Dragon Crash?

The cave in the mountains south of Valleynisia are making NWN crash. Every time it loads, it crashes. I restart NWN, loading screen, crash. Again, crash. Restart, Hall of Zolaras, working fine. Use a gift of Zolaras to get back and kill the red dragons I was fighting (another possible cause of the crash? Hasn't happened before with dragons... And I had just killed two of them outside.) and it crashes again.

Thanks for the report. I just added that area and hadn't had a chance to even look at it in-game.

Did some testing with Crideas, fiddled with settings, got the dragon fix just to be sure, and crashed again.

Theoretically, it's client side, but Derik had the exact same problem, so it would be interesting to see if it happens with other people.

I didnt crash once, the *whole* time.

I can't seem to replicate this crash on my end, with or without the "dragon fix" hak.

Checked the area...uses the standard caves tileset, no odd placeables or anything.

Still thinking about this one, just haven't come up with a fix for you.

I've had my Client hang (crash) 2-out-of-2 times upon spotting the two Adult Red Dragons outside the cave. The outside terrain itself doesn't appear to be the problem for me since w/o the Dragons outside these's no problem interacting with the environment.

Where as, inside the cave, my Client handled the dragons much better. I was able to battle the initial Old Red Dragon and several Adult Red Dragons without any glitches. However, my Client did crash eventually while I was inside the cave -it occurred when a second Old Red Dragon appearred.

Therefore, my experience hints at Client-side crashes upon viewing the Old Red Dragon(s), especially when encountered outside the cave.

Interestingly enough, there were no problems encountered after having used teleportation to arrive inside the Cave. Numerous Red Dragon spawns experienced without mishap. Note that only 1 Old and 4 Adults at a time were ever in view, whereas outside the cave, 2 Old Reds were in view. Also, no sound problems or stealth involved (Bioware admits these two features used to cause crashes).

Update ==> upon leaving the cave the game crashed! I restarted, and found myself outside the cave along with two Adult Reds across the gully. Just as I fired my first shot the game crashed again. Restarting, I discover that I was alive (!) and had slayed the first Adult. The game was stable from this point onward, thus allowing me to slay the second Adult while outside. Upon entering the cave again, the graphics acted quirky: as if half the screen would suddenly go black and my character would jump up in the air and back down again. Several restarts later, the cave zone became stable/normal again.

Update ==> Red Dragons elsewhere can cause client-side seizures: the East Tower of the Necropolis's School of Wizardry sometimes causes seizures. I'll investigate this phenomenon with google and report back.

Some folks have experienced a problem with the "improved" dragons made by Hardpoints, and have the "old style" dragon models loaded into their cep2_custom.hak file to work around this.

I've made a change in the appearance.2da file a few weeks ago that might fix the issue and still allow everyone to see the improved dragons.

If someone that was experiencing that problem could try playing with an empty cep2_custom.hak file and facing down some dragons, I'd appreciate knowing if the 2da change works for everyone. I'm hoping so, so that everyone can see the much better looking updated dragons.

Thanks!

I was one, gold, red and green dragons.

NPC dragons work fine now, no crashes.

Dragonshape red dragon works fine.

Dragonshape green dragon still causes issues though while shifing into or out of the shape. Not sure why as the green dragons outside Alatha didn't cause so much as a hiccup while running through their animations. Is the green dragon for dragonshape the same as used for the ancient green dragons? When I tested with Alex, his green dragon shape looked slightly different than the NPC dragons... more of a neon-green shade.

I was having crashes every time I went to Othik so I had the dragon fix cep2_custom file. I just replaced it it with the default empty file and visited a bunch of dragon sites. So far not a single crash and the dragons look great!

Oh, and a sidenote to my above... dragonshape's green dragon still crashes, but green wyrmling doesn't (and it's an obviously different model, no head fin).

Shifting OUT of red wyrmling shape still crashes, but not every time... 50/50 chance though. Shfiting into and walking around/fighting/emoting with the red dragonshape works fine though.