[Lord0Blackthorn]

I just walked into Trelis for the first time, gave the potion to the Orc that wants it and got the Fire Chalice from the Paladin. Then, I walked into the first building I saw, the one with the Hashishin emissary. And right in the middle of him talking the game crashed to desktop without even an error message. This is the second crash without explanation I had since yesterday. The first was while walking along the dirt path that runs between Torn's camp and Trelis. I have had zero crashes until now. What is the cause of these kinds of crashes, and how can I go about preventing them?

Update!!! So I disabled Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering. I then noticed that the game would lag and stutter so bad that when I turn around, in several places, the game's colors and textures go nuts. They actually turned a bright black and purple before the world just disappeared into black untextured nothingness. My character also vanished; only his armor could be seen, which made him look like a ghost. Only (oddly enough) lowering Vegetation visibility to medium made this stop. So now I'm playing it with all these features lowered or disabled and I was running across the land trying to escape some hostile Orcs when I fell into that pit that leads down into the cave right outside of Trelis. The game just up and froze on me as I was making my way through said cave, and it was a hard freeze requiring me to turn the PC off physically and restart it by hand. As soon as the PC restarted I got a BSOD with the typical 0x0000008E message that basically means somthing is rotten in Denmark.

The last thing I had done outside the game, previously, was update my video card's driver, so I removed the driver and reinstalled the older one I was using before I had updated it. But I wonder, is Gothic 3 known to cause BSODs? Or was it indeed just my faulty driver, and if so... will falling back to my older driver solve this?

Thus far, this series (Gothic 1, 2, and 3) has been the buggiest, most horribly put together RPG series ever. A dubious honor I previously gave to The Witcher and Neverwinter Nights 2's Storm of Zehir expansion pack. Which is ironic, since I had previously commented that Gothic 3 seemed an almost perfect game.... before all these problems started. Never speak too soon, I suppose! It is mind boggling that this is the same developer (or developers) who made Risen, which was literally a perfect game without even a single crash, bug, BSOD, error, or even flaw that I noticed. Unfortunatly, the Gothic trilogy is plagued by all of the above and more.

[Lord0Blackthorn]

Well, I thought I would test and see if falling back to my old driver would help, but it didn't. There is just something horribly wrong with the area all around Trelis! The screen still goes black if I don't all but disable Vegetation distance, and what is the use? Even if I do that, the game still does a hard freeze while I'm just walking around outside the city, followed by a black screen, forcing me to reset the PC by hand. The only difference is no BSOD this time. If there is no way to stop the freezing, I'm going to have to deem this game unplayable and uninstall it (and pretend I never bought it). I most certainly won't be buying Arcania any time soon. But I digress...

Does anyone know the cause of this game's freezing, or how to fix it? Or is it a product of the stuttering while loading areas on the fly, and therefore not fixable? I need to know where I stand with Gothic 3; so far, I'm just confused.

[Larisa]

I remember a constant crash under the bridge between Trelis and Geldern, don't know if it was fixed with the world recompile in CP 1.70

And I also remember that fast-flying (high amounts of data)could produce crashes. But for normal walking around... maybe you have a very slow hard disk?

As for other errors, your dxdiag log might help.

[Nisarg]

Update!!! So I disabled Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering. I then noticed that the game would lag and stutter so bad that when I turn around, in several places, the game's colors and textures go nuts. They actually turned a bright black and purple before the world just disappeared into black untextured nothingness. My character also vanished; only his armor could be seen, which made him look like a ghost. Only (oddly enough) lowering Vegetation visibility to medium made this stop. So now I'm playing it with all these features lowered or disabled and I was running across the land trying to escape some hostile Orcs when I fell into that pit that leads down into the cave right outside of Trelis. The game just up and froze on me as I was making my way through said cave, and it was a hard freeze requiring me to turn the PC off physically and restart it by hand. As soon as the PC restarted I got a BSOD with the typical 0x0000008E message that basically means somthing is rotten in Denmark.

Did the game get so unplayable AFTER disabling AA and AF? That's very odd. If I were you, I'd shut down the system, pull out the cabinet, open it, take out the graphics card, look for blown up capacitors or something. From experience, I can tell you that these are the exact symptoms of damage to the graphics card. And while you're at it, get your PSU and your UPS checked too. It is possible that they had a hand in damaging your graphics card.

