Bit Blot Forum
Aquaria => Support => Topic started by: Utopianh on September 06, 2008, 07:13:07 am
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I purchased/downloaded and full played this game a few weeks after release; it worked fine using my original radeon drivers, then eventually switched over to Omega to make the game play better on my laptop (and it did). However recently I went back to replay the game for a fix and now I'm finding the game completely unplayable; it loads the initial loading bar slowly, then it halts and slowly tries to load the logo in and eventually crashes.
I've changed nothing from a hardware perspective, and my drivers have been updated but I'm still using omega and updated them tonight (and reinstalled the game as well, although I overwrote the original folder instead of installing it fresh). I can post screenshots of what's happening if it would help with diagnosing the problem. Any ideas on what I can do to figure out the problem and/or fix it would be highly appreciated as this is a personal favourite game of mine and I'd like to be able to replay it.
Thanks.
Some system Specs:
Platform: Windows XP SP2
Video Card: ATI Mobility Radeon X300
Monitor: 1440x900 60 Hz Flat Panel (Laptop)
Processor Speed: 1.86 Ghz Pentium
RAM: 2.0 GB 782 Mhz
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(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/utopianh/aquarialoading2.jpg)
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/utopianh/aquarialoading.jpg)
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Never heard or seen of this issue before. Have you considered just re-installing the game from scratch? If that doesn't solve your problem, then I would definitely say you have something going on in your operating system now that is at fault. Graphics card drivers, or changes in directx (not sure if the game even implements directx or not but if it does then it's a possibility, perhaps audio drivers even perhaps? I would just start from square one and try uninstalling, re-installing and running the aquaria configuration utility and make sure everything is set properly for your settings/machine and try running it again.
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I already did a full reinstall, and I'm considering changing back to ati drivers instead of omega (but being that other people here use omega I doubt it's that). I hadn't thought it might be audio drivers, I'll check that out (I didn't think they could cause this kind of graphical issue).
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Yeah, audio drivers could cause an issue too. Good Luck! I hope you find the problem and get it resolved. What a bummer, no Naija? :(
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Updated and overhauled video and sound drivers; completely reinstalled again. Still having the same issues so I'm going to try installing it on my fiance's computer and seeing how it works over there.
Makes me kind of annoyed though that I can't play it on my laptop anymore :/
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I have a similar problem.
The game does not crash, but runs at a speed of about 0.5 - 1 FPS. The intro screen has the same "Filming a 60hz TV" slow motion line scan effect. It takes my trusty laptop about a minute to get through the logo animation and do the fade to open the main menue. There the sluggishness persists. The Click animation to start a new game takes 20 seconds to run.
The games does load, but after 10 minutes of waiting the frame-by-frame animation i finally terminated the game (I could see the little mermaid moving her feet, though)
I already put all graphic options to as low as possible, disabled framebuffer effects and mipmaps, tried running it in Window but no prevail. It's just far far far to slow.
I am surprised to see this 2D-Styled game kill my Laptop, while I can play a lot 3D titles smoothly...
What kind of System do I need to run this game smoothly? Does it use a lot Pixel Shader 2.0 effects? (Because, then I understand that the performance is so bad on my Laptop)
My Stats:
Centrino 1 Mobile Pentium 1,86ghz
ATI Radeon X300
1GB Ram
Windows XP, SP3
DX9c
Omega 3.8.422 Drivers
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Is this with the demo or with 1.1.1?
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Oh, sorry. It happens with the demo.
The game looked so fluid and cute in the Video on moddb.com - I just found it yesterday and wanted to try it because it reminded me of ECCO the Dolphin on SEGA Genesis.
It's the Demo that was hosted on Mirror 1, linked from the Aquaria home page (AquariaDemo.2007.12.07.exe)
Thanks,
- akeean
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Yeah, the changes in 1.1.1 might fix that issue... or it might be a strange driver issue.
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In essence that means: "Buy the game to see if you can play it"?
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In essence that means: "Buy the game to see if you can play it"?
What I mean is it might be fixed in the current code base.
You can try buying the game now if you want, or you can wait until we release a new demo version.
Either way, if something doesn't work, I'm going to do my best to fix it. :)
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Thank you!
Ill keep checking back for a new demo. (I guess I can't return the full version if it is buggy for me as well?)
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Just checked for new Omega drivers, but it seems the Version I have (4.8.422 / Cataclyst 7.1, it was just displayed wrong in the System control) was the last driver they made at omegadrivers.net (it seems they are not updating their site/drivers anymore, it seems current version of ATI Cataclyst is 8.1)
I am going to try and install the new 8.1 Cataclyst... let's see if that works helps
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utopianh, akeean, and myself look like we have the same problem. and i found 2 things that are similar to all 3 of us, first of all we're on laptops, and second, we all have ati graphic cards. i'm guessing it might be ati driver/hardware issues. if that's the case, i just bought the game and may never be able to play it, i only own a laptop.
