Dominions II: Technical/Hardware Issues

Marignon Zealot · #1 March 24th, 2004, 08:44 PM

A great bug - somewhere in a mid-late game, especially on a large map with plenty of units and races, game drops to Windows without any message. This happens somewhere at the end of next turn generation. reloading the latest save doesn't help - the same drops at the same moments.

The only solution i have - to make back-up copies of save games and replace the latest one with some made several turns before.Only in this case it is possible to evade the drop.

Win XP; Full Version; GeForce4400Ti 64mb

[ March 24, 2004, 19:18: Message edited by: Marignon Zealot ]

Johan K · #2 March 24th, 2004, 10:54 PM

Zealot, you forgot to mention if you have patched Dominions to 2.08 yet. If you haven't done so then do so. Many crashing bugs have been fixed since the game was released.

Aikamun · #3 April 2nd, 2004, 03:20 PM

Don't know if it was addressed by patch 2.08, but people are suffering through very low fps with Radeon cards. See: www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=74;t=001222

Thanks,
Aikamun

Zapmeister · #4 April 7th, 2004, 07:26 AM

I can't give a lot of detail, but I have noticed that in sessions (I reboot frequently) where I check my network games, and use other applications (NetScape 6.2, ICQ is about all) Windows 98 very frequently gets into a low-memory situation where it can't launch anything. That's with nothing running but the operating system.

I'm pretty sure this only occurs when I've been using Dominions on the net. I suspect that, in certain situations, Dominions is leaking memory under Windows 98.

Ripcord O'Reilly · #5 April 11th, 2004, 06:43 PM

From a post at Quarter to Three:

"Dom2 is a huge video hog, which is inexplicable considering the low quality of the graphics. Try hitting "W" at the start of the battle--that removes the 3D world background, replacing it with a wireframe view. That works for most people (the units are sprites)."

Pirateiam · #6 April 23rd, 2004, 02:29 AM

I am having proplems with game freezing at the map view when I am panning the view around. This is a Hard lock up. I seems to happen when I get further into games (turn 40+) possible memory leak? Once it happens it seems to happen almost every other turn after reboot. Here are my specs:

CPU - AMD Athlon XP 2000+
256 MB Ram
VIA/S3 onboard graphics 32 MB
Windows 98SE
Full Game Version 2.11

[ April 23, 2004, 02:19: Message edited by: Pirateiam ]

Psientist · #7 April 25th, 2004, 12:05 AM

Some startup options for Dominions2 require parameters to be set while starting up from the command line. You can do this from Terminal, but I've provided an Applescript that can do this for you automatically without using the terminal at all.

1. Open Script Editor.
2. Paste the following script:

doshell script "cd /Users/Username/PathToDominions/Dominions2;dominions2.app/Contents/MacOS/dominions2 --badmouse"

3. Save as a run-only application, naming it whatever you want - I named my "Dominions 2 Startup".

You can then alias, or double click that applescript application to boot up Dominions 2 for you with whatever flags you wanted to set.

Some important points:
- The above example sets the "badmouse" flag; sometimes, when you play using the reduced window mode, the mouse coordinates are messed up, and this parameter will fix that. There are other options (I believe the "-w" mode will force the game to be played as a window instead of fullscreen).
- Be sure to replace the "Username/PathToDominions/" part of the script with YOUR login userid, and the path to wherever you keep the Dominions 2 application.

Good luck.