Thus far, this series (Gothic 1, 2, and 3) has been the buggiest, most horribly put together RPG series ever. A dubious honor I previously gave to The Witcher and Neverwinter Nights 2's Storm of Zehir expansion pack. Which is ironic, since I had previously commented that Gothic 3 seemed an almost perfect game.... before all these problems started. Never speak too soon, I suppose! It is mind boggling that this is the same developer (or developers) who made Risen, which was literally a perfect game without even a single crash, bug, BSOD, error, or even flaw that I noticed. Unfortunatly, the Gothic trilogy is plagued by all of the above and more.

Pretty strong words, without evidence to back them up. I bet if you install Risen now, you'll find it even more likely to cause your problems, because the root of your issues lies in your hardware or firmware, but not the game itself. It is more or less impossible that G3, or any game for that matter, started causing such problems after it ran flawlessly for days.

Well, I thought I would test and see if falling back to my old driver would help, but it didn't. There is just something horribly wrong with the area all around Trelis! The screen still goes black if I don't all but disable Vegetation distance, and what is the use? Even if I do that, the game still does a hard freeze while I'm just walking around outside the city, followed by a black screen, forcing me to reset the PC by hand. The only difference is no BSOD this time. If there is no way to stop the freezing, I'm going to have to deem this game unplayable and uninstall it (and pretend I never bought it)

The game, especially v1.74, isn't that messed up. The only thing even remotely approaching serious problems around Trelis is the crash under the Geldern-Trelis bridge. I can only say that you'll have to get your hardware checked. It can't be a driver problem if rolling back your drivers doesn't fix it.

[Lord0Blackthorn]

Here are all the things I did today to try and get Gothic 3 to work, step by step, and what this actually reveals about the bugs I am experiencing...

1. I opened the PC's cabinet, checked everything out, and found nothing was wrong. Everything is as dust-free and in proper working order as can be. The Hard Drive was replaced only recently, as was the Video Card and the Sound Card. All brand new components, all cool as a cucumber (nothing at all hot or overheated), and all running perfectly. Even the fan was replaced this year for a new one! So then I decided to go the extreme way. Reformat!!!

2. I did a total reformat of my Hard Drive this morning, taking two hours to put everything back software-wise, updates and all. Everything checked out and ran without any issues or incidents. No viruses, either. I have several virus checkers and removers. Ad-ware checkers and removers too. So it's all very much as clean as the day the PC was manufactured (only a year ago).
I went one step further and did a full defrag and scans of the Hard Drive. No problems were present or detected by the defrag or the Hard Drive scans.

3. I reinstalled Risen and Oblivion. Both played flawlessly. I also decided to try Neverwinter Nights 2, Mount and Blade Warband, and a few other games of this sort that I own. All of them played perfectly. No stutter, no freezing, and no crashing in any of them whatsoever. I played each game after the reformat for several hours, too, just to make sure. In the end, I decided to reinstall Gothic 3. I played it for about two hours, it froze in the forests as I was walking around outside Trelis, and I shut it down about an hour ago to post about this here. Now, I should clarify some things I did not clarify before.

I did *not* get all of the problems in Gothic 3 only after disabling AA and Aniosotropic Filtering. Rather, I had them happening before. I simply thought that disabling those options would help... but it did not. Sorry, if my wording of this was not precise, but I was typing fast last night! Also, my Hard Drive is plenty big enough and nothing is wrong with it whatsoever. In fact, I had it checked out by two Dell technicians when they delivered it to my house and installed it last month. Since then, I have played all my various games and *only* Gothic 3 gives me trouble of any kind. Now, to get more technical...

The freezing in Gothic 3 is caused by the stuttering, which is constant and a known problem with the game. The stuttering is more extreme around Trelis, it seems, because the place is at a kind of crossroads on the map where the game is always loading a lot of different terrain types. Forests, caves, rivers, deserts, mountains, cities. It's all there in the Trelis environs. I've never in the game frozen anyplace else, in fact! Just there. I have never frozen near the bridges, though. Hearing about that bug is truly news to me. Now, as for my Dxdiag... here is what it has to say pertaining to my system specs:

Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
System Model: Inspiron 530
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v.6.00PG
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E4400 @2.00 GHZ (2 CPUs)
Memory: 2046 MB RAM
Page File: 682 Used, 4346MB available
DirectX Version: 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 3600 with 512 MB Video RAM
Sound Card: SoundBlaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio
All Direct X tests passed, for both DirectDraw and Direct3D

System Info reveals all of this, proving I have enough space on the Hard Drive to run the game without any unforseen problems...

