Gaming Issues with EverQuest

[Tyler05]

Allllrighty,
So here's the dealio. About a week ago I was playing EverQuest, I had been playing it for about 2 weeks without any problems. Then one day I switched to windowed mode and it crashed on me. And, ever since then, it's been randomly crashing on me even when I'm in full screen mode. Sometimes it gives me an error message, other times I just get the blue screen of death and my computer restarts. I thought I had a trojan so I uninstalled EQ and posted in the Cyber Safety forums.

Tom helped me with my cyber safety problems, turns out I did have a trojan. After we got that cleaned, I attempted to install EverQuest again one night. It wouldn't even let me install this time, so I posted here and went to bed. I woke up the next day and went to work, and on my way home bought a new set of EQ discs (because one of the error messages it was giving me was that the disk might be scratched or corrupt), and when I got home put the NEW disks in to have a NEW error message pop up. So I went to the forums to see what Tom had posted for me during the day, and he posted a fix for InstallShield. Of course, he's fixed everything, so I do as he says, and he has a fix for me again. Perfect!

So I successfully installed EverQuest last night. I bought the Titanium edition and installed all 5 Cd's without a problem. When I went to start up EverQUest for the first time (since I completely wiped all the files related to EverQUest before), it told me I had outdated video cards, and I should download the news ones.

I downloaded and installed the new ATI video cards. I successfuly start EverQuest, get to the server select screen, make it to the character select screen, and when I push "Enter world" (to play my character in the in-game world) The client crashes. I restart the game, this time make it past the character selection screen, enter the world with my character, but when I go to "zone" (Load into another map), my client crashes again. So I'm back at step one.

I'm not a real big computer guy so I don't know my specs, but I bought a $2100 Alienware so it's a decent computer, so I don't think my video cards are incompetent. But I might be wrong. Do you guys have any clue what's going on?


Thanks,
Tyler

[smurfy]

Not a game I play or am familir with but a couple of thoughts to get the ball rolling...
1) The game uses .ini files to make global and user setting changes - they may not have been deleted on uninstall.
2) Is your character one you were using before the problems? The character file (.ini) may be corrupt and it wasn't affected by the uninstall.

Perhaps you could try this...
http://www.uncon.com/reverend/eqiniedit/help.cfm

[Tyler05]

Hi,

Well since the date of my last post I have re-installed EverQuest and DirectX and was playing with no issues up until a minute ago...Went to zone and bam, blue screen of death. I bought a new CD set so I don't think the CD's are corrupt. What could be happening? Is it possible that my computer just can't play the game?

[baboon]

What are the specs for your system?

[Tyler05]

Alienware
CustomPC
AMD Athlon 64 Processor
3500+
2.25 Ghz., 1.00 GB of Ram

Cut and pasted, I bought an Alienware becuase I don't know too much about computers, so I (thought) I bought something really good so I wouldn't have to worry about it.

Update also, I just attempted to run EverQuest, didn't even get to character select screen this time, just crashed after choosing a server. This is also after uninstalling McAfee which seemed to have been causing some problems...

It has run various other games just fine, including World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Diablo II, and Battlefield: Vietnam

[baboon]

OK you have a fairly new PC, you video card should be able to handle Everquest if it can handle WOW.
And if you are running WOW you have Direct X 9.0c.
Have you looked at the forums for that game to see if there are any others with this issue.
And have you checked to make sure that your Windows Firewall if not effecting this?

[baboon]

Are you getting any errors? Or is it just crashing (by closing the app all together)?

[Tyler05]

I am recieving errors sometimes, othertimes it just crashes to "blue screen of death" and reboots computer. The error I get is something like "Eqgame has encountered an error and needs to close". I troubleshooted the error with the EverQuest support base, but it just says either my video card is out of date (which is of course not the case), or some files are corrupt (which is also not the case, because Tom helped me quarantine my infected files before and after I had EQ installed). So it's a mystery. I love mysteries!

[baboon]

Ummm Nm what I posted you already did it.

[baboon]

Sorry More pointless ramblings, went along with edited message above.

[Tyler05]

I'm not quite sure what you want me to do, but let me be a bit clear on what EQ support says to do...This is cut and pasted from their site:

This error can be caused by many things however usually it is from an out of date video driver or corrupted file(s).

Check to make sure you have the latest video drivers by downloading them from here:

http://eqlive.station.sony.com/suppo...t/ts_video.jsp

Next install the drivers and restart the computer.

Now you want to delete the eqclient.ini, eqgfx_dx8.dll, EQGraphicsDX9.dll, eqmain.dll, eqhardware.ini and eqgame.exe from your EverQuest directory. One or more of those files maybe corrupt, causing these issues. To do this please follow these directions:

First look for your EverQuest directory. You can find your EverQuest Directory in these 2 likely locations:

Click on MY COMPUTER\C:\PROGRAM FILES\SONY\EVERQUEST

Click on MY COMPUTER\C:\PROGRAM FILES\EVERQUEST

Next look for the files eqclient.ini, eqgfx_dx8.dll, eqmain.dll, eeqhardware.ini and eqgame.exe, and delete them from your EQ directory.

Afterwards, please start EverQuest to have these files recreated by the patcher. Once the patcher has finished press Play and try the game.

I did as they instructed me to do, deleted those files that is, and restarted EQ...Only to get the same message (attached) as I did before, when loading my characters (after choosing a server). Are we closer or have any clues to solving this mystery?

[baboon]

Hey real quick have you tried to run a system scan on that Site.
Here is the link to it.

[Tyler05]

Well, it appears we may have found the problem. I don't have a pixel shader? And by the way, I'm not trying to play EQ2, I play the original EverQuest, but maybe the original EQ requires a pixel shader as well? It's weird, though, because my computer DID run EQ for a while...It's a mystery because it acts up randomly. Grrrr...

[baboon]

Ok did a little searching around and found that the 9600 series cards have smart shader 2.0.

[baboon]

OK The latest catalist is 6.4. It is recommended that SP2 be installed. and the microsoft .net framwork be inplace or it will not funtion properly.
Here is the ATI page for the downloads of 6.4 and Microsoft .net