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Strange loading bug with one particular character


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I apologise if this is discussed elsewhere, but I'm not even sure what I should be searching for, let alone how to find an answer!

I mentioned elsewhere that when I load up my character the screen goes nuts (lots of flickering black lines like it's losing vsync; Fraps, if I have it running, goes off the scale) unless I tab out.  Task Manager shows the server process running at 100% for a minute or so, which indicates something is amiss.  Once it does finally load, something like 30-50% of the time the game is unresponsive: menus, music, popups work but my character won't move and all the others are stationary except for their idle animations.

The weird thing is that this doesn't happen with my other characters.  Character selection to running game is 5-10 seconds with no strange faffing about.

Any ideas what might be causing it?  I have absolutely no idea where to start, unfortunately.

I run Sacred 2 Gold on Windows 10, I've just run a Steam verify, installed the Community Patch and my mostly-textures mod, but ISTR I get the same thing even with the non-patch stuff unloaded so I don't think it's a mod doing it.

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The black lines thing started with CM 1.60.  Something codewise was optimized but it had that side effect.

The frozen characters thing I've been experiencing for years, ever since I first started editing scripts.  Just hit the quick save key and force close the game in task manager.

AFAIK those two things aren't related.  The only other thing I can posit is a corrupted save file, if it really is exclusive to one character.

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The other characters are pre CM1.60 saves which leaves me wondering if it's a scripting bug: I did mention that the Hunting Fever questline seems to be corrupted on my new main (and also that scripting is hairy enough to be effectively unfixable) so I wonder if that may be related.  Fortunately it's not a dealbreaker (yet), it's just annoying when I'm experimenting with this and that to have such slow loading times.

The black lines only appear with the apparently bugged character though, they don't show up with the others.

I didn't realise the frozen characters thing was a known problem and is probably unrelated.  I think the first time it happened was when I accidentally had two instances of Sacred 2 running and I concluded that it may be the protocol stream with the server getting out of sync.  But since it seems to happen anyway that might be a red herring.

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10 hours ago, Androdion said:

I've had that flickering on loading happen before, also post-1.60. It's usually indication of some kind of corruption within the savegame. Try changing difficulty level and loading the save again to see if it does the same, usually it appears/disappears with that but it's not a sure fact.

Well that's a curious thing: going to silver (I've been playing on bronze because I suck at combat...) made it load up straight away; going back to bronze saw the lines come back, so it's something weird with the save data.  I'd hope that switching away and back again might miraculously clear it, but sadly not...

Anyway, at least I have a means of quick-loading for when I'm testing stuff.  I dare say I may also get better equipment on silver as I seem to be having either a protracted run of bad luck or unrealistic expectations of what I might expect to find, even with lots of perception and bargaining-boosting items.

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Yep, that's exactly the same behaviour I experienced.

5 hours ago, vometia said:

I dare say I may also get better equipment on silver

You do realize that gear has a scaling growth with each difficulty level, so the higher you are on the difficulty ladder the better the gear will always be. More sockets, more modifiers (and better percentuals), better stats. Plus some gear only drops after you reach a certain difficulty level as well, so you'll definitely get better drops in Silver than in Bronze. And in Gold than in Silver, and so on.

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6 hours ago, Androdion said:

You do realize that gear has a scaling growth with each difficulty level, so the higher you are on the difficulty ladder the better the gear will always be. More sockets, more modifiers (and better percentuals), better stats. Plus some gear only drops after you reach a certain difficulty level as well, so you'll definitely get better drops in Silver than in Bronze. And in Gold than in Silver, and so on.

Yeah.  One of the hazards of only ever being good enough to play on easy. :lol:  That said, I may see how I get on with silver as a lot of my difficulty with difficulty levels tends to be due to misadventure.  A combination of a bit more caution and cluefulness may stand me in good stead.  Okay, "good" is optimistic, but better.  Less worse.

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I'd say that having your toon geared up as you enter a new difficulty level is also very important. Sure, evil things stack up the higher you climb, but in that respect so do the drops so you get to die faster but kill faster as well.

Plan your toon ahead and start Bronze for the first few levels until you get your game going and your gear interesting. After that climb to Silver and take your time with the campaign. You'll notice how Gold is much easier than what you were anticipating. From Platinum onwards, it gets tougher yeah.

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I'm quite a way through now, having got to the dryads' island; done pretty much all of the elf and human side-quests, maybe around half of the orc, swamp and desert ones and the main difficulty is the hydra critter on Christmas island: second time he seemed less lethal and in fact I battled him, the mega-harpie thing and a bunch of the usual suspects at the same time and the big problem is that I simply couldn't muster up enough damage to counter his self-healing.

My build is very loosely based on the "Saturday Shopper" someone posted which seemed a good fit as I like exploring and changing outfits, and I have way too many points invested in bargaining and perception, as mentioned.  Beyond that, my build is leaning somewhat towards offence rather than defence but I'm wasting far too many precious slots on "find valuables"!  Well that was a while ago, I've moved on and it's mostly +1 all skills now.  I suspect my offensive skills are hamstrung because of my preference for using a laser blaster: most people seem to recommend swords and I have a multitude of them stashed away in my almost-overflowing chest.  Strange, I used to almost exclusively play sword-based mêlée but I seldom do these days.

So yeah, I've probably just outlined why I'm kinda rubbish. :lol:  And does anybody use pole arms?  There're an awful lot of high-spec examples to be found but I get the impression other players don't give them much love.

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Nothing wrong with playing with an energy gun, and the Ice Hydra is always a tough foe to counter. Since you can socket enough +All Skills maybe you should focus on having one hard point where no modifications are needed and spend more on CA related skills for mods.

If you want you can post a pic of your skill set and I can give you some advices.

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I should really get on and seek your advice!  My talents certainly do not lie in finding a good build nor much aptitude tactically, a combination which can cause both frustration as well as not-very-engaging gameplay.

As an idea of how kinda rubbish I am I've had to set space to a big pause button I can't miss because I keep "losing" the cursor, and have to hunt around for it; even when I can see it I find I often "miss" and end up running towards a target instead of firing at them.  At least it's not as costly as it is in the Original Sins where a fidgety enemy avatar dodging out the way can cause you to miss a vital shot!

I think my priorities are also a bit off base because I like finding new stuff even if it isn't useful!  e.g. I went through a phase of liking the "Ancient" set and spent way too long searching for examples instead of using whatever was appropriate; I mean it's not as if the colours even clash any longer with the appropriate parts of Wardust installed (though the icons do: I've been slowly going through and fixing the ones that annoy me too much).  Of course as soon as I built up a full set I decided I don't like it any more.  And yeah, I know I can change the visual appearance to whatever I want, which is what I've done with the absurd-looking Sophia boots which I'm still using because I've yet to find any other footwear with two slots of any kind let alone a silver and gold one, though I have wondered if I'm focussing too much on items that can take enchantments at the cost of ignoring what stats they may offer even if they have no slots.  Anyway, I changed them to the Angel Dust type though I'm not sure that's an improvement since I, er, well, "improved" them.

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