NTFS - File System
298.08 GB - Total Hard Drive Size
164.50 GB - Free Hard Drive Space
2,048.00 MB - Total Physical Memory
1.31 GB - Available Physical Memory
2.92 GB - Total Virtual Memory
2.88 GB - Available Virtual Memory
4.91 GB - Page File Space

The graphical glitches are all totally solved by turned Vegetation distance to medium. I deduce by this that there is something bugged in the game's code when it comes to rendering vegetation at high and ultra high distances. This is very evident to me, but on other systems or perhaps on other video cards, you might not notice this. Gothic 3 does tend to run different for everyone. I am only getting the freezing now, and not the graphical glitches. And that is what makes it really unplayable.

There is never an error log of any kind when Gothic 3 freezes, either! The game just locks up, the character stops moving, and if left alone the screen will go black and nothing happens. Ctrl, Alt, Del does not stop the freezing and I just have to reboot. Then, everything is normal so long as I don't play Gothic 3. If I do, everything is normal except in the areas around Trelis that I mentioned above. As noted previously. On newer ATI drivers, I get a BSOD that has the generic 0x0000008E listing but since my hard drive reformat this morning and fallback to my old drivers I no longer get any BSODs. Just the freezing itself. Now, today I played for hours in all my other games with no problems so to me that says the problem lies with Gothic 3 on my system. There is nothing else that this is pointing to, logically, after all my tests... than that. Had anything come up elsewhere, it would be a different story. I even, in desperation, tried the Ultra ini file, but that just made the freeze occur instantly. (That file was for higher requirements anyway, so I should not be too surprised by this reaction.) So, I'm back to square one again.

Now, it is easy to say my dislike for this problem, and the problems I also had getting Gothic 1 and 2 running are strong words... but try to consider that every single review of Gothic 3 was unfavorable! The previous games in the series, I could at least run and play after some configuring. Not so, with this one. I was on one website where they actually went so far as to say that the community patches for Gothic 3 were nothing but attempts to "polish a turd". These are not my words. I think the community patches are a valiant effort to try and improve the game, myself. It just seems like the real issues lie in what they cannot fix. Namely, the stuttering that seems to cause the freezing itself. Look at the following website, if you don't believe me:
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33936293
I, at least, am giving the game a reasonable chance by attempting to play it and see for myself how it is. I cannot help it if there are some problems I am finding in it. Here is a website where they even say that Risen was the only polished game that has been published in this series so far:
http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showt...p?p=1061034292
So, this problem is not just with me; nor just on my system, apparently. This fellow also seems to freeze in Gothic 3 and have BSODs:
http://forums.techguy.org/windows-7/...bit-7-4gb.html
Except that person's OS is 64 bit, and they have a very different kind of video card, wheras my OS 32 bit. Clearly, the OS is not the problem, and neither is the video card... which further points to the game as the only possible culprit. In the words of Sherlock Holms: "Once you eliminate all other possibilities, all that remains is the truth." So, here is the truth then...

We know Gothic 3 stutters. We know it freezes. We also now know this is not just a problem on my specific system, nor on just one type of specific sytem. This leads to the question I logically asked to begin with: Is there any way to stop the stutter-related freezing and therefore make the game playable for those who are having this problem?

[Nisarg]

Hmm, G3 dislikes ATI cards. I suppose it's because PB used most of the shader code from nvidia, with a few tweaks. Risen's shaders are quite optimised, and some parts have been rewritten. Maybe that's why Risen doesn't have too many problems with ATI.

My own experiences with G3 v1.6 and later have been satisfactory, but I have only tried it with a GeForce 8600GT. G3 is quite heavy because its development was never finished, and most of the models are just unoptimised. Apart from that G3 has optimisation problems in the engine itself. Granted. So, it seems that only people who purchase nvidia cards should try G3, one can never say what happens if you run the game on a non-nvidia system. For all I know, G3 might even be using the GPU to use PhysX instead of the CPU acceleration found in Risen.

I myself am a witness to G3's poor optimisation. The "Medium" settings of G3 look worse than the "Low" settings in Risen, yet Risen's "Medium" settings (approx) gives me better performance than G3's "Medium" settings.

Trying to run old games like G1 and G2 is bound to run into problems on newer systems. The recent release 256 drivers from nvidia dropped support for them in WinVista and Win7, but the latest drivers again support G1 and G2. The ZenGine engine used for them cannot utilise DX9 and above anyway so newer graphics cards do have a problem with them.

As for the links you posted:
The rage3d link is for FG, which is known for being worse than G3 in every way.
The techguy link is for G3, but the chap has an ATI card like you.
I don't get why you posted the rpgwatch link.

I think you have already tried the only solution I can give you: Set every single graphics related option to 'low' (especially texture settings) or 'off' fro shadows, etc. That will probably make your game playable enough.