Issues with Black and White

Posted 20 July 2001, 11:50 | by | Perma-link

As you may have noticed on the creature cave page, I've recently been affected by the "hanging save game" bug in Black & White. This meant that whenever I tried to save the game, or join an online game (which initiates a save), the system would hang. This was a day or so before the patch came out.

After the patch was out, and installed on my machine, I was still suffering from this problem… I was unable to start the process to join an online game, and when ever I just tried to exit, the system would still hang. Regardless, for what ever reason I decided to have a play with it the other day, (12th July), played for about an hour or so, whipping about Land 3, finishing off a few buildings here and there, and basically preparing myself and my creature for Land 4. Exited, and hung during the save. :( Never mind, I was only playing for an hour.

However, I ordered some more memory at the begining of the week, which arrived yesterday: 512Mb for the ridiculous price of £70! To think that four months ago I nearly spent 70 quid on 128Mb… sickening huh? And this is from Gateway's prefered partner for memory upgrades, so I'm fairly happy with it as far as reliablility goes… So in that went last night, taking me to the rather odd number of 640Mb RAM, but never mind. Pottered about in other apps and thought, "What the hell, I'll try B&W". Fired it up, and it was where I'd left off after playing on the 12th, not where it was before I started… so although B&W was hanging, I guess the save game bit had worked.

So I played for about an hour or so, finished up, exited, and went to make a cup of tea while it saved the game… came back, and the desktop was sitting there, no error messages, all happy. :D. Looks like it's fixed.

I guess the system just couldn't cope with only 128Mb, and swapping to and from disk all the time. :(

One other thing I did notice though was that one of the villages (The Japanese one at the foot of the temple mountain) had a glitch with it's desire flags - it was trying to display two flags on one pole, at different heights - Need for Offspring and Need for benevolence (Heart and Praying hands). Bit odd, if I can get a screen grab (assuming that it still does it) I will do.

Filed under: Games, Hardware