Every so often, something comes along to surprise me.

Case in point: out of nowhere, some six years after its initial release, Glastenel Dragon has released an update for Ultima IV Reborn, one of the two Neverwinter Nights-based remakes of Ultima 4.

Based on player feedback, Glastenel has evidently gone and corrected a number of bugs and errors in the remake. So if you still have that old copy of NWN laying around, good reader, this one might be worth checking out.

So I have a conundrum.

Suspecting that the source of my Windows computer’s instability might be the existing video card (a Radeon 9600 XT), I went and picked up a Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 — pretty much the most powerful AGP graphics card in existence today. (ATI has always been my preferred brand.)

Anyhow, I installed the card and its drivers, and proceeded to test out Neverwinter Nights. That’s where the trouble started: NWN crashed, every time. I did some digging, and found a few hints in various places that the issue may have something to do with ATI’s Catalyst software — certain versions of the control center application evidently conflict with NWN, for example.

Things got worse when I tried to switch Catalyst versions (Sapphire ships the card with what I believe is Catalyst 8.4). Reverting to Catalyst 7.11 (apparently a very stable version) was no help: the driver didn’t support the card. Installing the Omega Drivers — which use Catalyst 7.12 — didn’t work, and for the same reason.

Installing the Catalyst 9.4 update/hotfix from Sapphire didn’t improve things any. And to add insult to injury, the Cayalyst drivers that can be downloaded directly from ATI’s website actually don’t support the card in question (it’s a relatively new card from Sapphire: AGP support and 512 MB of DDR3 memory).

Nothing seems to make NWN work. Which is a pain, as I’d hoped to start work on a new idea that would have greatly benefitted from the enhanced performance the HD 3850 promises.

A bit more searching today furnished me with downloads, from Sapphire, of Catalyst 8.7 through 8.9, and I’m hoping one of these will do the trick. Failing that, I plan to try reinstalling NWN, to see if that could somehow be the issue. I’ve already tried the critical rebuild patch for NWN 1.69.

Failing THAT, I’m thinking of maybe trading the card in for an eVGA nVidia GeForce 6200 LE and another 1GB stick of DDR RAM (this doubling what the system is currently equipped with).

nVidia cards apparently play nicer with BioWare games in general, although the 6200 is not as powerful, by a fair bit, as the HD 3850.

In the end, though, raw power is less important to me than that NWN runs, preferably at a frame rate in excess of 30 at a resolution with at least 600 pixels vertically (720 preferred) on a 16:9 monitor.

Thoughts? Should I even waste time on the HD 3850, or should I just swap it for the 6600 and the RAM? Has anyone else had this issue before and resolved it successfully?

I’ve been working on a bunch of stuff in Lost Sosaria proper, but the site design was getting on my nerves (am I ever happy?), so I opted to shift to something I found to be a little more…pleasing. And old-timey.

Also, I’ve changed the gallery component there away from Coppermine, and over to something a little more WordPress-integrated. Among other things, it adds some nice AJAX magic to image-viewing, but also allows me to display gallery sections here on the site without having to redirect the Reader to a gallery sub-site.

NWN 1.69 was just released; this is the final patch BioWare plans to release for the game. It introduced a bunch of new tilesets and graphics changes, so some of the tilesets I’m using will be adapting to those changes in the near future; look for such changes to be reflected here on the site as they happen.

Produced by: The Red Mage
Website: NWVault
Releases:
* Pagan Demo (0 bytes)
* Demon Hak (0 bytes)
* CEP (not hosted locally)

This remake of Ultima 8, which is in no way related to the Ultima 8: Exile project, appeared on the Neverwinter Vault in August 2004 without any prior indication of its being worked on. The Red Mage appears to be making a faithful remake (nothing in the module seems to indicate that the Lost Vale will be making an appearence) of the game, and the module appears to have roughly half of Pagan mapped out.

The module requires Adam Miller’s Demon Hak to play, as well as the CEP and both official NWN Expansion Packs.