Costume Quest Support FAQ

[DF Vic]

Hello, everyone! Costume Quest is a great game about the carefree joy of Halloween, but sometimes bugs get in the way of your costuming and your questing, which is not very carefree at all. If you are affected by a badly behaving bug, glitch, crash or other defect, please check out this here FAQ before posting. Many users are affected by the same problems that all have easy fixes, which is what this FAQ is all about. If you have read this FAQ and still can’t find an answer for your problem, do a quick search for other threads on the topic here. If that fails, too, then please post a new thread on the problem or email us at [e-mail]!

Costume Quest is doing sometheing strange and random and glitchy and none of the specific things below help, what can I do?

Computers are fickle beasts and sometimes things go wrong, but fortunately there are some easy things to try that fix a lot of the random issues. If you post about an issue, very likely we’ll ask you to try one or more of these things first.
* Reboot your computer. It’s a simple thing but it’s amazing how many problems this solves.
* Update your drivers, especially video card drivers. Just don’t try to use beta drivers as they will often cause more problems than they solve.
* Verify the Integrity of You Local Game Cache. You can do this by Right clicking on Costume Quest in your library, chosing Properties, Advanced, and then clicking the Verify Integrity of Local Game Cache button.
* Manually run the DirectX and Visual Studio C++ (vc) redistributables. This ensures that you have all the support libraries installed that Costume Quest needs to run happily.
* Try deactivating heavy background processes like anti-virus or malware scanners. On some computers these programs are so demanding that they significantly interfere with high performance games. If this doesn’t solve your problem, though, be sure to turn your scanners back on!

When I play Costume Quest I see lots of strange visual artifacts and can see through dolls and other parts of the world. How do I fix it?

This problem is almost always caused by MSAA being forced on through the video card drivers. Simply set your MSAA settings to “use application defaults” or the nearest equivalent and you’ll be g2g. If you’re forcing any other settings on, you should probably let the application run those, too.

When I press a button on my 360-style controller, the game hangs or crashes. Why does the universe hate me?

This crash is rare, but has always been caused by users having installed extra gamepad drivers on top of the native 360 drivers. Costume Quest should only be played with the native drivers, and supports lots of good stuff like remappable controls and tunable sensitivity settings.

Costume Quest is locked to a max of 30 fps. This makes me very angry. What can I do about it?

As of this writing, Costume Quest is a faithful port of the console version and is capped to 30 fps. There is no way to work around this setting, but Double Fine is trying to find the time to modify our engine to support uncapped rendering. If and when we do this, it will be made available on all Buddha engine games (Stacking, CQ, etc).

I have an ultra-awesome powerful GPU and want to run Costume Quest at the absolute maximum quality settings. How can I do this?

First off, select the maximum resolution that your monitor suppors. Then, launch the game with the secret command line options -ssaa2x or -ssaa4x. This will run the game with super sampled aliasing, either double the base res or quadruple the base res. It’s the finest anti-aliasing money can buy.