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Loved this game on PS3 and couldn't wait to get back into it on my PC but everything just doesn't work for me. I've tried all the solutions and it still crashes or has some kind of error. Really frusturating. First game on Steam I haven't been able to find a work around.
The normal servers don't because it's an old game.
About the crashes, for me, setting it to compatibility with XP SP3 and running as administrator works fine. You can also disable desktop composition and themes like aero if you want, but i don't find it neccesary. Also, run it with -skipopenal and -nocpubinding.
Damn... :(
Well, other things you might try if you haven't already (on top of XP compatibility, CM patch and prefixes):
1)
4 GB patch: http://ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php
It supposedly lets x86 applications use more than 2 GB ram. So since Sacred 2 is infamous for memory leaks (which could explain your issues), giving it more RAM might work.
2)
Also connected to crashing and memory leaks. Make your page file bigger. Sacred 2 loves a big pagefile! It will help if you defragment your HDD, but since windows 7 supposedly does this on its own, it's probably not necessary. Still, can't hurt to try.
Here's how you do it:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/change-virtual-memory-size#1TC=windows-7
Make it the maximum size. This helped me before. The steam version is stable for me (for now at least), but before, the retail version i borrowed once was horribly unstable. This fixed it somehow.
3)
Windows ready boost. Plug in your USB stick and use Ready boost. This puts random background operations on the USB drive instead of memory so it'll free up some RAM and make it slightly less prone to mess up. You don't really need more RAM since Sacred won't ever use it all, but still, can't hurt.
4)
Try disabling different settings in game like Physix because sometimes those can cause instability.
5)
Revert to an older driver version if you have the newest one or update your drivers if you don't. This probably won't hurt your other games, and more often than not i've had success on running some stubborn games by going back to an older driver. Sometimes companies just mess up. Use only official Nvidia or AMD drivers, not your GFX card manufacturer drivers.
6)
Use performance mode on your GFX card driver. Or use advanced settings for the game executable so you can specifically tell the driver what settings to use fro Sacred 2. Disable all the memory consuming stuff like Anti aliasing and such... Play around with it. I just use performance mode and it works fine. If i use "let the 3D application decide" option it causes lag so it would probably crash the game at one point.
7)
Disable antivirus, system boosters, any unnecessary program while running Sacred 2. Sometimes programs just don't like each other, and antivirus software could sometimes misinterpret memory read/write as something scary and malicious and interfere, causing your application to crash, or just do its own thing making the running program unstable as a result.
8)
Check what C++ redist you have (2005/2008/2012). I know steam installs the version needed, but install the other ones too. It won't hurt, and since Sacred 2 is an older program it might not play well with the newer compilers. I have all of them. And i mean all, various programs installed practically every C++, C#, .Net and what not version on my computer and it's fine. It won't hurt your computer.
9)
Alt-Tab out of sacred when in fullscreen. Basically what sacred does is it fills the memory constantly and never empties it (memory leak), so when it reaches the maximum what sacred can handle it can't fill it anymore and crashes. It's annoying, but some people had success with it.
10)
If any of the above steps fail, check your Sacred 2 file integrity via Steam, or just redownload the game. You'd be surprised how much a simple redownload can solve. It's a big chunk of bandwidth though, so use it as a last option.
Those are all the things i was doing when i was researching crashes on Sacred 2 and i managed to get it working. I know this seems like a lot of work for a game, but since you already spent money on it, it's worth a try. I probably did more, idk.
I hope you manage to get it working. I know how you feel, lol, i was so mad when the game refused to run properly.
Good luck!
EDIT:
I just found this. I haven't tried this myself, but it might prevent memory leaks and crashing by eliminating preloading. Worth a try if all else fails. The logic of it is ok too. Nowadays (especially beefier computers) have really really fast ram, and speed is more often than not the cause of most instabilities with older programs. They weren't written for that, so by eliminating preloading, your game is gonna read/write on the fly, using less memory, and since even the slowest memory nowadays is pretty fast for Sacred's age, it could really be a fix.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/225640/discussions/0/864956554687300470/
I'm going to try the no-preloading hack for a bit and see what happens! In 2 minutes of preliminary testing it doesn't seem to cause excesssive disk thrashing...I assume I'm just using disk buffers as cache.
Another tip: if you have a Creative Labs audio card, make sure EAX is disabled. (What a senseless waste of patented technology Creative is.)
The suggestion for video options is one I haven't tried. (performance, huh? Hmm...)
Beyond this, I think I've been there already.
I'm pretty sure I have every C++ runtime every distributed, but DLL hell is still a suspect, for sure.
I have experimented with memory, don't think I'm hitting the memory limitations, as it sometimes crashes within a very short gaming session. With 8G of ram and Intel SRT on my gaming drive, readyboost really has no effect other than to increase load times...I tried it for a while because, hey, new feature! I have a pretty enormous fixed size page file (12G!) that I enlarged specifically for this game back when I thought ram might be the issue.
PhysX is really a funny thing...I actually have one of the original PhysX accelerator PCI cards in the basement somewhere, which if you install the ancient drivers needed to get it going, will do a great job working as a physics decelerator. :) To run the game you must have physx installed, but to run the game without crashing, you must have physx disabled in game.
Oh what the heck, I'll try once more. (If you do the same thing over and over expecting different results, that's the definition of debugging.)
I like your debugging approach! :D LOL i do the same thing whenever i want to troubleshoot something. Check and crossreference every possible option. :P And i'm not satisfied until i get it working. :D We're not insane.
My friends when something doesn't work: "Meh, screw it, uninstall."
Me when something doesn't work: "Oh, no you don't, you'll work, even if it makes my basically reprogram you to work!" :P
Funny thing that happened to me with Sacred since i've had it on Steam. Once the game wouldn't start up, the steam launcher kept appearing and dissapearing. I checked the files and Steam found 150 MB missing. Lol whut? I didn't do anything! They dissapeared for no reason. I had to reinstall the CM patch too after that. Weird.
So yeah. Try a reinstall or at least file integrity check.
Also (it happens sometimes), that newer systems confuse games, so the closer you have it to the games recommended specs the better. Maybe set the pagefile back to automatic? Who knows. At one point whenever i obsess over stuff not working i try everything, even the opposite of recommended stuff... You never know.
You can also try to disable antialiasing and all the "touchy" stuff in options and put SweetFX in the game directory (where the executable is) to act as a 3rd party effects. It has AA and color corrections and other effects that are more or less unnecesary, bit it works separately, not using the games resources but its own. Might take some load off the game if you disable most of the stuff in its options and use SweetFX instead.
Because let's face it, Sacred 2 isn't really the pinnacle of optimisation and stability even on lowest settings, so whatever you can do outside its own settings helps.
I use it on most of my games since i discovered it and it works wonders! If nothing else to liven up some colors. Some games can have such dull washed up colors it's almost painful to watch (see Saints Row 2)...
I just did a "check file integrity" to restore things to stock, and reapply the community patch... but it might be that a full delete and download is in order to clear out any old cruft from CP?
Also delete all the stuff in the Documents folder and AppData, move your savegames in a separate folder (you can get them back after a reinstall) and delete the prefetch file for Sacred if windows created it.