I recently purchased Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition. I began to notice some sluggishness when moving items around and when switching between characters on the inventory screen. Whenever the sluggishness got too bad, the game would freeze and then crash. This was happening often enough that it was becoming difficult to play the game, enough so that I began the process of asking GoG for a refund (I have since cancelled the refund request, now that the game is running smoothly). None of the standard GoG troubleshooting solutions made any difference. Searching the internet discovered a few other people who had the same problem, but no working solutions for me. For some people, the problem evidently went away after they removed some mods that were causing problems (invalid items were in the inventory). My game is a fresh install, no mods, so I knew that couldn't be the issue.

I am writing this post to share my solution, in the hopes that it may help others who may be experiencing the same problem. I would suspect that the issue may be present in other Enhanced Edition Infinity Engine games from Beamdog as well, so I'll list them here for the search engines to key off of, in case people playing the other games are experience similar problems: Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate, Bldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and Throne of Bhaal. I have no idea if any of the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition games would be affected, but I'll list it here too, just in case. I don't own any of the other Enhanced Edition games, so I can't test any of them to find out.

I eventually realized that the problem may be related to OpenAL32.dll, since every single mouse-button related interaction with the user interface produces a sound, whether it be a click and/or a party member saying something. Hardware accelerated 3D sound has caused me problems in several games in the past, and OpenAL32.dll was definitely the culprit in at least one of those, so I suspected it might be the culprit here as well. Searches turned up many people who were missing OpenAL32.dll entirely, but none that linked it to the problems I was having. At least I was able to confirm that the game does indeed use OpenAL32.dll.

The solution to all my problems was to override the version of OpenAL32.dll the game was using with a different version, by copying the replacement DLL into same directory as Icewind.exe. A working version of OpenAL32.dll can be obtained from the open source OpenAL Soft project: https://openal-soft.org/#download

This is an entirely software implementation, no hardware acceleration whatsoever. I suspect that, as a result, the entirely software implementation tends to fix crashes related to buggy combinations of hardware acceleration and not-so-wonderful sound card drivers.


How to install:

Exit the game if it still running. Download the most recent Windows .zip file (currently, openal-soft-1.21.1-bin.zip). Extract the \bin\Win32\soft_oal.dll to the directory that you installed Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition into (same directory as Icewind.exe). Rename the new soft_oal.dll to OpenAL32.dll. Now, Icewind.exe will use the replacement OpenAL32.dll instead of whichever other version it is using.

When you next launch the game, you may notice that the game sounds a little bit different than before. For me, the background echoey ambient crypt/hallway sounds sounded more realistic, but at the expense of some of the sound effects perhaps sounding somewhat muffled. If you extract the 'alsoft-config' directory from the openal zip file, you can run the included alsoft-config.exe program to toggle various special effects on/off. For me, unchecking 'EAX reverb' made the game sound pretty similar to how it did originally. However, I'm still keeping it enabled, since I got used to it pretty quickly, and find the ambient sounds to be more immersive than before.

After installing the new OpenAL32.dll, all of the various sluggishness and crashes went away. I hadn't realized that pretty much the entire user interface had been at least somewhat sluggish before. Even the intro video had some sluggish delay (and some audio glitches). Now, everything runs extremely smoothly, no sluggishness, no audio glitches, no crashes after 2 nights of playing. I also haven't had a single Alt-Tab related crash since installing the new OpenAL32.dll, so it appears to have fixed that problem, too. Maybe it's just that my onboard audio is somewhat crappy (SoundMax integrated audio on my ASUS P6T WS Pro motherboard), but forcing the game to use a 100% software 3D audio solution made a HUGE difference for me.

It looks like there is an in-development 2.6 patch from Beamdog that Steam users can opt-in for testing, that is 64-bit only (32-bit support will be removed from all Enhanced Edition games in the future). Once the patch is released and GoG updates to 2.6, you may need to use the 64-bit version of soft_oal.dll instead of the 32-bit version. If so, the OpenAL Soft documentation states that you'll still need to rename soft_oal.dll to OpenAL32.dll, even though it is the 64-bit version.