Avernum 5 crashing

[Bruno]

Is anyone else having this problem? I am in Shanker's Tower; I've beat-up the Ogre and gotten the crystals to repair Shanker's machine, but when I cast Dispell Barrier, or use a Piercing Crystal to get past the barriers in the room, the game crashes and kicks me back out to the desktop. Did I forget to do something? Have I missed something, or is this a bug?

Any ideas?

I am playing this on my new Macbook by the way, with Snow Leopard, etc.

[Bruno]

Okay after dinking around with this thing and experimenting with the editor, going back to previous saved games, etc. I think I've got this thing at least partially figured out. Apparently, you can't take Gladwell's Geas before finishing with Shanker without crashing the game at this point. I still think it's a bit of a bug, but at least that much is figured out.

What a thrill! now I get to go back and do half this game over again!

[Aoslare]

Are you sure? Gladwell's geas is just a single SDF, and I am skeptical that that would lead to a crash... especially one that no one would encounter for the first 3 years of the game's release. I suspect something else is going on, perhaps involving file corruption.

[Bruno]

After backtrackng and playing up to meeting Shanker again, etc. I ran into the same problem. So I did some more dinking around with it, and seem to have narrowed it down to this; now it seems that talking to Cienna about Shanker's indiscretions on the Surface triggers it. (I still think it's a bug, but I'm no computer whiz by any stretch of the imagination.)

Thanks for your input by the way, and I appreciate any ideas anyone might have.

[Aoslare]

The dialogue with Cienna about Shanker can set SDFs 74,17 and 74,18. The only place these are ever checked that I can find is when you are talking to Shanker, and they only change which dialogue options are available. So that's not it. It's probably file corruption. Redownload the game, copy your saved game, and see if the same thing happens on the new copy.

[Bruno]

Okay, I did what you suggested, trashed the game (again, including emptying the trash, which included game files after copying them) redownloaded the game, copied the saved game files back over, etc.

 

Same problem, but I did find something else interesting; talking to Cienna about anything, not necessarily Shanker, seems to trigger it.

 

Oh, I keep forgetting to clarify, that this is before taking Gladwell's Geas, this time through, so the Geas has nothing to do with it. Apparently. I dunno.

 

Okay, let me another correction, after dinking with this a little more; it seems to be the pylon, not Cienna. If/when after talking with Shanker or whatever, I take the boat back down to the docks and then overland to the Portal, talk to Cienna, walk back to the boat, etc. everything seems to work fine. If I use the pylon, and then come back, whether or not I talk to anybody, the thing crashes as before.