Archived from groups: alt.games.morrowind (
More info?)
Darrel Hoffman wrote:
>>I think a lot of it has to do with your play style. With 512 MB of RAM
>>I could reliably crash the game within 15 minutes. I was doing a series
>>of quests for a guild and would set a Mark at the quest giver's
>>location. I would then use teleportation type transportation or boats
>>or silt striders to get to the location, do the quest and Recall.
>>Repeat this a few times and memory usage would triple and crash the
>>system.
>
>
> True. I've taken calling everybody's favorite footwear "Boots of Blinding
> Crash". Moving around very quickly tends to encourage crashing. What
> really bothers me is that the system specs on the box are just plain not
> adequate.
>
> Required: 500 MHz P3, Celeron or Athalon, 128 MB Ram, 32 MB Video.
> Recommended: 800 MHz P3 or Athalon, 256 MB Ram, 64 MB ATI Radeon 7500.
> My system: 2.6 GHz Athalon, 768 MB Ram, 256 MB ATI Radeon 9500.
>
> My computer has more than TRIPLE the recommended specs in every category
> (let alone the "required specs"), and yet still crashes regularly. How does
> this stuff not get noticed before the game is released? Surely if they
> tested it on that "recommended" system for any length of time, they would
> have most likely crashed at least as often as I do. At what point do they
> decide "Ah, good enough. Let's ship it."? I just wish the game had some
> way of warning you when a crash was impending, or maybe even saving a backup
> when it did. So far, every time it's happened to me, I've had no warning
> whatsoever. One minute it's working perfectly, the next, BAM. No
> slow-downs or hard drive spinning up, just all of a sudden the music stops
> and the picture freezes, and 3 seconds later I'm either looking at the
> desktop or waiting for the computer to reboot.
>
>
Usually when I just crashed to the desktop without warning it was a
hardware fault, not the games. I started playing Morrowind when it was
released on a P4 2GHz computer with 512 MB RDRAM and an ATI Radeon 7500.
Shortly thereafter I upgraded to a 9700 Pro to get better performance
and the special effects. When I first installed the card it would crash
suddenly in less than 15 minutes. Touching the video card found it
almost too hot. Putting in a fan to exhaust the hot air from the video
card fixed that problem.
I recently ran through the Underworld of Suran module on my new computer
running a 3.4GHz P4 with 1GB DDR RAM and the same video card. This
module would just dump me to the desktop suddenly. No other parts of
the game had this problem so I am sure that in this case the module was
to blame.
As far as system specs and coding go I remember running Arena when it
came out and there were times I wanted to throw it away. Whenever I
entered or left a shop it would stop for a minute or so while it loaded
the cell. This was very irritating when you were shopping for a
specific item (all shops had a random inventory) and had to go to a
dozen shops looking for it. My system even then was above minimum but
until I got an even more powerful system the cell loading was a killer.