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Hey folks, I found SiS the other day and decided to give it a go, but unfortunately I find it difficult progress through the game after what is probably around roughly an hour of play. Whenever I meet a certain faction the game promptly locks up, then crashes and I get a report that my dgbhelp.dll is too old. Did I miss something? It only seems to be upon this particular event that the game has issues with whatever is apparently a problem. I can't see what faction it is, or if the particular planet (eltanin) is the problem, but I've no way to progress any further.
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Soleares: Hey folks, I found SiS the other day and decided to give it a go, but unfortunately I find it difficult progress through the game after what is probably around roughly an hour of play. Whenever I meet a certain faction the game promptly locks up, then crashes and I get a report that my dgbhelp.dll is too old. Did I miss something? It only seems to be upon this particular event that the game has issues with whatever is apparently a problem. I can't see what faction it is, or if the particular planet (eltanin) is the problem, but I've no way to progress any further.
It's probably a video driver problem. More specifically, I would guess that you're playing on an older laptop with an Intel Integrated driver? We do what we can to get it to run everywhere, but, officially, the minimum specs for Stars in Shadow include a dedicated video card. That requirement is in place because some older Intel-Integrated laptops have versions of this problem -- effectively, what you're seeing there is an "out of video memory" error.

On the chance that you're on a laptop with an NVIDIA card, there is a fix, see: this post.

But, otherwise, I'm afraid there's probably not much to be done.
Hey, thanks for the reply. It is indeed an older laptop (maybe 4/5 years), but while it does have one of those dreaded intel things, it also has an AMD Radeon HD 8500M Series card that I can (and do) select for actually playing games. Which I believe is just about is enough to run the game.

I'm also be surprised that I'd have issues with this game, but something like skyrim is possible, which seems like a vastly more demanding game, but that's just my opinion/estimation. Regardless, I can somewhat imagine what you're saying to be the case. It's not happened since, and I've restarted a new game, so I reckon it's indeed a video thing and not a specific event-based bug. I'll have to trust for now it's the issue you described and see if it improves once I've purchased a better piece of equipment.
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Soleares: Hey folks, I found SiS the other day and decided to give it a go, but unfortunately I find it difficult progress through the game after what is probably around roughly an hour of play. Whenever I meet a certain faction the game promptly locks up, then crashes and I get a report that my dgbhelp.dll is too old. Did I miss something? It only seems to be upon this particular event that the game has issues with whatever is apparently a problem. I can't see what faction it is, or if the particular planet (eltanin) is the problem, but I've no way to progress any further.
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ashdar_games_inc: It's probably a video driver problem. More specifically, I would guess that you're playing on an older laptop with an Intel Integrated driver? We do what we can to get it to run everywhere, but, officially, the minimum specs for Stars in Shadow include a dedicated video card. That requirement is in place because some older Intel-Integrated laptops have versions of this problem -- effectively, what you're seeing there is an "out of video memory" error.

On the chance that you're on a laptop with an NVIDIA card, there is a fix, see: this post.

But, otherwise, I'm afraid there's probably not much to be done.
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Soleares: Hey, thanks for the reply. It is indeed an older laptop (maybe 4/5 years), but while it does have one of those dreaded intel things, it also has an AMD Radeon HD 8500M Series card that I can (and do) select for actually playing games. Which I believe is just about is enough to run the game.
Hmm.... The 8500M is not a card we had much experience with, but, I've seen desktop cards as old as 4000 HD's run the game without issues, provided their drivers are up to date. I don't suppose there's a newer version of the AMD drivers you could try for your laptop?

Re: Skyrim, the core problem is that the game is written in OpenGL, rather than Directx, and the AMD and Intel OpenGL drivers are a bit quirky, particularly on older hardware. (The quirkyist of the lot is probably the AMD 7800 HDs, which actually seem to run the game better if they use the older Catalyst drivers, rather than the newer Crimson drivers-- there's a small chance this might also be the case for your 8500M. The old Intel HD 3000s are weird as well -- those adapters are virtually unsupported on windows 10, and, for some very strange reason, are often unplayably slow when the game is run 64 bit mode -- while they're playable, if crash prone, in 32-bit mode.)
Post edited December 25, 2017 by ashdar_games_inc
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ashdar_games_inc: … the core problem is that the game is written in OpenGL, rather than Directx, and the AMD and Intel OpenGL drivers are a bit quirky, particularly on older hardware. …
I can attest to this. My laptop (twelve years old and still chugging, 24 hours a day) cannot play this game. :(

No doubt the 32bit processor's integrated Intel graphics capabilities aren't.

This reply is to note that your error message contains a typographical error:

Exception caught in WinMain

Error - missing required OpenGL extension, EXT_framebuffer_object.

(Interesting side note -- your drivers appear to support ARB_pbuffer -- so a driver update might be all you need to fix this issue.


http://stars-in-shadow.com/modding
To wit, you have not closed the parenthesis that contains the hint.

Otherwise, I am unable to provide any further feedback for this game.

To wit, you have not closed the parenthesis that contains the hint.
That's annoying and is not projection of intellect.
Post edited June 09, 2019 by Flesh420.613

To wit, you have not closed the parenthesis that contains the hint.
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Flesh420.613: That's annoying and is not projection of intellect.
Yeah, I was actually impressed that you bothered to provide a hint that (mutatis mutandis) would actually be helpful. So thankyou for thinking ahead, but still not dice. :)