Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) Technical Problems Blackboxes around things and crashing to desktop

I installed the game around 2 weeks ago and have had no problems whatsoever until yesterday. Let me tell you where I'm at just now. I went down south first and solved some quests for Mitox and Alix after first doing all the dungeons in Aleroth and setting the mages mind straight again. Now I just left the farms and have started the Abbey. I get black boxes now around some of the tress. people, etc (but not always) and also the game has crashed to the desktop a couple times. I tried different configs but nothing seems to help.
My specs are: P3 800, 512 Mb pc133 sdram, Win98SE, Voodoo 5 5500, plenty of HD space, SB live and letting Windows take care of virtual memory. I'm using Direct 3D in the game because when I try to use Glide, I get an error msg after the test. Now, I don't know if this is important, but things started to go bad after toggling back and forth between windows and the game by using alt-tab. The screen kind of went screwy for awile and then I noticed that my guy moved *very slowly* on the screen. I quit, re-started a save and the problem seemed to be gone. Is it possible that I'm using a corrupted save game that just keeps the problem going? If I go back to a much earlier save (before any of this started) could this fix the problem? I really don't want to do that because I've gone quite a distance since first noticing problems. Should I re-install and if I do, how do you keep the save games you already have (besides the obvious -copying to a separeate folder and then copying back after re-install)? Anyway, I really was enjoying this (one of the best I've found in years) until this happened. Using version 1.0034A ***Please Help*** Thanks.

Update to win2k or xp and get rid of the Voodoo video card. Take your pick from ATI or Nvidia depending on the cash you want to spend. Win98 is such a crap OS with so many strange issues, it's near impossible to troubleshoot them. Offhand though I'd guess your problem is the Voodoo card.

I understand what you're saying but why would this happen after 2 weeks of absolutely no problems? I do have to upgrade, but I figured this could be the last game on this system... Any problems moving the saves to a new system? Thanks.

hmm well for one I'd check for virus' or spyware. Having this happen after 2 weeks of nothing is a little odd, but it could be you just didn't hit certain parameters within the game that could cause the old video card to act up. I'd encourage everyone to download and install the free version of ad-aware and scan your system. It will remove the blaster worm and probably others.
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/

I'm in no way affiliated with them, but the free product really helps people that mess around on their PC's a lot and get mass amounts of spyware.

Save game files should move just fine to another system.

Did you notice this in the readme text file?


I don't know if that could cause a problem with some images but not others, though.


Try deleting all of the files in the '..\Divine Divinity\Run\Dynamic' folder.
This folder is used as a cache for the game. Files are created / copied there from the save game folder when you load, and written / copied from that folder when you save a game. The files will be re-created as required the next time you start Divinity. If there was a corrupt file in that folder, deleting the files should fix the problem.