably in the first place as some of the old DOS games* that required you to spend days fine tuning your boot disk with it's himem.sys and loadhigh= etc to get that magical combination of settings that would let it work.

The devs did a great job of the actual gameplay/story/atmosphere, it's just a shame the engine and implementation was so shoddy, it could definitely have done with a lot more testing especially under 64bit and Vista (given it's a "game for windows" it shouldn't be too much to expect it to actually run on fairly standard systems).



*I found some of them a while back, something like 20 or so in one of my drawers with notes such as "basic boot disk", "general disk with sound", "basic with sound and CD", "Privateer", "U8 -KEEP - DO NOT OVERWRITE.".
 
you may need to install one of the creative packages if you're using a creative labs card, iirc it's something like the openal driver (oalinst.exe or something like that) from the creative site.
 
Quite bad for me - using XP and Vista32. Several CTD's and now I've got a weird sound problem in Vista. Still an excellent game however regardless of the stability woes.
 
Strange to hear about the stability problems, I have it running on Vista Ultimate X86 without any problems, maybe it is related to 64bit Vista?
 
I've never had the game crash physically...But it has reset my resoloution on my widescreen a couple of times without saying anything.

Only problems ive had are with random bits of debris bouncing around a bit too excitedly due to the physics :p
 
I had problems originally but I eventually put that down to the Crucial RAM being on it's way out. BioShock seems particularly sensitive to overclocking and/or faulty components.
 
Only issue I've ever had with it is the fact that it messes with my desktop gamma settings, other than that I don't think it has ever crashed.
 
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