Grimrock

Hello,

First off I wanted to congratulate the entire Almost Human team on making such a compelling and atmospheric game. The parts which I have been able to play have been truly impressive, and it's the main reason that this problem is so... problematic for me.

Essentially, every time I load the game (usually on the title screen or about 5 minutes into gameplay) my entire computer will abruptly turn itself off. No warnings, no error messages, nothing wrong on startup. This has only been cropping up recently - I had racked up maybe three hours' play time - but there's now a crash every time I start the game.

This problem has never happened with any other program (at least, not without a bluescreen or error message) and I've reproduced it enough times to be 99% sure it's caused by Grimrock. Here's all relevant information I feel could be useful; please let me know if there's anything else I can supply.

My system: Dell XPS M1530 running 32-bit Vista SP2. Graphics card: GeForce 8600M GT.

Game version: 1.3.7 - This crash also occurred in 1.3.6, so I uninstalled, deleted grimrock.cfg and installed 1.3.7, unfortunately to no avail.

I bought this as part of a Humble Bundle so the archive was downloaded from their site. My md5 signature matches theirs.

Fortunately, I haven't lost any data as a result of this crash. After the most recent one an alert box saying 'TBIA: kErrorShell - NotifyIconNIM-ADD' was showing; though this may be an error caused by the system terminating so suddenly.

Hope you can help, and thanks again for such a wonderful game.

Does this crash happen exactly at game startup or a bit into the game i.e. 1 to 3 minutes?

In case it's the former it could be caused be the power supply going bad and is not able to deliver the power requested by the system and most of all the graphics card.

In case it's the later this sounds a lot like an overheated system, so the PC goes thru an emergency power-off. This you can check with tools like HWMONITOR. Since this Dell is a notebook prolly it's cooling system needs cleaning.

Disaster: Thanks for your prompt reply; yes, this does sound possible. Usually it's a few minutes in; i.e the game's had time to load, I've just got excited about it working, then BAM black screen. I'll run it again with HWMONITOR on and see what I can see.

Just ripped the back off my laptop and gave it a clean with a bicycle pump (Who needs canned air? I've always resented buying air) and managed to get a few hefty, hairy griffnuts out. On restarting the game it now runs without a problem.

Dr Disaster - You have my sincerest thanks.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know why Grimrock might cause such a marked temperature increase? I run plenty of 'demanding' software of this machine and nothing has ever caused it to panic and shut down before.

While LoG's graphics seem quite simple compare to the high-end high-volume high-selling games it's AAA lighting engine is very demanding on graphics cards. I have no insight on the engine but as in other graphic intense games the most power-hungry features are shadow rendering and SSAO (screen space ambient occlusion).

JoshSmith wrote: Out of curiosity, does anyone know why Grimrock might cause such a marked temperature increase? I run plenty of 'demanding' software of this machine and nothing has ever caused it to panic and shut down before.

Unless your other softwares are game, they are unlikely to even use the GPU at all so they could hardly make it contribute to your laptop's internal temperature.