Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Technical problems Solution to crash (black screen) on XP

Hi there, a few weeks ago I managed to bypass the crash issue I had. I had installed the game on a (rather budget) computer, but it passed the minimum and even recommended specs, so it should have been alright on low settings. (AMD sempron 2,8 GHz, 2 GB ram, XP pro - Divinity 2 DKS).

My problem deviates slightly from all the other crashes mentioned here, in the sense that the game started up just fine: I could see the lady-bug intro, I could play in game in the first town there, chatting with the female mage, deciding what type I would play, etc. All worked fine. Until it was time to go back to the flying ship. She tells me there's a dragon sighted and what not, and then... it crashes. The screen ALWAYS went black at that moment, and it got reduced into/as a tab on my taskbar. (Re)clicking the tab (to open the window again) made it crash completely.

Now, I've had tried all the tips provided here: setting it on lower or higher resolutions, installing the latest drivers, installing the latest patches, de-installing codecs, reinstalling the WMP codecs, etc. Nothing worked. It still borked at the exact same time/place.

What did work (well, as a work-around) was this: I went to C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Divinity 2\Profile\graphicoptions.xml

There you see the option in the file Fullscreen="1" ; I changed it into 0. This makes it turn into windowed mode.

When I started the game anew and came to the point of the crash (returning to the ship and going of to hunt for the dragon) it DID turn black again, but contrary to the first time, you actually still hear the sounds, and it doesn't crash. The cut-in movie/scene just went on, until it finished, and then the game resumed, and everything worked fine again. (even after setting it back to full screen again). So with a save beyond that cut-in scene, you can just go on and proceed with the game.

I just hope that I don't have to do that every single time a cut-in scene is showed. But maybe not. It's strange I didn't have any problems with the other cut-in scenes before, though. I read somewhere that it was due to different codecs been used for different scenes/movies. But I'm a bit baffled by the reason for this. I agree with Larian Studios they can't foresee every possible variant on every possible machine that the game runs on, but it would have stand to reason that you only use one and the same, (and preferably most commonly used) codec for ALL your cut-in movies. That's definitely an error of Larian Studios (even if they didn't do it themselves, they should have checked it). I hope you guys learn from your mistake.

But anyway, while it's more of a work-around (you still can't see the cut-in scene), it did help me to get further with the game on my XP-budget PC, while all the rest of tips and tricks didn't help. So I thought mentioning it here too, if other people had the same trouble.

There you go.

Thanks for the feedback. Hopefully it will help if anyone else runs into a similar problem.

If you browse to the video folder, can you play the problem cutscene movie in Windows Media Player? I played the Xbox version, so am not sure what the name is.

Someone with video performance issues on an older computer reported (here) batch converting all the videos to a lower resolution. You could convert the cutscene video leaving Farglow to a different codec.


Welcome to the forum.

I had tried that out before, but I picked out some random ones. They played just fine if I tried them directly. That said, I don't know if that particular scene was one of them. Probably not. And I don't feel like checking them all, so I would need to recognise it by name. Does anyone have the name of that particular scene, the one you get after you go back to the flying ship, before searching for clues in the second town?

The link you gave, with the conversions, will probably work too, since they're all converted in another format/container. And if you have the right codec for that, it will work just fine. I want to stress, though, that I didn't have any trouble with the other cut-scenes, even on their native resolution, so I don't feel like I need a low-res conversion of all those vids. It's definitely a codec issue, not that my computer is too weak to play the scenes in their resolution (or it would have had trouble with the other cut-scenes too).

So, if possible, I would rather have the high-res videos working, in-game.

I guess I could make some high-res conversions of (only) the vids that give me trouble, and put them in the folder. Maybe I could link them here too, for people with similar problems. But the problem remains of knowing which one in-game is which one in the folder. It's been a few weeks so I can't remember quite; but is there an easy way of recognising that? (remember with me the screen always went 'tab' and crashed, so I can't visually compare it, because I never see the cut-in scene that borks.)

The video leaving Farglow is '...\Divinity II - DKS\data\Video\Story\ToBrokenValleyRide.wmv'.

