Help! My Game Has Been Scuttled!

[Sheldon]

Hi everybody!

Silent Hunter III is one of my all time favourite games. I have played countless careers and scenarios over the years. Last week I started a new career and things were going well until shortly after I upgraded my VIIb to a VIIc. Our boat returned to Kiel after our seventh mission, we were refueled and re-supplied, and we set off on our next patrol mission off the southwestern coast of Ireland.

After barely leaving the harbour we received a message that our flotilla was being transferred from Kiel to St. Nazaire. Having played many careers, this transfer was expected. But then, five seconds later, a message told us our base had been transferred to Kiel. Then five seconds later a message informed us we had been transferred to St. Nazaire. Then back to Kiel, etc. This just kept repeating. I tried ignoring it and just carrying on with the mission but the messages never stopped.

I exited the game and did a web search and learned that there WAS a known bug with the Kiel/St. Nazaire error. It advised that I change one digit in one of the CFG files and I looked but my CFG was already correct (per the suggested change).

7th Flotilla Radio Bug
There is a bug with the 7th flotilla whereby if you are in 7th Flotilla in September 1940 and thereafter the game will keep telling you "New Base Kiel" and then "New Base St. Nazaire" whenever you load up the career. The problem is that the Flotilla.cfg lists 7th Flotilla as being in both places during that month. To fix the bug, go into Flotilla.cfg and scroll down to the 7th Flotilla listing. There you'll find the following lines:

Flotilla2=904
TO2=940
NbStartingDate2=5
NbDate2=7
Emblem2=data/Emblems/SubEmblems/Flotillas/7th flotilla.tga
NbBases2=3
Base2_0=750;Kiel
Date2_0_0=1939
Month2_0_0=8
Date2_0_1=1940
Month2_0_1=9

The last number - the 9 is what needs to be changed. Change it to 8 and that should solve the problem.

As an experiment, I tried changing my file to what the bug fix thought I should have had (before the fix) and restarted the game. I began mission 8 all over again but the same issue prevailed.

I reset the CFG file to what it was before I tinkered and decided that it was early enough in the career that I hadn't lost too much time so I would just start a new career. Mission One was going well. Everything seemed to be fine. I saved the game normally. Later, I tried to play and the normal splash screens appear and the game starts loading. Halfway through the loading process the game crashes and I am asked to tell Microsoft about it. I tried again, same result. I restart the PC (XP Pro SP3 with 8800 GTS 512) and try again, same result.

My game is now dead and I cannot play it any more.

Any guesses as to what happened? Any suggestions about what I should try? Might a full re-install of the game fix this glitch? Will the copy protection lock me out if I uninstall and reinstall? I have never before had a game die like this. I have not installed any new software for at least two months. There have been no hardware changes in over a year.

Any suggestions are appreciated. I figure if anyone will know it will be you guys!

[nikbear]

Giving this a 'Bump' so that someone might help you out soonMust admit its a new one on me Perhaps if you list your game setup,Stock?,GWX? or any mods that you may be running or anything like that,just to give the clever bods on here some idea of what might be the cause or any possible conflicts or known errors,always a startHope your fixed soon

[Sheldon]

Thanks, nikbear. I appreciate it.

My game is vanilla stock with an improved smoke mod ... and I have the Das Boot soundtrack mp3s for the gramophone.

I am fairly tech savvy and run a clean, secure PC. The last software changes was the installation of a game (Dead Space) and a graphics driver update -- both occurred about two months ago. I have probably played SHIII 30 times since then with absolutely no problems until the fateful day.

This one has me stumped. I will be a sad skipper if a re-install triggers the copy protection. This is still the first install so I think I should be okay.

[Savage]

just for poops and giggles, when u did ur driver update did you run a driver sweeper program? or possibly try to roll back the drivers? just a possibilty. Also is there any error code that you could possibly paste in here?

[Sheldon]

Is a driver sweeper like a mine sweeper? Never heard of such a thing. My driver update was directly from Nvidia and seems to be fine.

Last night I tried loading the game again and it still crashed. I ran a memory diagnostic and confirmed there was no bad memory. I ran a fragmentation check and there was only minor (insignificant) fragmentation. No culprits. No clues. The error message from Microsoft did not contain any useful remarks.

So ... with a big sigh and no other option ... I uninstalled the whole program including all saves and profiles. Then I re-installed the game. I patched it to 1.4. I didn't bother with the smoke mod but did copy over the mp3s for the gramophone. I did NOT modify the CFG.

So far, so good. The game loads. I could save my game then I exited the program and tried loading the game again and it worked. FWIW, the game does seem to load a little bit faster. Not minutes ... but faster by a few seconds.

Just posting this follow up for posterity in case this glitch should happen to any of my fellow skippers. Thanks for all your suggestions. I appreciate it.

Now ... there's a big, fat merchant convoy out there that needs to be sunk so off I go.

[Task Force]

Driver sweeper is a program that deletes old drivers... so you dont have a halfway uninstalled driver or something with 2 drivers.