Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) Technical Problems Direct 3D

Hi all,

I got a copy of Divine Divinity to play on my laptop as my PC is currently out of commission.

In the Divine Divinity configuration screen, the Software and DirectDraw pass the test and play fine, but when I select Direct3D and select test, (in any resolution), a black screen loads with a mouse cursor which I can control, but nothing else happens.

When I select skip test, it appears to instantly crash to desktop

My laptop easily surpasses the requirements, (its only a couple of months old), and uses an ATI Radeon 200M graphics chip using the latest Omega drivers, and Divine Divinity is patched to 1.34

I did a forum search but couldn't find anything, (well, there was a German poster who had the same problem but the translation didn't find any solutions).

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks, Mantz.

If you run dxdiag (click Start | Run, type in dxdiag and hit Enter), does it report any problems? There are a couple of tests under the Display tab.

Have you tried the latest ATI drivers (or those from the laptop manufacturer, if any), if you don't need the Omega drivers for a different game?

You can try downloading and extracting these configuration files into your '...\Divine Divinity\Run' folder. If the game is crashing before or during the creation of the files, perhaps it will be able to load if the default versions are already there. You can edit the config.div file in any text editor to change the resolution from the current 1024x768, and can also edit a line to skip the intro videos (see here).


Are there any performance problems in the game with DirectDraw? Even though Direct3D should be better than DirectDraw, with your laptop being so much above the recommended specs for the game, practically there may not be any noticeable difference.


Welcome to the forum. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wave.gif" alt="" />

Thanks for the welcome!

I've ran all the tests in dxdiag successfully.

Driver wise, the manufacturer drivers are months old now, and the regular ATI drivers don't support my chip.

With DirectDraw there are a couple of 'stuttering' issues, though they always seem to occur when a new sound is to be played, so that may be a sound card issue.

Thanks for the configuration help, I'm off out for the night but I'll try your suggestions tomorrow hopefully!

Mantz

Same time I posted my original post I also sent a tech support request to CDV and they replied saying that it's a problem with all radeon cards.

To solve they suggest select Direct3D, skip the test, and then save and close.

Though as that didn't seem to work for me, I used the config files supplied above and they seemed to work fine, so thanks for your help!

Glad you got it working. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/party.gif" alt="" />

Most of the time skipping the test should be sufficient to get the game working. Some time ago, one other person had a similar problem creating configuration files (IIRC also for Direct3D), which got fixed the same way.

Wow, those configuration files seemed to fix something! The game was crashing on me constantly and I had no idea why. I have an ATI Radeon X800XT video card... not sure if ATI's have a problem in general with this game. I played for quite awhile tonight without a single crash... hopefully it keeps up!

Thanks!

So simply resetting the configuration files did not help?

The configuration program can have a problem with some Radeon cards/drivers (and with GeForce, though less often) but the game itself should be fine. I have a Radeon 9600 and that never caused any problems with either the game or configuration program.


Welcome to the forum. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wave.gif" alt="" />

I swear I tried everything to get it to stop crashing. Each time it would crash, it would ask me to reset the config files upon trying to boot up the game again, which i would do. I tried running in Software, directdraw, and direct3d. Direct3d wouldn't even load the test (not sure if I ever tried to use direct3d and skip the test). Software and direct draw both crashed constantly while playing. The crashes occured at random times too... didn't seem to be a pattern. I messed around with the dxdiag settings too, which didn't help. Something in the unzipped configuration files that I downloaded fixed it though. I also noticed that the configuration menu is set to direct3d, so somehow it must be using direct3d.

Oh well, I'm just glad it works now.