NwN and Windows 10

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Drake Strongfist
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NwN and Windows 10

Post by Drake Strongfist » Wed Aug 23, 2017 4:09 am

Hey guys,

So I'm trying to return after about 2 years away but the issue that I'm having is that all my attempts to get the game running on my (daughters) windows 10 machine have resulted in game breaking lag.

I've researched the issue in depth and I've deleted all of the updates that are anywhere near the ones that are known trouble makers. I'm in compatability mode and I've made sure to take all the other old precautions. HIstorically speaking I've ran this game on XP, 7, Vista, and 8 just fine. However, now I just can't seem to find the way. I'm totally at a loss. I have no idea what to do from here. If there is a more computer literate member willing to work with me on this issue, I'm all ears. Honestly, anyone is bound to be better than me on this lol. I literally just google possible issues and attempt the solutions I find there. I feel like I should point out that my woman recently purchased a new machine that runs windows 10 and I managed to install it for her with no issues. No idea what the problem is with this one though. Anyway....any help at all is appreciated, otherwise I guess Arelith will be but another fond memory.

Cheers!
Drake

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by cptcuddlepants » Wed Aug 23, 2017 4:22 am

Try turning off the "Shiny Water" option in the Advanced tab of the video options part of the menu.
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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Drake Strongfist » Wed Aug 23, 2017 4:27 am

Done, thats always the first step. Shiney water has been an issue since I started playing this game upon it's release. Thanks though!

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Rabbid » Wed Aug 23, 2017 4:37 am

Drake Strongfist wrote:Done, thats always the first step. Shiney water has been an issue since I started playing this game upon it's release. Thanks though!
My first question: What is the Graphics Card on the PC? Or failing that, what model laptop etc. is it?

While it's an old game, some GPU's can struggle with it.
Kalgoon wrote:Drow PC waltzed into Cordor and proceeded to murder like disco was going out of style
Kuma wrote:It's 1372 after Bane's resurrection but before the Silence of Lolth
Which means that Elminster has been trapped in hell for 130 years
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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Drake Strongfist » Wed Aug 23, 2017 4:50 am

Product name: HP 15 Notebook PC
Product Number: N5Y05UA#ABA
Bios:F.27-04/07/2016
Processor name: Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU N3540 @2.16GHz

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Rabbid » Wed Aug 23, 2017 4:53 am

I've not too much experience using Intel Integrated HD graphics for NWN, but it should be fine.

My next thought is are the graphics drivers up to date, but I'm going to guess they are.

Just so I can get an idea. When you say game breaking lag, do you mean it's chunky with things like turning the camera? Or is it more of a delay between say, clicking to move and actually moving?
Kalgoon wrote:Drow PC waltzed into Cordor and proceeded to murder like disco was going out of style
Kuma wrote:It's 1372 after Bane's resurrection but before the Silence of Lolth
Which means that Elminster has been trapped in hell for 130 years
+1

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Cuchilla » Wed Aug 23, 2017 4:57 am

Did you try running NWN as earlier versions of Windows? I can't even remember how to do that. But I did that when Windows left XP, once and for all, and I never had troubles with W7, W8, W10 or other newer versions.

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Rabbid » Wed Aug 23, 2017 4:59 am

Cuchilla wrote:Did you try running NWN as earlier versions of Windows? I can't even remember how to do that. But I did that when Windows left XP, once and for all, and I never had troubles with W7, W8, W10 or other newer versions.
He said he's tried compatibility mode already.
Kalgoon wrote:Drow PC waltzed into Cordor and proceeded to murder like disco was going out of style
Kuma wrote:It's 1372 after Bane's resurrection but before the Silence of Lolth
Which means that Elminster has been trapped in hell for 130 years
+1

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Drake Strongfist » Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:05 am

Indeed!

