Lifting Cet's curse from my PC

[the Dark Neighbor]

This is a follow-up to my foul-up. To briefly recap, I was having trouble getting W&W to run. After having the game for 5+ years and never previously having a problem, I ran into a vexing situation where the game would run for 45 second to a full minute before the game would hang. I tried uninstalling and re-installing numerous times, and I tried various suggestions found on Ironworks in order to get the game working again. Nothing worked. Is this Cet's revenge? Had the mummy's curse finally fallen upon my hapless PC?

My specs are as follows:
OS: Win98
Video Card: NIVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
DirectX: 9.0 (4.09.0000.0900)
Memory: 318 MB

Bungleau came to my rescue, asked a few questions, and prescribed a few solutions for me to try. I followed them as best I could (I'm no chiphead, but I think I did ok), and lo, I was able to leave town for more than a minute! It was great! I paused to blithely give Grue Morde directions to Gareth's, stopped in for a slice of rat pie at Bilbump's, paid Mon the Sculz a visit (then scalped him), and generally had a merry old time in and around Valeia proper. But what's this? A pack of trolls on the horizon? "No sweat," thought Slisss, my Lizzord warrior, leader of my merry band and oblivious to the fact that lizards do not in fact sweat. My band closed in, swords flashing in the dusk, my elf and pixie wizards murmuring the beginnings of incantation in the background. "Weega!" cried the leader of the troll horde, and then...

[Rethpian impersonation]: "The game hangs! Crash it went!!"

As my computer sat there frozen, the Troll Mangu's leering visage pasted to my screen with a rotten-toothed grin, I wondered, "WTF?! It was working fine before! What's the freakin' problem now?!?"

I had a bout of inspiration and decided to search through W&W various data files. As I was searching, I suddenly remembered that almost every time the game froze, I was fighting one or more trolls. I browsed through all of W&W's speech files and I found it: EC000000_105.wav. Quoth my PC, "WINDOWS CANNOT OPEN THE FOLLOWING FILE. IT MAY BE A FORMAT WINDOWS DOES NOT RECOGNIZE OR THE FILE MAY BE CORRUPTED." For those of you who are not familiar with the file by its verbose name, it is the one that says, "Trollie [grunt] taka, taka!" I copied the file from my W&W CD-Disc 2, double-checked it, and found the CD's version to be okay, so I replaced my corrupted version with the clean one.

Now, why, after uninstalling and reinstalling several (at least four) times, did this same file keep installing corrupted? The file on the disc itself is perfectly fine. I restarted the game, with the shiny new file straight from the disc itself, and made mincemeat out of those trolls. I fought several packs of trolls thereafter, and I heard their familiar battle cries of "Trollie [grunt] taka, taka! Trollie kill! Oomah! Trollie eat you later!" Everything seemed fine.

Thank you Bungleau, for all your help! Who would've guessed it was a corrupted troll speech file that was causing the problem? Has anyone else had problems with speech files getting corrupted for some reason? My anti-virus software is up-to-date, and says my system is clean. My question is, even if it was a virus (highly unlikely, but you never know) why would a virus pick out that one particular obscure file and not touch any of the others?

I do have one small problem yet. As I was reloading my game multiple times to get a favorable amount of hit points for my Ratling rogue's level-up, the game crashed to the desktop after loading from the town screen. Granted, this was after 6 reloads, but has anyone else encountered this? Does W&W have a known memory leak after multiple saved game reloads? I've heard Wizardry 8 has something similar, but I have never been able to duplicate it there (after re-loading 30 times, or something riduclous like that, just to get a specific item in a treasure chest.) Any input would be appreciated, as 1 hp per level-up is pretty stingy, IMO.

Thanks, guys! The Gael Serran is a much more enjoyable place because of you!

--the Dark Neighbor

[bsftcs]

I am afraid, I cannot help you much, as I am no wizard in the technical department, but welcome to the board. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Wyvern]

Welcome to the board, the Dark Neighbor!!

Delighted that Bungleau was able to help you with many problems - he's been a life saver for MANY a player!!!

Really, don't bother to reload to try and do better on your level ups - truly! We've all complained about this and at one point or another we've all done the reload the game etc. but it isn't worth it - the game will eventually even out and you will get some GREAT level ups!! The whole level up thing has been tested time and time again - just let the game do it's thing and play on. You will not be lacking for hit points and attributes or anything as the game progresses!!

And if you follow my advice - you won't have your game crash to the desktop.

[the Dark Neighbor]

That's a good point, Wyvern, and I hope you're right!

Many thanks to all for the warm welcomes!

--the Dark Neighbor

[Bungleau]

Hmmm.... you've got a clue in there, tDN [img]smile.gif[/img] When you click on the lever, there is another sound file that plays... perhaps that's corrupt as well. I don't know which one... they all start with lever_... but make sure you can play all of those. It's a stretch...

Wyv's right on the level-ups. Every time you go up, the game rerolls your HP and you get either the new roll (if it's more than you've got) or just one more HP. So the more you do it, the longer it will take as time goes on... it's a losing game.

Not to say that it's not justified at low levels on occasion... but after a while, it's pointless.