CTDs

[Herculine]

I sent this to a friend in a PM, but I decided that I should share it publicly as well in case it will help anyone or in turn anyone has any input or fixes for this.

With Dragon Age Origins I've had a few CTDs, but nothing too terribly annoying... until today.

 

Without giving any spoilers, I'll say that I made it to a big boss battle involving an enemy that you have to kill in like four or five different reincarnations before he's actually dead. A tough battle depending upon how you do it, sure. Well, I kept getting CTDs during this battle, most annoyingly so when I was on the verge of winning or even had won and the cutscene was supposed to start. I went through this like a dozen times, sometimes just plain losing the battle and other times nearly winning and getting a CTD as a reward. So I did some troubleshooting, closing any other programs I had running at the time ('cause I do tend to get a bit arrogant with my memory and processor, but they have their limits like any others) and even went so far as to restart the system to make sure the RAM was purged. Went back to the battle and again had CTDs. So finally I got annoyed enough after wasting like an hour on this one issue to go here and get some console cheats so I could finally get on with the game.

 

Normally I only use console commands to test mods because things like walking through an entire game in godmode just sucks all the fun out of it for me. But in this particular instance I really felt like I had little alternative. And I suspect that the issue may be directly linked to that particular battle because I haven't had any such recurring CTDs since. So just a heads up: if you get to the battle at the center of the Fade and it keeps crashing, then likely my suspicions are correct and that part of the game is just plain buggy.

[Thandal]

@Herculine; Let me guess: You're playing a Mage? :tongue:

 

I've been troubleshooting CtD problems on my QuadCore/8GB RAM/1GB VRAM rig since the release of the 1.03 patch. :laugh:

 

I've gone through all the basics steps you outlined above, and added the "FO3 Large Memory Area Fix", which improved the situation for me enormously! (It enables "daorigins.exe" to access more than 2GB of RAM. Search for it here on the DANexus, if you're interested.)

 

I can pretty much pinpoint the types of events that cause a CtD for me: "Simultaneous casting of spells with an associated execution sound FX and vFX (even transitory ones, like 'Rock Armour') by two more more characters." The key is "simultaneous". In Big Boss fights with spellcasting opponents, (like that one!) the chances of those conditions being met go up the longer the battle rages. And the sudden firing of the Cutscenes which signal "success" at the climaxes seem to be especially suseptible as well. :blink: :ohmy: :mad: :wallbash: :sad:

[Herculine]

@Thandal:

 

Yeah, I kinda suspected that it was just simply an issue of too much stuff (i.e. graphics effects/character actions) happening all at once. While my character is a warrior, I had two spellcasters with me for that battle and I had a tendency to shapeshift myself as the boss changed forms as well. Lots of stuff for a game engine to run there. (And yeah, I made my .exe large-address-aware also.)