I find it odd. I play arcanum(not safe or full screen modes) and surrounding all the objects is black boxes, as if the animation itself uses them. However if I play safe-mode it runs beautifully, no black boxes or any such. The only issue is that if I run safe-mode the game slowly lags and lags untill its frame-by-frame play. I run win 98 SE on an HP Pavillion 6740c(i know it sucks, my better PC has no room for anything, its got all my 3d games and stuff =/) Not only that, but even in the standard mode after a good hour of gameplay it starts to lag to. It seems like it is eating my ram, but I can't understand it since i easily meet the minimum requirements. Any ideas?
you should get one of those programs that cleans your RAM. if it doesnt help you should try to reinstall every drive you have(mostly video/audio)and if that wont work you should buy a new comp!
well I don't have this pronblem with any other direct X games, and yes I do run 8.0, I ran it with BG2/ToB and that game ran fine. Hell even MW4 runs great on this machine. I think it may be that my video card strongly dislikes arcanum, I tried to buy it a new video card (ATI radeon) but that card is not compatible with my PC =/
here is more specific info: ok I suffer from black box syndrome, however this is solved by simply playing in safe mode. Unfortunatly while in safe more(or even playing in standard mode with the black boxes) the game seems to simply devour my ram. After about an hour to 45min of playing I have to reboot, otherwise the game simply lags on the same frame for about a minute, and it does it frame by frame. I was looking through the readmes and found this: "If the game begins, once character creation is complete, and your top and bottom menu bars are visible, but the main game window is black or distorted, this would constitute a 3D video card problem. If you are experiencing video card related problems, you can disable 3D acceleration by exiting the game and launching Arcanum's Software Rendering Mode. The Software Rendering Mode (safe mode) is available via your Start Menu. The arcanum.exe command line option for Software Rendering mode is "-no3d"." Now I didn't have to type "-no3d" to get safe mode, that is already an option on the start menu. Is that "-no3d" bit require extra work? Do I have to add that to the arcanum.cfg file? Also is there anyway I can stop if from lagging every hour of gameplay? Below are my sys specs: HP Pavilion 6740c 64mb ram intel celeron Windows 98 SE (can't think of anything else, but if you ask I'll gladly put it forward). I used the direct X included with Arcanum(8.0 though I think I already had it installed, i followed the instructions given in the box).
My guess is that you´ve downloaded some cheats, I downloaded the exp cap remover and after I put it in it´s place I got blue squares around everything so I deleted it and now it´s fine again. So, delete all cheat stuff and reinstall it and it should be fine.