The infamous "freeze up" bug of Witchaven 2

[mathtek]

Hi there,

First of all, I'd like to express my deep satisfaction and excitement over the fact that this site and board exist. I'm one of those (not that many people?) who actually think the Witchaven demo is brilliant, especially the light shading work. I remember buying Wh 2 and meeting the bug, my system being a 486 DX4 running at 100 MHz. What happens is this: THE MAGIC WELL IS BUGGED. the way to solve it is to swap the magic well sprite with another one, using the level editor. It will then run smoothly at all times, you don't need a Pentium. Cheers everyone

[Corvin]

I'm not sure I've experienced a freeze bug before. But It's been awhile since I updated the editor manual.
If the Well code needs to be looked at, I'm sure EG is up to it at some point, that's the stuff he does.

How would you build it by swapping the well sprite?

[mathtek]

Well, you don't need the magic well to complete the game at normal difficulty level; I think it's probably just best not to use it in any maps that a person creates, if I understood your question correctly. The bug that I refer to is almost always mentioned in reviews of the game; I called it "freeze up", but it could be also described as an "increasingly slowing down" bug, I remember that my pc just ground to a halt after a while

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Interesting - I am adding this to my list of things to look into although I haven't noticed this to be an issue on any of my setups (even my old Windows 9x computer is a significantly faster processor than a 486 though - TBH I would not try to play Witchaven II on a computer that slow even if the specs claimed it was possible, though it's certainly imaginable that some performance issues might be related to bad programming). My initial hunch is that it has to do with the game spawning a lot of additional sprite entities (each of those little blue orbs that swirl around the well) but if it's doing anything additionally strange that might be slowing the game down I will try to fix that. I could also consider adding some additional special option to let the player turn off this effect without needing to hack the map files, if such proves to be useful.

It may be a bit because while I am finding a little more time for games lately, I do have a few other projects I want to address before jumping back into the WH stuff.

[mathtek]

That would be great; I've been holding on to this crumb of information for 20 years, always thinking that someone else would fix it the way I did or some other way; it seems not to be the case after all