Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) Technical Problems Weird colours/DDHelp crash/Dell machines

Hi folks,

This may help some people and also I'd be grateful if anyone knows what actually causes this problem.

When playing on a Dell PC the game crashes, frequently with a DDHelp error message displayed. The game will then only show corrupted colour displays whenever you go into and interior location (outside seems to be OK). You get weird purple and red tartan effects in shadows and torches show as black flickering holes etc. Occasionally, if you have a save game saved in an outdoor location you can reload this and the strange effects stop. However, whether this works seems to be random and you might reload 100 times without fixing the problem.

BUT!! Armed with experience from a similar DDHelp problem in Pool Of Radiance (the buggiest game in the universe) I have a tedious but working solution. Apparently there is some software that Dell uses that causes the DDHelp problem. The answer is to put your PC into standby mode for an hour. After that the corruption goes away! At least until the next crash. Don't ask me what type of software goes to sleep after an hour in standby mode, but whatever it is Dell seem to have written it. There were some suggestions it was the mouse driver but I use a Logitech not a Dell mouse and have the latest drivers for it.

Can Larian investigate this please? It used to happen in the first version of Divinity as well, but I didn't have the workaround at that time and it was VERY annoying. Well, it's STILL very annoying but at least I can play the game occasionally.

Troll.

For Divinity there were a couple workarounds for this problem. In Beyond Divinity the config.lcl file is empty by default, so that solution may not work.