Steam Edition of Penumbra: Overture, B.P. & Requiem - Crashing

[DON3k]

I've only tried playing the 1st one (Overture), since I wish to play them in order, and I've read through a lot of the messages here, to identify a possible issue / solution before posting, but nothing has solved my problem.

As the title mentioned, I purchased the complete set of Penumbra via Steam.

Basically, I either get a crash at New Game, and if I do get it to start, I play fine until the next level or major loading-door is opened, then normally the loading screen appears, after about 10 seconds, the screen flashes and a black screen is all I see. I then have to END-TASK. I will normally still continue to hear the in-game music, but Vista will indicate the program is no longer responding in the Task Manager. The game, if left, never continues and must be killed.

Upon killing the game, I see this on the toolbar:



Strangely, none of my other games has ever caused this error. Not Crysis, Bioshock, Far Cry 2, Fallout 3... Just naming a few of the other titles I've played thru over the past few months.

My hardware:

MSI P35D3 Platinum MB
4 GB PC12800 DDR3 1600 Mhz Crucial Ballistix RAM
Intel QX9650 CPU
Vista 64
ATI 3870X2 w/9.2 Drivers (latest available)
Audigy X-Fi Fatality w/latest drivers via Creative Auto-Update

I've tried disabling the Catalyst AI, made sure that all other settings were checked for Use Application Settings, so that the Catalyst is not 'tweaking' anything, and I even tried clicking OpenGL Triple Buffering, but it's a no-go.

I also uninstalled 9.2 and installed Catalyst 8.12. Same results.

I tried the default screen resolutions, as well as a couple of the native resolutions of my monitor, but that does not seem to matter - same results.

For the hell of it, I setup Creative Alchemy to handle the sound, to see if this made a difference, but with or without, no change.

As you can see from the hardware list, my PC is a beast, and normally chews thru anything I throw at it. I'm also an IT Tech, so keeping the PC tuned and everything patched and up-to-date is always covered.

Anyway, if there's anything specific you can suggest, please do.

Oh, and as for Vista, I'm using the Administrator account, not the administrators group. I re-enabled the Administrator user and do not use any other profiles on this machine. So I do not have to deal with Run As Administrator or confirming rises in access level to make changes, UAC confirmations, etc - making permissions or access to files / folders no problem.

Also, the fact that it bombs during a level load, and not during actual game play, would make me think that it would not be connected with overheating, overclocking, etc. Besides, I've run HWMon while troubleshooting, and the temps are all very low. I have very good water cooling on the CPU and a very good airflow case.



I'll mention it, even though I would assume you're already aware of it; ATI, in their 9.1 driver set, introduced full OpenGL 3.0 support. Not sure that this should matter - you'd know best. However, that is why I did try rolling-back to Cat 8.12, just to see, but clearly it did not change anything results-wise.

However, even though I did try the 8.12 drivers, as a test, I hope that I'm not told that I need to regress drivers to some ancient set just to run the game.

I haven't played a good adventure / puzzle-solver game in a long while, since I normally stick to things like Fallout 3, Neverwinter Night series, and some FPS stuff, like Left4Dead, etc. Your series I was hoping would be a refreshing change of pace.

Oh, and here's my log file:

As you'll notice, this time it launched and started my save with no issues, but when I reached the next door (supply room this time) and opened it - bomb.