Hi, my brother bought and installed The Dragon Knight Saga on Steam, but was having problems so he called me in. Here's what I've found so far:
Config: Win 7 64-bit, 8GB RAM, Core i7-870, ATI HD 5800 (no CrossFire), Gigabyte P55A-UD3 Motherboard
Windows up-to-date, audio and video drivers up-to-date
Problem: After starting a new game of Eco Draconis from the main menu, the loading screen appears and then an intro movie plays (\steam\steamapps\common\divinity ii blah blah\data\videos\story\Start_Movie.wmv - I'm doing this from memory so sorry if its a little off). After a random period of time - as little as a second or two or as much as almost the whole length of the video - the video will stutter massively and then stop and the screen goes blank. Usually the sound continues off and on and sometimes the next music will play (for the character creation screen). But, the screen is black and input is largely rejected - the machine is completely bogged down. Sometimes I could get the Ctrl-Alt-Del screen to come up 20 or 30 seconds after ctrl-alt-del but could never get the task manager to start. Or at least I ran out of patience before I could get to it. A hardware reset or power-off is required.
Findings: Start_Movie.wmv will play just fine in Windows Media Player (there is mild juddering on the opening pan, but I suspect that may have to do more with converting from PAL to NTSC in the prodution pipeline or some such thing.) I replaced Start_Movie.WMV with wildlife.wmv which I think is a sample installed with Win7. Same exact problem, except now with majestic horses running on a beach instead of grim adventure dude trduging along an elevated walkway. To see if we could get past the video, I trimmed the new Start_Movie to 1 second in length using Windows Movie Maker 2011 (not bad! hadn't used that since the early XP days). Lo and behold, after a second of horses we got to the character creation screen just fine. Created a character and continued only to get hung up in the exact same way on Tutorial_Arrival.wmv. Gave that movie the one second horses treatment as well and was able to get into the game proper, which my brother saved and played for a little while to verify the actual gameplay stuff was working okay. It was, and he was able to turn all the graphics settings back up too.
Seeing as it is almost certain to hang the next time a cutscene video is played I offered to replace them all with one second horses, but he didn't seem thrilled with that idea. I then suggested we create 1 second videos for each game movie that simply said, "Please refer to video: Tutorial_Arrival.wmv" or whatever video it was supposed to be. He could then exit the game, watch the referenced video in Windows Media Player and then restart and reload his game and continue. Some people just don't have any respect for creative hacks. Imagine that!
It occurred to me later that we hadn't tried the expansion at all, so I called him and had him start an expansion game and he reported that it played through several videos just fine. To make sure I hadn't somehow accidentally fixed it for all videos I had him restore the two I had changed and had him start a new game with the original campaign and it hung just like always. The only test we haven't tried is finding one of the expansion videos and making it Start_Movie.wmv just to make certain that its not an authoring problem between original and expansion.
In any case developer people, if you are interested in solving this, I am willing to help. I'm not knowledgeable about DirectShow and filter graphs and pins and whatnot (that's about the extent of my knowlegde), but point me to the data you need or tests to run and if necessary the tools needed to do it and I can provide it. I am a software professional, so just about anything goes (keeping in mind its my brother's computer - not mine.) As far as the computer, its relatively clean, he didn't even have Divx or xvid, it seems unlikely to me that this is a codec issue but I'll entertain any tests you want. At the urging of a post on this forum I installed the K-Lite Basic pack and it appeared to neither help nor harm anything. Also 2 sets of video drivers (what he had and the latest) and 3 sets of audio drivers (removed what he had and tried Win7 generic HD Audio drivers and then the latest Realtek drivers from Gigabyte.)
If you have multiple tests, try grouping them together as its a 40 minute drive round trip to my brother's place.
Thanks.
