Slow Motion Bug - Even after forum fixes

Hey,

I have a Nvidia Geforce 8600 GT graphics card and have the slow motion bug in The Bard's Tale.

I have tried:

1. Forcing off Vertical Sync
2. Changing resolution
3. Downloading the newest graphics card driver
4. Turning all of the performance settings on low in-game
5. Reinstalling it
6. Changed to Maximum pre-rendered frames - 4
7. Changed to Texture filtering-Quality - High performance

The only idea i might have is that the selective program settings in the Nvidia control panel may not be applying the settings to the actual program since I have to access the .exe in the Steam folder.

I access the individual program settings by going to:

Nvidia Control Panel ---> Manage 3D settings ---> Program Settings ---> Add ---> The Bard's Tale.exe

Here are the settings for the .exe:
White and italic means grayed out on Nvidia control panel

1. Ambient Occlusion - Not supported for this application
2. Anisotropic filtering - Use global setting (Application-controlled)
3. Antialiasing-Gamma correction - Use global setting (On)
4. Antialiasing-Mode - Use global setting (Application-controlled)
5. Antialiasing-Setting - Using global setting (Application controlled)
6. Antialiasing-Transparency - Use global setting (Off)
7. Maximum pre-rendered frames - 3
8. Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration - Use global setting (Multiple display performance mode)
9. Texture filtering-Anisotropic sample optimization - On
10. Texture filtering-Negative LOD bias - Use global setting (Allow)
11. Texture filtering-Quality - Quality
12. Texture filtering-Trilinear optimization - On
13. Threaded optimization - Use global settings (Auto)
14. Triple buffering - Use global settings (Off)
15. Vertical sync - Force Off

I am able to play other RPG world games like Overlord 1,2/World of Warcraft/Eve Online/etc. And this is the only game I have had do the slow motion bug on me.

Any ideas on how I can get that fixed or should I just ask for a refund?

Thank you.

My system specs are:

• Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ 3.00 GHz
• RAM: 3.00 GB
• System: Vista 32-bit
• Graphics Card: Nvidia Geforce 8600 GT

[jor]

Is it slow everywhere?
If I disable Vsync, I can have everything on full, and the only slowdown I get is during the summoning scenes of Princess Caleigh and others later on, where there is a vertical wall of flowing particles surrounding the summonee. The moment this appears FPS drops down to 1 (but sound plays at normal speed), the moment it disappears the game is playable again.

With Vsync ON the entire game is like that.

For me running, fighting and summoning along with the monsters and NPCs are in slow motion. Talking is sort of in sync.

[BreenGuyLOL]

At first i thought its just lag, but now that someone else is complaining, its bad.

[Amander]

For me, having vsync on caused loads of trouble, I had to turn it off.

[hwyckoff]

I have a 2.8 gigabyte quad core PC with 16 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 video card. Even after setting the GeForce card is set for performance, the Summon the Princess scenes are still incredibly slow. The rest of the game runs well -- but the summon scenes drag down to a snail's crawl.

Within the game, I set the performance options to as low as it would allow me. It still didn't help. No change as far as the summon scenes are concerned.

Curious to see if this issue was limited to the Steam version of Bard's Tale, I ran the XP version of the game on my XP computer and it had the same issues. So whatever the cause of this bug is, it seems to be present in two different versions of the game.

I don't have any solutions yet for my experience with the game -- only more descriptions of what didn't solve the problem.

[BreenGuyLOL]

Look at this!
http://cedegawiki.sweetleafstudios.c..._Bard%27s_Tale

It says to change the OpenGL language to No and shaders to 1.3. but the incompetent editer forgot to mention how exactly to do that and which file to edit.

[BreenGuyLOL]

Also if you have a gamepad, you'd know that when you plug it in, most games decrease their FPS. Well when I tried playing The Bard's Tale on PC with a gamepad the problem was fixed, plus it's more comfolrtable to play with a gamepad than mouse and keyboard.

[Janmanden]

I've got a similar problem with an ATi HD 4850, whenever there is a cutscene or a summoning animation my fps drops to less than 10 and the fps fluctuates quite a lot throughout the game. It's also a problem inside shops.

I don't know what the problem is, but either the game doesn't like my ATi HD4850 or it's the AMD driver that's the problem, because after I pulled out the HD4850 and put in an older ATi X1950PRO and rolled back the driver to an older ATi version from 2009 the game is blazing fast all of sudden with everything enabled. No fps drops of any kind anywhere.

I also notice a change of quality. The game graphics looks a little paler, but there is more of it. I am using a bow that shoots fire arrows. With the 4850 it just looks like a regular bow that shoots arrows with a small flame, but on the X1950PRO the bow has a glowing sphere and the flames on the arrows are more expressive and there are other things I didn't notice before.

