Help me get dominions running again

[Rytek]

My laptop got shaken around a little bit this morning. In the afternoon I went to load up Dominions and got a "Nagot gickFel" out of memory" error code.

Everything else is working fine on the LAptop. I just can't get dominions to load now. I have tried deleting all files, uninstatlling and the reinstalling.When it get to the black screen it times out about 2 minutes and then gives the above error.

Any suggestions?

[vfb]

Maybe open it up, and reseat the memory and the video card?

[Alneyan]

Does anyone know how to run Dominions with the verbose argument under Windows? I cannot get any command-line argument to work under Windows at the moment... I seem to be lacking in Windows kung-fu, but I'm not sure Dominions itself knows what's going wrong here...

Does memory usage keep on increasing in the system monitor when you try running Dominions? Can you play other 3D games fine, and have you tried playing for more than a few hours? I hope that's not your problem, but you might want to run a memory test program (like Memtest86+) if all else fails, especially if you start running into problems with other games...

[Gandalf Parker]

Running Dom3 in verbose mode in windows is pretty muich the same altho it isnt as helpfull in learning it. This command will work...
dom3 -STd --port 12345 --era 1 --mapfile aran.map -g testgame

But without the more helpful linux experience I shudder at the idea of someone figuring that out error by error.

Windows does not handle redirects well. It obnoxiously sets things for you such as.. the debug log will be called log.txt and there will automatically be a stdout.txt and a stderr.txt created.

[Alneyan]

Doh! I have a fair bit of Linux experience, but that actually hindered me... (Why on Earth does the command prompt redirect output to files only, instead of displaying it in the console too?)

Anyway If you want to run the game in its 'try to tell us what's wrong' mode, you should go to Start -> Run -> Enter the path to your dominions executable in quotes, add -ddddd at the end, and attach the resulting log and sterr/stout files for public viewing. So something like: "C:\Program Files\dominions3\dom3" -ddddd (with the quotes as they appear)

I cannot promise you'll find any particularly illuminating information that way, though... still, I think it's worth a try, especially if it's just a software issue somewhere.

[Illuminated One]

On Windows you might also run dxdiag.
Either you go to Startmenu->Run and type "dxdiag" in the box that opens and execute. Or you open a console (Found in Accessoires submenu) and type "start dxdiag".
Go through the various pages of the program and run all the test to check if your video and sound card are working correctly.

(Oh, and just to eliminate the most trivial thing have you checked how much free space is left on your hard drive? Allthough windows will probably inform you if it runs out of hard drive memory)

[Gandalf Parker]

Thats usually a good suggestion but I dont think that Dom uses any of the DX abilities. Other than the fact that dxdiag might report some problems with your graphics card.

[lch]

Dom3 uses OpenGL, so no, nothing DirectX-related.

[JimMorrison]

You know, I think I had this problem once (or my roommate did), and it was a corrupted video driver causing it - reinstall of the driver fixed it instantly.

[Loren]

My primary suspect would be a memory chip that's loose and not registering.