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Submitted by iryan on Sat, 2013-09-28 20:12

RSimpkinuk57 wrote:
Lady Femme, its not my computer crashing, nor even Windows, just the game with a software bug. If "protection exception" means the same on Windows as it did on the old mainframes on which I was once a programmer, then the way to get one is to mess up memory management in some way. Do something to the 200th entry in a table set up for only 100 entries. Build a 200-characters-long command sequence into a "buffer" 100 characters long. Whatever legitimately occupies the location you overwrite will be "corrupted", and if it happens to be the memory address for where to go for something else.. "Protection exception" is when the end result is DS straying "out of bounds" into memory space reserved by or for Windows itself.

The only possible fix would be a new patch from GPG! which we know isn't going to happen.

On my old system, but not on my new one, I then had a wait of a minute or two while Windows "collected exception data" to be sent - or not, as one chose - to Microsoft over the internet.

If you never had this happen to you, lucky you.

"Collecting Exception Data" message generated by the game after it crashes generally means corruption of some of the resources and was a common problem with DS1 and DSLOA when using mods. As a mod maker you would often see that a lot during mod development.

That's one of the reasons that DS2 uses a new system of saving games. DS1 and DSLOA use to save the absolute position of the party on the map together with all of the associated map data, etc, which is why the save files could be very large sometimes. This would allow the player to resume play on the same exact position they saved at with everything exactly the way they left it but could cause an exception detected message (use to see those a lot during development of Legends of Utrea) upon trying to load the game if there was the slightest problem with anything. DS2 is a lot more robust but you can only resume games from certain spots (mostly towns). You can still get "Exception Detected" in DS2 but generally only in trying to load a map with a problem mod or something corrupted entering the frustrum during play (seen both problems during development of DS2BW Adepts).

The first question is are you using any mods? Does the problem happen randomly or does it tend to occur in a certain area? You mentioned one case of opening a mule's inventory and finding it empty and then trying to reload only to get a crash - you're not using a mod that increases inventory capacity by chance? DS (all versions) has a hard coded limit of 255 items allowed in the inventory.

If you're using mods the first thing I would try is to play without them. If the problem still occurs perhaps you have a corrupted install and re-installing may help.

Memory management isn't very good with DS games, even with DS2. I only play the original DS1 maps in DS2 now with the help of the DS1MapPack mod and while exception errors don't occur (as far as I know and none have ever been reported to me), the disappearing world bug does pop up now and again. It's actually still there but the game doesn't render it so you can see anything - the party can still move in it, though you can't see them, and monsters obviously exist as you can hear them and the party can fight them. Reloading the game is the only solution.
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