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I haven't checked up on this in a while; it looks like there's a new patch out, but as there doesn't seem to be any major coding changes in the new release relating to ATI graphics cards and laptop drivers specifically I'm not sure it will address the issue. I'll get around to dealing with getting the new patched release soon and test it though. Originally though the game was completely playable and I have no idea what caused these issues, but I'm glad to see I'm not the only person who's seen this issue, so there's a chance it might get addressed eventually.
Key things are definetely ATI mobility drivers/cards in some way shape or form though; I really wish omega drivers where still updating, and I'm wondering if anyone had luck with the newest catalyst drivers?
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Just got the game from steam, and i have the exact same issue. Playing on a laptop, ati graphics card with omega driver. Played the Demo without any problem, but the time between the demo and now, i got the omega driver. Would be lovely with a patch to address this problem.
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Any clue what's causing it? Like are there any theories as to what exactly the new drivers don't like?
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I am no expert what so ever, but its clearly something with the graphic drivers. It's at a constant 1FPS as soon as the bit-blop screen comes up, and it's not like its dipping from high to low framerte, its just a constant lag.
Maybe i should add that i got it from steam...
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I played the demo of Aquaria one year ago. Everything was working fine. Then I finally purchased, installed and tried to execute the game yesterday. But I got an error message when the two bars are getting blue at the start. The program terminated without even getting to the menu screen or the company logo. The demo which was still installed, did also did crash the same way.
I use a desktop machine with WinXP (32bit), a Radeon X1950 graphic card and a Creative X-Fi sound card.
Since the demo worked before I came to the conclusion that newer drivers were causing the problems. After reading this very thread I decided to try the graphic drivers first.
I did first uninstall my ATI drivers (Catalyst 9.8 ) and installed after the reboot from the ATI/AMD Support site (http://support.amd.com/de/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx) some random old ATI graphic drivers (Catalyst 8.12 ).
As a result the game now runs well. (Yes I know that it doesn't make sense to use an outdated graphic driver but anybody who experience the same problem might find this usefull)
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Played around with making game profiles and changing different variables, but nothing seems to help. The only thing I've noticed is that when I set it to the lowest resolution the bit blot screen runs smooth, but when the main menu shows up, its back to 1 FPS.
Sad that it won't be able to play the game until I get a new computer, but I'm glad i could support what I think is the right way for gaming to go. Keep it up and hopefully future releases will be more compatible :D
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Same here.
Laptop
ATI card
Running catalyst 10.3
Gonna mess around, see what i find.
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I think i found the problem,
Trying to solve it now...
Edit:
I am sure i found the problem and it's a *itch to solve
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I found out aquaria was using GDI32.swapbuffers, for those who don't know what that means, it means that your rendering in software mode and not with your video card.
The tool "OpenGL Extensions Viewer 3.0" confirmed this, my opengl driver was version 1.1 generic microsoft driver.
After testing tons of drivers and fixing the "unsigned driver" error message, i still found no opengl driver to be installed.
However the driver was in the system folder, it was called "atioglxx.dll", after that i went to find out how windows selects your opengl driver.
Which lead me to a registery key which was pointing to atioglx2.dll which doesn't exist, so i changed it voila opengl version 3.2
Good news:
I can run other openGL games yah!
Bad news:
Aquaira doesn't care and still won't run using hardware
Back to the drawing board
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There all fixed only took me all day..
I forced the SDL library to use wgl_swap_buffers instead of GDI.SwapBuffers
Now i was going to look where SDL decides which to use but suddenly it already selects wgl_swap_buffers and the game runs fine.
To sum it all up:
ATI selects wrong openGL driver fixed by:
Start regedit
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\OpenGLDrivers\ati2dvag
Change DLL value from "atioglx2.dll" to "atioglxx.dll"
After that SDL (simple directmedia layer) messes up.
This fixed itsself for me so i don't really know what to do with it.
So much work for a demo :'(
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Sadly, I was never able to find a solution for this problem, although thankfully since, I've had to replace my laptop and the game has been running fine on my ATI Radeon HD 4890/AMD P2 X4 955 build.
I finally bothered to come back to it recently to give the Sacrafice mod a play through, and saw my old problem post had been bumped heh.
I hope you are able to track down this particular issue, and it's troubling that more people have encountered it because it was entirely inexplicable.
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So my story is that I bought this game as part of the Humble Indie Bundle. I cannot get it to work at all, and I'm getting similar problems that are described above. I'm actually new to PC. Who knew that PC games are so hard to get to run! I'm a QA tester at work, so I'm going to try my hardest to get it to work. If anyone needs logs, etc. just let me know.
I just bought a Dell xps 9000, with a Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. I'm running windows 7, x64. I just assumed these hoss graphics cards would work wonders, but I guess it's mostly that ATI doesn't support older games well with newer drivers? (I can only get 2 games out of the humble bundle to run *sadface* )
I'm getting an atioglxx issue too. I'm going to try the above method involving changing the dll and see what happens. :P
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Hmm. I tried Scale's approach. When I went to the OpenGLDrivers, I didn't even have the ati2dvag.
