Dark Messiah problems

[Doc Rob]

Picked up this game today for £10 - thought it was worth a go.

Initially, it didn't work at all - sound OK, but blank white screen on launching. (Remained after 1.3 patch)

During the installation, it associated itself with Steam and downloaded a lot of data. It will now launch and run via Steam only - and now the sound is knackered, with severe stutter, and the game is more or less unplayable.

I have updated both graphics card and sound card drivers.

My system:

Alienware Pentium 4 Dual Core 3.6GHz
Geforce 7800GTX 256MB
Audigy 2 ZS
3GB RAM

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Lysander]

This game is riddled with problems. Personally I gave up after a while - it installed fine then wouldn't restart again. I just moved on to other things but it was quite annoying.

 

[willhub]

I read about a problem were if you have one of the settings on high, I think textures maybe, it causes an overload in the memory and then causes you to stutter like hell and freezing all the time.

 

[Elrein]

My game wont load the 2nd lvl, allways CTD @ exactly the same point

Good thing it was free with my video card

 

[SK07]

Works fine for me, but I picked it up 2 days ago and guess what it was 98p for the collectors edition at GAME. Looks like you got ripped off and it was brand new .

 

[RaMDOM]

Picked up this game today for £10 - thought it was worth a go.

Initially, it didn't work at all - sound OK, but blank white screen on launching. (Remained after 1.3 patch)

During the installation, it associated itself with Steam and downloaded a lot of data. It will now launch and run via Steam only - and now the sound is knackered, with severe stutter, and the game is more or less unplayable.

I have updated both graphics card and sound card drivers.

My system:

Alienware Pentium 4 Dual Core 3.6GHz
Geforce 7800GTX 256MB
Audigy 2 ZS
3GB RAM

Anyone have any ideas?

The stutter problem is from the sound - I found it pretty much got rid of the problem when I switched the sound to Stereo.

Ace game though - minus the spiders, which sucked.

 

[snazzy_dazzy]

The game ruled


It ran fine with no stutters on my pc


Great game albeit a bit short

 

[squiffy]

No problems at all here. No stutters, run smooth as silk, no sound stutters. Great game

 

[snazzy_dazzy]

IIRC if you selected certain graphics modes it said it would stutter in the manual due to the massive textures....

Maybe worth fiddlying with....

 

[MooSey-UK]

I played it maxed @ 1280 x 1024 on a Gainward 7800GS+ 512 (700gt core) and had no probs. that was with 92.91 drivers then i think. absolutely no probs.
although I had downloaded it via steam and always played it through steam.
great game.

 

[Doc Rob]

98p for a game that was only released a few months ago? I thought £9.98 was pretty good...

 

[snazzy_dazzy]

98p for a game that was only released a few months ago? I thought £9.98 was pretty good...

lol.

Its worth £10 easily....


I didnt see it that cheap persoanlly and all game deals are the same everywhere....

 

[mnet674]

This chugged terribly and crashed very frequently when I was playing it but it seemed to get better by some of the later levels. Since this was months ago perhaps it works better now but it doesn't seem likely so far

 

[Doc Rob]

Just thought I would update this for interest's sake.

I messed around with the settings, to no avail, and then had a look on the web. I found a site with some plausible sounding suggestions. Apparently the Source engine has a lot of known problems of this type, due to it loading textures on the fly during levels (never had any problems with HL2 or CS: Source, but there you go).

I increased the size of my virtual memory to 2.5GB (from 1.5).

I downloaded the trial version of Diskeeper and defragged my HDD.

These two things seemed to fix the problem - or at least I was able to run part of the first level with the sound seeming normal, which it hadn't previously.

The next step is to stop a number of processes which are clogging up my memory - the trouble will be figuring out what they do, and whether they are necessary or not...