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Ebonstar » Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:29 am

I run on my laptop with Win10 and its just fine.

the one thing i did notice though, make sure you set all your behind the scenes updates and downloads into quiet hours, of which they assume not between 9 to 5 local time. I used to get all my lag when other things were yanking bandwidth and so forth and once i changed my quiet hours to after midnight it all went away.

the things i saw were jerking screen turns and stuttering.
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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Drake Strongfist » Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:33 am

Understandable, but my issues are more than "jerking" its literally game breaking lag. As in, there is nearly a minute between the time I click on the ground and my toon "teleports" to the location of said "click"

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Ebonstar » Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:36 am

but your other machines run the game fine. make sure your ethernet drivers are up to date as well.
I run mine on wifi so i never had to deal with them. that is if your on a hardline from your router.
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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Ebonstar » Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:38 am

oh and if your on a hardline make sure your not using an old data cable as well, the newer machines use 2.0 or higher usb ports so if you have a usb 1 cable you wont get full usage either
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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Drake Strongfist » Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:43 am

I'm attempting to run on wifi but if need be I can run a cable to the location of the machine. I'm a journeyman electrician. I have the tools, the terminal ends and a box of cat5 cable at my disposal if you think that would help. ;)

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Iceborn » Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:46 am

While the new versions from GoG are said to come with the critical rebuild integrated, are you sure you have it?

Otherwise, the legendary Creator's Update from Win10 did cause some catastrophic side effects in NWN.

Other than that, I am not really sure.
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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Drake Strongfist » Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:56 am

Yep, I'm running the 1.69 rebuild, as evidenced from the fact that I can log on, but the lag is retarded unbearable.

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Iceborn » Wed Aug 23, 2017 6:30 am

Last time I checked, you didn't need the rebuild in order to actually log in the server, which always did struck me as strange - but last time I checked was like three years ago so don't hold me on that one.
Misc Changes, with the Feats and Skills sublinks.
Available races
Spell Changes
Class Mechanics
Command Guide

Take a look before asking your questions!

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Drake Strongfist » Wed Aug 23, 2017 6:36 am

I'm running version 1.69 *nods*

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Drake Strongfist » Wed Aug 23, 2017 6:40 am

In any case, I'm out for the night. I have some things I need to come to terms with emotionally (my oldest kid joined the army and left for boot camp today) so I'm done for now. I'll check in on the thread and hopefully find a solution tomorrow. Thanks guys, as always, Arelith fam is the best! Hugs and kisses on all your naughty bits!

-Drake

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Ozzy.nl » Wed Aug 23, 2017 1:55 pm

Here is something you can try.
Go in to the NWNplayer.ini and find
[Game Options]
Client CPU Affinity=0

You can set this to =1 or =-2.

Have to give them both a try. But witha i7 =-2 is the best bet.
You can also chance Max Memory here as well to 1024.

good luck hope you get it running.

Ozzy

Edit:

Also some searching got me this.

Neverwinter Nights was released in 2002, and was only optimized for single core CPUs such as Pentium IV and the like. Nowadays Windows based PC desktops and laptops are more common to have more than a single core CPU.

We can get around this by telling the game to use a single core on a multi-core CPU. It's easiest to do this through the nwnplayer.ini file, which is an initialization file used by the game to detect player settings.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
To do this we will navigate to your Neverwinter Nights install directory.
By default, it is usually a folder that looks like this:

C:\NeverwinterNights\NWN\

On my own computer it looks like this: E:\Neverwinter Nights\NWN\

You should see a file within this folder called nwnplayer.ini, so right click on it and open with notepad, which should be on the default list of programs in Windows.

Please Note:

C: represents your first hard drive in your computer, whether it be a solid state drive (SSD) or a traditional SATA drive.
If you are installing for the first time, I would recommend installing it on a SATA drive, as it does start to add up to gigabytes of space after CEP and other server HAK files are installed.

If you don't know where your NWN is installed, you can search for the location through a Windows Search.

I'm on Windows 7, so I hit the start menu and type NWN into the 'search programs and files' type box.

You can even type nwnplayer.ini in this search to bring it up.

Now, open the nwnplayer.ini and search using ctrl-f for [Game Options]

If there is no part that says [Game Options], add it by inserting the following lines:

[Game Options]
Client CPU Affinity=-1

-1 works best on i5 cpu's generally.

If you're on an i7 as I am, I would try the line below:

[Game Options]
Client CPU Affinity=-2

Under the File menu in Notepad, select “Save,” Then close the window. A lot of choppy 'visual' lag in the game will be gone, so game on folks!


ADVANCED GRAPHICS TWEAK OPTIONS
_______________________________________________________________________

Are you experiencing crashing in game?

Try these advanced graphics options from the in game menu for graphics!


