wc3 ks in vista--game crashes during video

J

JonkyB

Spaceman
Hi, I've recently installed the kilrathi saga on my new vista home premium computer, and just finished playing WC1 and WC2, and am trying to start WC3. I didn't have any real problems with the first two games, but WC3 crashes before the first mission starts. I can watch all the videos of the intro and scenes before the first mission, including the briefing, but when I click to go down to the flight deck to start the mission, the video gets as far as Blair running down the stairs, and as he walks toward the camera, the video pauses, the sound stutters, and I have to close the program through task manager. I've pressed escape before this point to skip the video, and I can then play the first mission without problems, but once I get back on the carrier, during the scene with Hobbes, the same problem always occurs.

This happens even when I activate win95, 98, or xp compatibility mode. Also, apparently dxdiag in vista no longer has any option to change the sound/video acceleration level.

Any help you can give me would be much appreciated!

Some of the specs:
Dell Inspiron E1505, Core 2 CPU (T7200, 2.00 Ghz), 2 GB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 video card, Logitech Extreme 3D Pro joystick
 
It's possibly a disk error as it's only happening when it tries to read the disk for the movie.

Have you tried cleaning the disk? Is it perhaps scratched?
 
That can't be it; since I made iso images of my discs a while back, and am running the game using these images mounted through Daemon Tools. Perhaps it's an issue with that program?
 
JonkyB said:
That can't be it; since I made iso images of my discs a while back, and am running the game using these images mounted through Daemon Tools. Perhaps it's an issue with that program?
Click to expand...

Hmmm. Could be. It is still possible that the Movies.tre file is corrupted though. You might be able to find the sound acceleration settings under your advanced tabs in the audio section of the control panel.

However I don't have alot of practical experience with Vista or The Kilrathi Saga either really.

Does it do it still if you run the game off the CDs?
 
I just spent some time googling; and it turns out that Microsoft got rid of hardware audio acceleration in Vista.

I unfortunately don't have the original CDs with me--I left them in storage a while back, thinking that the isos I kept on my external hard drive would be good enough. Any other ideas to test out before finally concluding the movies.tre file is definitely corrupted?
 
Something else I've noticed after skipping through the Hobbes video: Except for the "getting in the fighter video" the other crashes seem random. Sometimes, a video will crash one time I try to watch it; when I restart and try and watch the same video again, it will play normally. This leads me to believe that it's not a general corruption in the movies.tre file. Also, I tried burning the image file to a cd, and playing from the cd, and the game doesn't play any differently except the movies pause from time to time to allow the drive to spin up. This makes me think that the movie problem isn't an issue with Daemon Tools.

Don't know if this could help at all, but WC4 DVD edition works beautifully.

Also, there seems to be a small issue with my joystick: whenever I try to pull up very slightly, the game responds by instead pitching down a bit. This doesn't happen when I try to turn, and it's definitely not a problem with my joystick--I've checked in control panel and with other games and this doesn't happen. This is a really annoying problem since it basically means I can't aim correctly and is making me play the game on rookie mode, since on that difficulty there's aim assistance.
 
JonkyB said:
I can watch all the videos of the intro and scenes before the first mission, including the briefing, but when I click to go down to the flight deck to start the mission, the video gets as far as Blair running down the stairs, and as he walks toward the camera, the video pauses, the sound stutters, and I have to close the program through task manager.
Click to expand...

I'd disable the sound to see if your laptop sound card could be responsible. Start the game with WC3W -NO_SOUND It's probably also worth disabling double buffering and interlacing and seeing if that has any effect. Add the -D and -NO_INTERLACE switches to WC3W for those.

JonkyB said:
Also, there seems to be a small issue with my joystick: whenever I try to pull up very slightly, the game responds by instead pitching down a bit. This doesn't happen when I try to turn, and it's definitely not a problem with my joystick--I've checked in control panel and with other games and this doesn't happen. This is a really annoying problem since it basically means I can't aim correctly and is making me play the game on rookie mode, since on that difficulty there's aim assistance.
Click to expand...

I haven't heard of that before. What kind of joystick is it?
 
Hello, Sorry for the long delay. I've now tried all the different command line switches in different combinations. I've also changed vista settings to get rid of all the fancy visual themes before running the game. The results: definitely my sound card is not to blame--the no sound switch has no effect on the video crash problem. At one point I alt-tabbed out of the game in the middle of a video, when i came back to it, the videos wouldn't play, though the sound would. In this condition, the cutscenes never seemed to crash, as judged by the fact that the sound went all the way through each scene as it should have. Therefore, it's definitely a video problem. Adding the -d switch seems to have no effect, with or without any of the other switches. the no interlace switch has no effect on the video crashing problem, but it does totally ruin the videos themselves by messing up the colors in practically every pixel, most of which are turned some shade of gray. Using the different switches in combination doesn't change anything. However, disabling the vista themes seems to have lowered the frequency of the video crashes--it only crashes when blair walks toward his fighter about 50% of the time now. And magically the joystick problem is gone (it's a logitech extreme 3d pro by the way).
 
JonkyB said:
I just spent some time googling; and it turns out that Microsoft got rid of hardware audio acceleration in Vista.

I unfortunately don't have the original CDs with me--I left them in storage a while back, thinking that the isos I kept on my external hard drive would be good enough. Any other ideas to test out before finally concluding the movies.tre file is definitely corrupted?
Click to expand...

The md5 checksum of movies.tre is:
185AE88030B809DD99BE5D2BCC3876C1

Download something like fastsum, and if it generates the same checksum, your copy of the file is identical to mine, and the problem lies elsewhere.
 
Yup, that's exactly the same checksum of movies.tre I get. Must be somewhere else. Maybe I could get the checksum of other important files and post them here to compare to yours? I don't know that much about which files are the important ones, so maybe you can suggest some?

It seems to me the issue is with how the game calls up the video files--I notice that the video tends to crash at points in the cutscenes where the camera angle is just about to change, maybe it's having trouble accessing the movies files?
 
JonkyB said:
It seems to me the issue is with how the game calls up the video files--I notice that the video tends to crash at points in the cutscenes where the camera angle is just about to change, maybe it's having trouble accessing the movies files?
Click to expand...

Are you sure it's actually accessing different movie files? Most of the situations where the camera angles change and scenes transition are still the same file.
 
yes, that's what I thought as well, but I recently tried the game out on a friend's computer running xp, and the game works perfectly--therefore the files aren't corrupted. I noticed while I was playing on the xp machine that the video undergoes a slight flicker at the points when it tends to crash on my computer. Also, a lot of the time the video crashes right before or after a scene that would be different depending on what decision you've made...i.e. you've chosen a hellcat for the mission, so the game needs to call up the shot of the hellcat standing there as opposed to a different fighter. Or you've just chosen one guy as your wingman, so the game needs to call up the particular scene of Blair choosing that person. Or you just finished a mission, and Rachel tells you something different depending on how you did.

So overall, it seems to me that these different scenes must be in different files, and that would account for most of the crashes, though not all of them.
 
So if the disc is fine, I'd guess it is some kind of conflict. You could mount the disc file in some way to eliminate your CD drive as a possibility, but it seems like some combination of background programs and drivers is causing things to hiccup.
 
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