[Janmanden]

Looking for an exlanation why my ATi X1950PRO works, when the newer and more powerful ATi HD 4850 doesn't has led me to one of the few things that the requirement page for Bard's Tale highlights:

DirectX® -compatible video card with programmable vertex and pixel shaders that support DirectX Vertex Shader version 1.1 or higher

That could be it. The ATi X1950PRO got Shader Model 3.0, which is backwards compatible with all previous versions while the ATi 4850 got Shader Model 4.1, which doesn't support Shader Model 1.

---

Shader Model 2 added additional capabilities to Shader Model 1.
Shader Model 3 added additional capabilities to Shader Model 2.

Shader Model 4 on the other hand "is a superset of the capabilities in Shader Model 3 except that Shader Model 4 doesn't support the features in Shader Model 1".

Bah..

[Carnun]

Same problem with massive slowdowns, especially in cutscenes. Game is unplayable.

[Freelancer412]

My solution may help to many. I had the very same problem on my GeForce 9600M GT and none of the aforementioned solutions worked. So I tried a "hit or miss" repair and the solution which worked perfectly was to turn the Particles in the Options from "All" to "Some" (Everything else may stay on the highest setting.). Right after I set the particles to "Some", all the summoning slow down problems has suspended and the game is playable.

[Mu-san]

Has anyone done this? I tried hex-editing, but I think I didn't do it right.

http://hardforum.com/archive/index.php/t-940624.html

From the link:
Recently I bumped into the same problem, so I tried to hack some in-game settings (absense of 'particles - none' option bugged me a lot). Well, now I've got kind of a solution for that.
The first problem is testing. I just played till the end of Kirkwall (first visit), so not much testing was done. It worked fine on world map and Caleigh summoning, but who knows what will happen later...
The second problem is complexity of fix. It's a manual hex patch with vague directions http://media.ign.com/boardfaces/2.gif so blame me freely for not being user-friendly. Or try finding some hex-editing tutorial on Google.
Well, anyway, I'll post it, since it changes only 'default settings' for particles, not some code or game files... It is like editing .ini file or registry value.
While playing, every time you return from the menu to game, it multiplies some value by number, which is based on p-settings. for 'all' multiplier equals 1.00, 'most' -> 0.75, 'some' ->0.50.
I tried to set it manually to 0 by a trainer program, and there were no lines, particles in my next 'summoning Caleigh test'. It was no fun, so I tried to set it to 0.10.

Okay, the patch. In exe file ("The Bard's Tale.exe") you look for hex string -
(I've got two finds but patched first one only)
90 0D 86 00 00 [00 00 80 3F] , Value in brackets = float equivalent for 1.0 (it's for 'All' setting)
~8-10 (0x0C)bytes later will be hex string 00 00 40 3f, = 0.75 ('Most')
~8-10 more bytes - 9A 99 19 3F = 0.5 ('Some')
I recommend setting 0.5 to 0.05 - that way, there are lines in summoning sequence, but game doesn't slow down as much as before.
Hex strings :
0.1 = 'CD CC CC 3D' ,
0.05 = 'CD CC 4C 3D'.
Just write any of these over original 9A 99 19 3F and save the file. In game, set particles to 'Some' and try world map. If it works, then you did it right.
Any feedback would be good. Especially bad effects.
Taken from IGN Boards.

To make the hex changes use HexWorkshop or a program in its likehood.

[CJDJ]

My game runs very slow, and I can't get it to run correctly. I've tried all the fixes suggested in the Forums, and my game still runs slow. I've tried changing the Resolution from 1920x1080 to 800x600; went into my nVidia Control Panel and forced VSync to off; turned all the settings down to low; still no good. The odd thing is, when I right-click the "The Bards Tale.exe" and go to Compatibility tab, it's always set to "Windows 98/ME." Every time I change it (to either Windows XP Service Pack 3, or completely off), run the game, check again, it goes back to that. UAC is off, so I can't see that causing it. I already have it defaulted to Run as Admin. I'm stumped. Any suggestions?

System Specs:
Win7 64bit
AMD Athlon II X4 630
6GB RAM
Geforce GTX580 (306.97 drivers)

[Killart Gotshe]

Originally Posted by CJDJ

My game runs very slow, and I can't get it to run correctly. I've tried all the fixes suggested in the Forums, and my game still runs slow. I've tried changing the Resolution from 1920x1080 to 800x600; went into my nVidia Control Panel and forced VSync to off; turned all the settings down to low; still no good. The odd thing is, when I right-click the "The Bards Tale.exe" and go to Compatibility tab, it's always set to "Windows 98/ME." Every time I change it (to either Windows XP Service Pack 3, or completely off), run the game, check again, it goes back to that. UAC is off, so I can't see that causing it. I already have it defaulted to Run as Admin. I'm stumped. Any suggestions?

System Specs:
Win7 64bit
AMD Athlon II X4 630
6GB RAM
Geforce GTX580 (306.97 drivers)

I'm afraid there is no solution. Inxile Support also ignore my emails.
They can't sell game just like that. It's unplayable.