Most of the video names are relatively easy to identify (at least if you've already played the game), like Start_Movie.wmv (cutscene with Damian on his flying fortress and then a slayer seeing a dragon knight) and Tutorial_Arrival.wmv (ladybug flying through Farglow). Videos for the FoV expansion start with 'EXP_', etc.


The link you gave, with the conversions, will probably work too

The links to the downsized videos are broken (the site was shut down).

Ah, yes, completely forgot about this little problem back then. been a long time, and I finished the game since long by now. ;-)

Yes, the file worked with wmv.

Can't really remember if I ultimately also converted the vid in question, or all of them, or installed some extra codec-pack, but regardless; the above solution should still work for people that (want to) play it, still. (And I guess you always have people like that. Even I played the bard's tale waaay past its publishing time. Old(er) games can be cool. ;-)).

Raze,

Are there still many people that try out Divinity 2 and encounter this problem?

If so, I might look into it a bit more, and maybe re-do the same thing as the site of those links that don't work anymore: convert and make low(er) resolution copies of it, so people can replace them with those, and can go on with the game.

For that, it would be nice to know what resolution and codec to use in prefernce (what causes the least trouble). And maybe also what vids cause the most problem (maybe only a few cause problems, after all).

If it's still useful, I'll put up links/as site where people encountering problems with this kind of thing can d/l it.

People are still playing Divinity 2, but this particular problem doesn't come up very often. There were a couple codec related issues recently (for one the person could avoid the problem [minimizing on videos] by starting a video in WMP before starting the game, and leaving it paused).

Hello,

First of all, thank you Larian for you're wonderful game Divinity 2.
After all these years and finishing OSEE I wanted to replay to this game on my laptop (lenovo y50-70, i5 4200H 2.8 GHz, gtx 860m, 16gb ram, Windows 10)

I had two problems :
unfinishing loadings -> Solved by lauching the game with Windows SP2 compatibility
No video played -> so there is this awkward problem : no videos are launched, not a single one from the directory : C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\divinity2_dev_cut\Data\Video, everything is transparent instead. So i don't have the loading screen or the Larian intro or any cinematic or skill video played in the game.

Is that a driver or a PhysX issue ? Thank you for you're help

It is most likely a codec problem. Can you play the videos in Windows Media Player?

Check for updated video drivers (though this probably isn't directly related) and Windows updates in general (particularly anything related to Windows Media Player codecs).

You can also try installing the AC3filter audio codec. Some people have fixed codec problems by either uninstalling or installing codec packs.

You can rename the intro.wmv and loading.wmv videos in the '..\SteamApps\common\divinity2_dev_cut\Data\Video' folder to get the game to skip them.

As mentioned above, try starting a video in Windows Media Player, pause it, and leave it running in the background when you start the game. That can help if there are problems with certain video filters or codecs.

Hello,

I solved the Video problem simply by installing the media player Windows media feature pack : https://www.microsoft.com/fr-fr/download/details.aspx?id=48231 (I have a Windows 10 N professional edition)

Unfortunately, I noticed that I didn't get rid of the unfinishing loading problem (the game is in an infinite loop : music and logo animations are still played. I noticed it happens the 2nd-3rd-4th time I open a door, after the savegame loaded. The times it works, I can hear just the opening door sound. If the game goes into the infinite loop, I hear the opening AND the closing door sound. Weird Bug). I still have this even after trying :
- Launching the .exe with every compatibility (Windows XP SP2-SP3, Windows 7, Windows 8)
- Enabling the lockstep mode
- Verifying the cache integrity within Steam

Thank you very much for your attention

Try the 4GB Patch to increase the amount of virtual memory that the game (or any 32 bit application) can access in 64 bit versions of Windows. That usually helps if enabling Lockstep Mode doesn't (you can also try disabling 'Use Multicore').


A couple people have reported that setting the game to run in a window fixed the problem. To do so, edit the file below in a text editor and change the one to a zero in Fullscreen="1".
C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Divinity 2\Profile\graphicoptions.xml

You may need to set Windows Explorer to show hidden files and folders (covers Vista through Win 10).

Thank you very much, the 4gb patch solved this