The Witcher 2 crash to desktop, personal expirience and i solved it.

[SNaKeYGR]

The Witcher 2 crash to desktop, personal expirience and i solved it.

1st of all, i love The Witcher game series.
Love the characters, love the lore behind everything but it seems im also cursed with the series.

I bougth TW1 EE retail when it came out back then and i loved it but could not play it satisfactory.
I was one of the few that had the crashing bug and nothing could help me fix it. Looked up for any solution. Tried everything that i could find on the net and on this forums but no luck. I could play Max 30-40 mins before the game would crash.

My sys back then was almost the same as today with only one change. The GPU.

CPU : Intel C2D E6600 2.4Ghz (o/ced 3Ghz)
GPU : Albatron 8800GT 512MB (current MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II/OC 1GB)
MB : Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI
RAM : G.Skill DDR2 F2-6400CL4-1GBHK X2
Sound : Creative SOUNDBLASTER X-Fi Xtreme music
PSU : ETASIS ET650 650WATT
HDD : WD120 / WD250 / Segate Barracuda 500GB
OS : Win7(32bit)SP1 Ultimate on WD250 / WinXP SP3 on WD250 (dual boot)

Now the thing was back then that i could not play TW1 more then 10 mins on my Win7 OS but managed with pain to finish it on my WinXP OS. 30-40mins sesions before crash and restarting the game.

Got myself the TW2 on a steam sell like 2 weeks ago. Dled it and tried to play it. Tweaked abit the option on the launcher and then started playing. Tutorial and prologe were smooth but the second i went into Chapter 1 and Flotsam the TW1 nigthmare came back to haunt me. This time with crashes to desktop without any error messages.

Again searching the net for any solution but although i came across some they didnt help or they were not for my case, like im not german and run TW2 on english or the RAM fix, wich i dont have more then 3GB ram. I'm sitting on 2GB.
Tweaked settings, lowering or disabling options. No results. Steamcloud wasent even enabled and removing the steam UI ingame didnt help also. Disabling AV, veritying integrity of game cache on Steam, deleting savefiles before and ingame just leaving 2-3 files... Crash crash crash to desktop without any error msg.

Crashes were random and not tied into a location or while/before/after a cinematic. They could happen while using F5 for quicksave, opening doors, going into inventory, using the save option, opening journal, ending a dialog. Random is random.

The only think i noticed thougth was that lets say i played 30mins. Because of the crash issue i was saving every 2-3 mins. Be it F5 or save in the menu. Now every time i restarted the game and going into the loading section i noticed that although i was saving every 2-3 mins in that 30min period before the crash, i was missing the latest saves !!!
For example : crash after 30mins gameplay. Restart game. Latest save is from 15min gameplay. Again crash after 30mins. Latest save is 20mins gameplay.
It seams that while i was playing and saving through the 30min at some point the game does not save any files anymore.

Well that hinted that something was wrong but as i am not a programer and i have no clue what i could do with that.

Only solution that i was left with, to be able to enjoy and propably finishing TW2 was to download the GoG version and hope i dont hit the crash wall again. Or try to run it on Winxp partition.
Redownloading the GoG wasent an optimal solution, cause im sitting on a 2Mbit line and 16GB+ takes alot of time, so i rebooted my WinXP OS and hoped the TW1 solution would happen again.

AND IT DID !!!

I'm playing TW2 on WinXP. With no crashes. Have no problem with how many savefiles i have in the folder. Have alsmost set the setting to ultra and with no problems and game runs smooth as S#$@ CPU still O/Ced !!!! I am happy and i am enjoying TW2 like hell !!!

Whats the diference in WinXP and Win7 ? Hardware is the same. WinXp has outdated drivers but still runs TW2 by miles better then Wix7 !!!!

So this was my expirience with the crash on desktop without error and TW2 for me. Why i did post this?
I know that not many ppl have a dual boot but the reason i posted is more to give a hint to any moderator to what happend to me and how i solved it. I am ready to help find what may be the problem by being guided and give any info i can provide to find any solution to many ppl out there ho have this problem and could not solve it.

Dont know why but i think that how the game stops creating savefiles after some random, point must be something worth investigating.

Sorry for my bad english as its not my native language and i hope you could understand what i was trying to say.

 

[waltc.480]

You might want to think again, although it's good the game is running properly for you! I'm running W1EE with the "new" combat mod which I just installed (I just noticed it)--and the game runs great under my Win8Pro x64 system. Sometimes these things "just happen" for reasons that computer engineers the world over are still wracking their brains about.../>/>/>

Seriously, the number of variables is huge, and the one or more that changed for you were what made the difference. The work comes in trying to nail down the variables...!

Last week I was having a problem with W2 EE in that it kept "C-ingTD" every time I'd try and save a game, either through a quick save or manual save. I installed the W2 combat mod and "walla'"--CTDs stopped, seemingly forever. I can now save with gusto & without fear. Besides installing that mod, all I did was change a few option settings relating to vsync and FSAA (with ubersampling enabled and working well I figured any more FSAA was completely superfluous.) I cannot tell you why I was getting the CTDs since I'd never been getting them before--perhaps an installed file was corrupted/mangled and the installation of the combat mod replaced it--who knows? Perhaps it was a combination of option settings that for some reason my game setup suddenly did not like--but I doubt it. Anyway, the problem is simply gone for the moment and I really expect things to stay that way since I'd never had that problem before.

The only thing I don't like about the situation is that I don't know what started the CTD's and I don't what fixed them.../>/>/> Grrrr-rrrr-rrrr. But the main point is that the unwanted behavior has now ceased.

I should mention this while I'm here--don't feel like another thread: Along with the new combat mod, the W2 displays like a *new game* with ubersampling creating an absolutely *gorgeous* display! Beautiful--I almost feel as though I'm watching a super-clear, studio-quality 35MM film instead of a D3d display! My last gpu wouldn't run ubersampling at all except as a slide show--completely unusable. *Now* I know how gorgeous this game looks on a GPU capable of doing it justice--my new 2GB HD 7850--an incredible difference over my former 1GB HD 5770. Happy Witchin'!

 

[SNaKeYGR]

Thanks for the reply.

After checking your own post and how you managed to solve your problem, i tried the windowed mode myself on my win7.
No luck for me.Was even worst then fullscreen. Crashed after 5 mins.

I will stick to the WinXP solution till i finish at least 1 playthrough. I dont have the endurance atm to try to fix it but rather prefer to enjoy my game. After that i may give a shot isntalling the combat mode and see if that helped or not.

I realy tried my best to fix my problem. This last 2 weeks i spend more time looking up every solution i could find and gave it a try, rather playing the game. But the curse of the Witcher was stronger. I had 26 hours played on steam and was still mid chapter 1. After switching to WinXP i was able to play a whole 2 hours or even less and managed to kill the Kayren and stoped rigth before the choise to talk to Roche or to Iorveth. Nothink more to say.

I will be still lurking around steam and official foras for any solution, but now i can spend more time enjoying the game.