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Windows Vista/7 64-bit This game is a mess

Discussion in 'Bugs' started by crimson, May 9, 2014.

  1. crimson

    crimson Member

    I hope devs see this because honestly I'm fed up with Dungeons of Dredmor.

    I bought the game a couple of years ago and NEVER finished it. I clocked over 200 hours already.

    Wanna know why I didn't finish yet? The game is a mess.

    1) It randomly crashes
    2) It crashes a lot more often if you use the gas canister skill (which I do)
    3) The game is cheap (random mob can one-hit kill you if you're unlucky)

    For the record I'm playing Rogue difficulty with the expansion. Yesterday I lost 5 hours of progress because the autosave failed and the game crashed. Today I made it back to level 15 and the game crashed AGAIN. I've rarely came across a game with so many crashes. Each time the autosave feature starts it feels like the game will crash.

    I love the game (obviously) but it's broken. I've only been using one mod, but the crashes occur even without it. I'm playing in windowed mode and full screen seemed even worse. It sucks.
     
    Bohandas likes this.
  2. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    I've had a few problems -- it's certainly not perfect, but my biggest problems were solved, and it is pretty stable for me. I have had the rare crash, and have lost my saves, but it's become a lot better for me.

    1. First of all using several mods that add too many new items can make the game unstable, plus some mods may just be broken. If you are in doubt, test how playing with a vanilla (no mod) game works for you.
    2. Second, disabling the steam cloud can help with you losing your saved games. The steam cloud, for me, was a huge headache, and could corrupt, overwrite, and otherwise mess with my save directory. Since disabling it, I've never lost a save game.
    3. Which DLCs do you have installed. The free one (You have to Name the Expansion Pack) does not install automatically -- you have to choose to install it. I've heard of problems where installing a different DLC but not the free one could cause stability issues.
    4. You should either check your game cache, or reinstall the game (or just reinstall it from scratech). For a variety of reasons, files can become corrupt, and reinstallation may solve that problem if this is the case.
     
    JimJam707 likes this.
  3. ElJefe

    ElJefe Member

    i was about to post about gas canisters.. Darnit. yes on the lava level it has crashed twice now. I have a huge canister too. its like 50% of the build. going for +9 total alchemy in a level or two. sighs. just cleared a zoo and crashed at last 5 guys. sigh.
     
  4. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    My game just deleted my save because it crashed when I hit "save and quit". At the rate at which the dungeon suddenly collapses I'm never going to beat Dredmor again.
     
    Exile and Bohandas like this.
  5. ElJefe

    ElJefe Member

    ewww. darn.
     
  6. Bohandas

    Bohandas Member

    Even without it the game will still constantly delete or corrupt saves. Just not quite as often.

    On the upside, with steam cloud turned off you can at least restore jacked up saves from manually made backup copies of save files (whereas with steam cloud on these will be instantly and automatically deleted). Remember to backup often.
     
    Last edited: May 27, 2014
  7. Loerwyn

    Loerwyn Member

    Can't be that bad if you've got 200hrs in it.

    We know it's buggy, we know it's a bit broken, we know it's unreliable. Disabling Steam Cloud, running Windowed and even disabling the Steam overlay (and running with that -opengl run option IIRC) tends to help keep it going okay from my own experience.
     
    venserpw and Haldurson like this.
  8. Bohandas

    Bohandas Member

    And also back up your saves! This is critical!

    (So critical that it makes the one save per character system built into the game look kind of stupid. I get that its a common part of the genre, but it doesn't work well with a scatterbrained game that constantly accidentally deletes things)
     
  9. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    As I've said, I've NEVER lost a save game once I had the steam cloud disabled. Never.
     
    Arron Syaoran and JimJam707 like this.
  10. Bohandas

    Bohandas Member

    But I have
     
  11. Loerwyn

    Loerwyn Member

    And this is what matters.

    But we also need to be realistic. It's not likely that this will be fixed in the near future. The GLG team is just too busy with Clockwork Empires at the minute, and unless any massive security flaws or suchlike are discovered, we can't expect any fixes to be any closer than the horizon. The OP has issues, and genuine ones, but I'm wondering why it's taken over 200hrs of gameplay for such issues to finally cause outrage (200hrs, by any stretch, is a great run with a game - I've managed that with two or three titles at best, I reckon). That's not to say said issues aren't, well, issues, but we need to step back and look here.