When I play the game in windowed mode, when the logo appears, I get the 1fps issue. After the logo, a scene appears of a valley with a dragon to the right (while still at 1fps). The scene fades to white and then the game crashes.
The windows crash report says that the fault module name is OPENGL32.dll
I'll try reinstalling and maybe installing the newest Opengl separately.
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Hmm, reinstalling did not help. If I alt-tab away, the game actually proceeds to the main menu. (Still at 1fps). I usually have to click to close the window though since it is unplayable. The windows report appears and notifies that the fault module name is now atioglxx.dll_unloaded
This ati problem is the same issue I'm having with Gish, Aquaria, and Penumbra (all part of the humble pack).
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Ok I seemed to fixed all these problems by finally getting ATI catalyst control center 10.4 to take. It took me 2-3 times of trying to get it installed. Once I did, the game works as suppose to!
Basically make sure you uninstall previous drivers, do a driver sweep of ati drivers, then reboot and install the newest drivers... hopefully no further problems :P
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So I'm going to throw a wrench in this awesome thread where all of you with this issue have ATI drivers on laptops!
Just grabbed the Humble Bundle, fired it up on my Windows 7 x64 desktop with a 9800GT (1G) nVidia video card! Same issue.
I'm going to investigate some more after work, I'll let you know if I find anything. It does seem like it's using software rendering...
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It does seem like it's using software rendering...
Wtf, wow. :)
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I was looking for a solution to the OpenGL problem, and I really can't find any sort of good legacy support for OpenGL... it's like it just didn't exist under Windows Vista! I'm running an ATI Radeon Mobility x1400, and it really should be able to run this. Sadness!
Anyway, Nvidia guy, you might be in more luck than the rest of us. Nvidia seems to have much better support for OpenGL drivers. Here's their page for OGL drivers, check that out and see if it helps.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_driver.html
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Hey, I just got this from the humble indie bundle.
I tried playing full screen on my mac, and it works just fine.
However, I tried playing full screen on my pc and the screen flickers, as if it is in incompatible refresh rates. Trying to change my refresh rates did not solve the problem. However the game displays just fine in windowed mode, however I prefer to play in full screen mode.
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So I figured out my OpenGL issue, but now I have a new host of problems. I think it has a lot to do with Windows 7 and Microsoft's aversion to OpenGL (and who can blame them... they do own the competing rendering library) since I was able to install Dell's (outdated) Vista drivers (btw, I'm running a Dell E1705 with a Mobility Radeon X1400). It fixed all of my OpenGl issues, Aquaria ran at a good framerate (with stipulations, more on that), but Prey and Doom 3 both ran perfectly well earlier today for the first time since I've had Windows 7.
As for the driver version, I'm pretty sure that Dell was just installing a custom version of the ATI Catalyst 8.6 drivers, so for people that don't own Dell laptops I would try that.
Now the new issue is that the title screen is all black and I can't see the option to start a new game, but there are other forums topics for that issue, so that's the last I'll say about that.
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Do you have a link to those drivers Arigus? I have the exact same video card.
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problem: aquaria runs at 0.5…1 fps fullscreen with minimum graphics setiings :'(
setup: aspire one l110 — atom n270, ram 1.5 gb, video 8 gb + shared memory… yeah, i know it's not a gaming monster, but there're many visually similar titles running at least decently. linux mint 8 xfce (ubuntu 9.10).
has anyone managed to run aquaria on similar setups?
p.s. fixed (http://www.bit-blot.com/forum/index.php?topic=1250.msg25891#msg25891)! runs fine.
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problem: aquaria runs at 0.5…1 fps fullscreen with minimum graphics setiings :'(
setup: aspire one l110 ....yeah, i know it's not a gaming monster, but there're many visually similar titles running at least decently. (ubuntu 9.10).
has anyone managed to run aquaria on similar setups?
I'm also on an aspire one, on lucid (ubuntu 10.04). It's the only game from the HIB that lags for me; it definitely feels like it's using software rendering on linux as well. Aquaria is 1 fps before it even gets to the main menu. The problem may be different, but the symptoms are exactly as described for windows.
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I'm also on an aspire one, on lucid (ubuntu 10.04). It's the only game from the HIB that lags for me; it definitely feels like it's using software rendering on linux as well. Aquaria is 1 fps before it even gets to the main menu. The problem may be different, but the symptoms are exactly as described for windows.
oh sorry i panicked =( got it working ok — just manually edited every relevant setting in ~/.Aquaria/preferences/usersettings.xml down to minimal value:
Blur on="0"
NumParticles v="128"
ScreenMode resx="1024" resy="600" bits="24" fbuffer="0" full="1" vsync="0" darkfbuffer="0" darkbuffersize="256"
now it runs fine.
p.s. special thankx to everyone who helped bring the humble indie bundle to all the indie-loving gamers out there!
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I'm guessing it's just the fbuffer settings that really matter there..?
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I'm guessing it's just the fbuffer settings that really matter there..?
i was feeling way too lazy (and eager to give this great adventure a try) to test the settings one by one. but probably you are right. want me to check?