Shiny Water to Off (a known problem on a lot of NWN servers)
Grass to Off (Should absolutely be off in a setting with a high polygon graphics counts, e.g. mountains)
Creature Shadow Detail to 0 or off (I turn this off even on my NVIDIA 760GTX - A lot of the more modern tilesets have issues with this and WILL make you crash, so it's better to have it off!)
Try reducing the shadows detail overall if you run into any other problems.
Anti-aliasing may make the game look better, but can often crash you.

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Aero Silver » Wed Aug 23, 2017 3:36 pm

Ozzy. Nl has wonderful advice.
If you are not computer savvy, i suggest that you name a copy of the ini file before accessing it, in case it gets messed up.

Also, i suggest that you lower the graphic detail to Low, disable Shadows and Grass and all that. Then try logging in. If you are experiencing better performance, then try raising the details to Medium.

For integrated cards, do not expect fluid performance, even for old games like NWN. You can make it run fairly well, but not stellar.
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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Ozzy.nl » Thu Aug 24, 2017 4:16 pm

To be honest I knew these options my self but someone else wrote them out. :D

I found these on the thessir forum

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Drake Strongfist » Sat Sep 02, 2017 12:34 am

Hey guys,

Thanks for all the tips and brain storming. Sadly none of your ideas was anything that I haven't already tried. That machine with windows 10 still just wont accept NwN at all. I've scoured the internet every day since I started this topic and have spent hours and hours implementing all sorts of fixes for things that I hadn't even every had to do before. There were a surprising number of issues for various people throughout he years. Nothing has proved fruitful. However!

I dug my old machine back out and it started giving me problems about the time I started my hiatus from the server (about 2 years ago). Long story short its a machine that still runs winows 8 since I missed out on the free update phase of windows 10 due to the machine not performing well (I couldn't even get it up to 8.1, it would fail repeatedly.

Basically the issues with it, were first the network adapter crapped the bed, I had ordered a new one some time ago but hadn't bothered to put it in because of a performance issue. The other problem was that something was causing it to run at 99-100% disk usage constantly. Previously I had tried various 3rd party programs that promised to root out the issue and fix things. They didn't. The day before yesterday I sat down and began the tedious process of manually uninstalling everything that wasn't OS critical one item at a time, and finding ways to rid myself of the "sleeper" programs and installers that many of the aforementioned 3rd party softwares leave behind. Followed up by running numerous instances of chkdsk /r, Dism commands, and Sfc /scannow to clean up anything that was broken. Long story short, eat a bag of Pufferfishes Norton Antivirus (Clearing it out seems to have been when I started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel)

Last night I got on and talked for a while in Cordor, things were ok. Then.....crash "a problem has caused the program to stop, windows will close it now"

I thought it could've been a fluke, relaunched and got back on, found someone and explained through tells that I'd like to take a walk with them somewhere relatively safe to test reliability during combat animations, etc. Several crashes later I logged off and went to bed.

Today I got up and researched the error logs to find the issue.....long story short again, I slapped my self for being stupid and updated drivers across the board.

Today I was able to log on, rp, explore the new to me Cordor and walked all the way to the remains of Wharftown and traveled by ship back to the city. No crashes, minor hiccups and overall smooth performance.

Looks good so far. Hopefully I'm back!

Now to decide on a new character to create so I can start fresh in "re-learning how to Arelith" with all the new changes.

Thanks again guys, really great of you to try and help me out. Sorry if this was long but I know you tech guys like to have updates and progress reports when you try and help a bruh out ;)

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Ozzy.nl » Sat Sep 02, 2017 10:56 am

Drake,

Should the win 8 pc not work eight for you there is another option for you to concider. Since you have a newer pc you could turn that older win 8 pc in to a linux mint machine. Running it with the cinnamon desktop it gives a very stable environment and on this forum there are a few different ways to install your windows nwn copy very easy eighteen natively or on wine.

Just throwing it out there. 8-)

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Re: NwN and Windows 10

Post by Drake Strongfist » Sat Sep 02, 2017 11:12 pm

I've often thought about trying linux out, actually. I'm just not super computer savvy these day. I used to be alright a looooooong, long time ago but when you take a few years off, you're suddenly decades behind in tech time so I just never devoted the time to learn. These days I just baby step it and then use the interwebs to teach myself enough to get by lol. I'm hearing some noise from this unit that has me thinking that the HDD is struggling. If it goes I'll either be in the market for a new machine or possibly be open to replacing it with a SSD. If I decide to go with the new SSD, then I may as well start fresh with Linux I guess. What do you think I'd be looking at cost wise for the OS?

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