A DEFINITE FIX for the AMD drivers issue, DH crashes on load...

[novapaddy]

Following on from an earlier post by MartinBG, where he said guys should delete the 2 fire sprites for the Carrier to stop the game crashing on load.

The only other fix was to go back to an earlier AMD driver, version 15.12.

I decided to investigate and see if I could find a solution which would allow you to keep your latest AMD drivers.


SOLUTION:

My solution is to totally replace the carrier sprites for darkest hour with a different carrier sprite. The current dh fire sprite has 79 images. The replacement has 50.

I have tried the new carrier sprites on Windows 10 with the latest AMD drivers and Darkest Hour loaded with no problems whatsoever.

LINK:
https://mega.nz/#!j1hzRTgD!QmHwGwyLlUp5QdHrLft8kCHKDT7gbWFMC7Pk__uJnCk


STEPS:

Paste the palette file into Darkest hour/gfx/palette folder, and replace the file already there.

Go to Darkest Hour/gfx/map/units/bmp and delete the CARRIER bmp sprites. Replace with the ones posted.

Go to Darkest Hour/gfx/map/units and delete the CARRIER .spr files. Replace with the ones posted.

 

[Eginhard 38]

Great job!

 

[Jeremyd1985]

Awesome, greatly appreciated!

 

[taffy3]

Hi guys. I can confirm that novapaddy's solution worked for me (I have an AMD GPU and have been suffering from this, too).
The nature of his solution led me to another workaround. If you're a counters player like me, you can disable unit sprites in the launcher and this also makes the game playable. Can't believe I didn't try that already.

 

[caksz]

Thanks , it worked now.

 

[Czudak X]

Hi guys. I can confirm that novapaddy's solution worked for me (I have an AMD GPU and have been suffering from this, too).
The nature of his solution led me to another workaround. If you're a counters player like me, you can disable unit sprites in the launcher and this also makes the game playable. Can't believe I didn't try that already.

Turning off sprites wasn't feasible solution and DH still crashed, along with the other spinoffs of the good oldie Hearts of Iron II. However, this fix worked flawlessly for me in all cases. Kudos to the author.

 

[DarkPhoenix Gaming]

Thanks for the fix. Worked like a charm for me. On another note, whenever I play on anything above 1024x768 my mouse flickers endlessly. Do you know any fix for this mouse flickering issue? It's not a serious issue but it is kind of annoying so I would like to get it fixed.

 

[novapaddy]

Thanks for the fix. Worked like a charm for me. On another note, whenever I play on anything above 1024x768 my mouse flickers endlessly. Do you know any fix for this mouse flickering issue? It's not a serious issue but it is kind of annoying so I would like to get it fixed.

do a google search of "mouse cursor flickers above 1024" and you will see that they recommend all the usual stuff: drivers, try changing settings etc etc. Remember dh is a 16-bit game, well mostly. I mean if you are up on true colour 32 bit, maybe try a lower setting?

 

[Zsar1]

@novapaddy : I am currently investigating this issue on the AoD side. Sadly I do not have an AMD chipset myself, so I have to work rather blindly.
Could I convince you to try and create - for any one single sprite affected - a non-crashing version as close as possible to the original, so that we can figure out, what exactly causes the crashes?

... Actually nevermind. Lennartos and I diagnosed the texture issue this evening: The carrier attack animations are too long for any DirectX before 10. It works on nVidia and earlier AMD drivers by accident, not by design. If I have not misread, the files should have a maximum width of 8192 px.

The affected files are (on our end):

• T-carrier a-fire c-min d-ne.bmp
• T-carrier a-fire c-min d-sw.bmp

 

[RobinToth]

I've never had problems at all with DH, but all my friends got tons of problems. Hopefully this will fix it for my friend.

 

[Czudak X]

Working together with Zsar1, I pinpointed the exact cause of the crashes and fixed them. One does not need to swap all sprites and can retain the original ones. All he needs to do is to edit two files and the game loads beautifully. And it works for every title affected, not only DH.

 

[Inner Circle]

Working together with Zsar1, I pinpointed the exact cause of the crashes and fixed them. One does not need to swap all sprites and can retain the original ones. All he needs to do is to edit two files and the game loads beautifully. And it works for every title affected, not only DH.

Would you kindly tell us which two Files need to be changed and how does that change look like?

 

[Czudak X]

Would you kindly tell us which two Files need to be changed and how does that change look like?

I created a new thread about it here. Tagged you.