    If every save is being corrupted, then there is a bigger issue at play here. We do seem to have a consistent stream of 'My Save Is X' topics, but they're not frequent, so either people aren't reporting the issue or it's happening to a small group of players. This suggests it's possible to avoid it somehow.
    If one in every few saves is being corrupted, then we have a similar but less-pressing issue, though it's understandable how frustrating it can be, especially towards the later end of the dungeon. But we need to look, again, at ways to avoid it.
    If it's a rare thing, we may just have to take it as a known risk.

    But what we can do is look at what we - as players - can do to minimise the effect of this, or to create some sort of recovery plan. I propose that these steps should be taken or observed and we should see if it minimises the rate of a save failure.
    1. If on Steam, verify the files. This should always be the first step.
    2. Try running windowed and with the Steam overlay disabled. This itself can make things more reliable.
    3. Try running outside of Steam (Dredmor runs without it).
    4. If access to a DRM-free version is available (e.g. Humble Store), then try using that.
    5. Don't use the same character name each run.
    6. Backup saves during/after each session.
    7. If possible, don't use any mods like items, skills, etc., as it's possible they don't write into saves properly for some reason. But I can't, generally, see a mod being an issue in this respect.

    I put #5 in bold because it's easily overlooked, and I think it's an important step to take. It seems to me that corruption would be more likely from repeated over-writing of a file (or if the writing goes wrong and maintains some information from the previous version), rather than from a fault inherent in the save system.
     
    SkyMuffin likes this.
  12. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    Except for 6, which is tedious, none of this helps. 5 is redundant and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how steam works. Dungeons of Dredmor is never DRM'd, even on Steam. Steam the service offers developers Steamworks which, among other things, lets developers put DRM on their games. Steam doesn't magically DRM games all on its own.
     
    Exile likes this.
  13. Loerwyn

    Loerwyn Member

    Steam can be required for a game to launch, irrespective of whether they use Steamworks. There are titles like Dredmor and Isaac which can run independently of Steam (though Steam is obviously needed to download and update the files), but as I just said - Dredmor is one. I don't want to get into the "Is Steam DRM?" argument, because I think there's merits to both sides of the discussion.

    And no, #5 is not redundant at all, and applies to *all* versions of the game from *all* platforms. It is about how the game's save system works, it has nothing at all to do with Steam. I never stated it does, so I have no idea where you drew that conclusion from.
     
  14. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    That was a typo. I meant #4

    I know #5 doesn't have anything to do with it because I never re-use character names. I just get frustrated with people calling Steam DRM. Steam is a distribution system. It has nothing whatsoever to do with DRM.
     
    Exile likes this.
  15. Loerwyn

    Loerwyn Member

    Saying "Try running a version that does not require a client to download and install" is a bit of a mouthful.
     
  16. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    That's not true either. The steam version will work if you download it off some pirate website and just run it. This is how I ran dredmor on linux before steam for linux existed (I "pirated' it from one of my windows installations).

    It's no different to getting say, Alpha Centauri, off of Gog.com, which advertises itself as "DRM-free"
     
    Exile likes this.
  17. Loerwyn

    Loerwyn Member

    Okay then...
     
  18. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    My statement that I've never lost a save game once I disabled the steam cloud was meant to reflect the fact that maybe there was something else going on with Bohandas than a bug in the code. If files are becoming corrupted frequently for him, but not for me, it may be something else, like some other software that he has running in the background, or a hardware issue.
     
  19. SkyMuffin

    SkyMuffin Member

    I love this game, but the crashing is a bit of a pain. It's been much more stable after many patches-- at least on vanilla. But I do understand that my computer isn't anyone else's. Most of my problems have been with playing the game when I have mods going, and Steam Cloud, of course. At this point I just manually copy/paste the folders over to back them up haha.

    One or two more patches to get it stable would be so great.
     
  20. Arron Syaoran

    Arron Syaoran Member

    If I play purely vanilla, my game saves almost never crash at all. Only very few stairs crashes from over a year ago and maybe 1 or 2 Monster Zoo Crashes and that's it. If I use mods however, especially more than 10 or so mods, my game save crash rate increases somewhat. I always disable steam cloud, but I tend to reuse names often. Out of 20 modded runs with more than 6 mods installed, I get about 11 Deaths(one or 2 of those deaths might be a win instead), 5 Suicides and 4 Crashes.