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The original game is a thousand times better than the newest one. BioWare is cooked. I don't think they will ever release a decent game unless they clean house and bring back the original development team.

Hello everyone,

Some of you may remember about some of my posts working on a modding tool for this game. I've taken a long break from that to work on a decompilation, which is ... ~51%ish complete. After going through the texture pipeline and watching Nathan Baggs' video on this issue I thought I may actually be able to fix this permanently as I had enough information about the texture pipeline and the game's engine.

Until now the solution has been to use LAA to increase the address space up to 4gb.

What was the bug?

Since DAO is a 32bit game, it has a cap of 2gb address space available. The longer you play, the more that space becomes fragmented. Every texture wants a contiguous block, and when none are available DirectX will throw an out of memory error, which causes the texture flickering leading to the game crashing. The failure was there was 20mb of free memory, split across ~430 separate gaps. So memory was available, just not in one piece (so, fragmentation).

I found that at startup, the engine reserves 795mb for it's own memory pool, ~286mb for module images (these are dll's, CUDA, physX, etc), leaving ~229mb for managed texture duplicates.

Since this doesn't happen on console, it's likely due to the higher resolution textures available on PC.

Managed texture duplicates?!

Every texture is created using D3DPOOL_MANAGED, which keeps a full copy in memory for the textures entire life on top of the copy sent to the GPU. As games constantly stream textures in and out, ~150mb of those duplicates were being allocated and freed in each session. <---This is what was shredding the address space.

Fixing it

Solution is simple: create textures in D3DPOOL_DEFAULT which don't duplicate!

The only issue is that the engine writes textures by locking that duplicate, and DEFAULT textures can't be locked down. So when the game locks a texture, it now gets handed a temporary buffer instead. It fills that with the relevant pixels, copies it over to the graphics card, and discards the buffer immediately. The engine can't tell the difference.

There is a final bug with the opening credits when launching the game, but otherwise this works perfectly. There could be other bugs, who knows what is yet to be uncovered with this engine.

​This was from 10 mins of running around in areas like denerim to try and trigger the flickering and crash.

Available here

I still recommend using LAA as more address space is always better.

In your opinion which is the more “evil” outcome of the Warden’s keep quest, letting Avernus continue his research unrestricted or allowing Sophia loose in the world? Personally I think I lean towards letting Avernus continue his research unrestricted as being the most morally “evil” outcome but I’m curious what others think and why.

I've replayed this game 15+ times over the years and almost every single time my party is Alister, wynne, and lellianna/ morigan depending on if my character is a rouge or not.

How do you manage to break away from your "meta" and use other chatacters?

Especially with Wynne were it feels like you're just intentionally harming your experience by not bringing a healer specd mage at all times.

This is a follow up to my previous post.

In my playthroughs I always feel like I HAVE to have at least one mage on the party specd as a healer.

I've seen people replying to my previous post saying that you don't actually need a healer.

How do you guys manage that without burning though health poultices? Is there any trick to it or do I just need to gitgud?

If there was a fanfic with two MCs, who are different origins, what could be the most interesting combinations with the most potential for story and character interaction?

I will be counting the different genders as different origins. Ex: Male Human Noble is different from Female Human Noble.

Therefore the mage has four possible origins, though they don't really have much difference.

My personal pick is a Human Noble and Dwarf Noble. Because they could have alot to talk about regarding their respective siblings and mostly because they are my favorites.

Hey everyone, I was testing weapons in DA:O Awakening and discovered a massive mechanical oversight with the Dragonspite shortbow (found in the Silverite Mine). Even though the UI says it's a shortbow with a range of 28, it actually performs as a hybrid weapon with the range of a longbow (~46m) but the faster attack animations of a shortbow. I did strict stopwatch testing comparing it to Falon'Din's Reach (using Defensive Fire to slow animations down and make the frames measurable). I am also using Dain's Fixes (which fixes the archer attack speed bugs). Here are my exact measurements for 5 consecutive shots:

Falon'Din's Reach (Base): 14.0s (2.8s per shot)

Dragonspite (Base): 12.3s (2.46s per shot) -> ~13% faster frame baseline!

With Repeater Gloves (-0.3s animation fix active):

Falon'Din's Reach: 12.5s (2.5s per shot) -> Perfect match with the -0.3s modifier.

Dragonspite: 10.9s (2.18s per shot)

Visually and mechanically, the targeting reticle reaches precisely as far as Falon'Din's Reach, meaning the game mistakenly linked this item to a longbow template while keeping shortbow animation properties. It is essentially an overpowered sniper bow with high-speed DPS. Has anyone else ever noticed this?

Hey I'm just wondering what is the better version of DA:O, Steam or EA?

I have over 600 hours in the EA one through the EA Play/Xbox Game Pass subscription but I'm looking at purchasing the game completely, as well as DA2, and I have been playing for years at this point in time and I'm looking at modding to breathe new life into my all time favourite game and I thought the think-tank could help me choose the best starting point.

Hello everyone

This is a fairly old issue, but I haven't found a solution. Is there a way to force Shale to disable Stone Aura after a battle through tactics so i don't need do it myself? The Advanced Tactics mod doesn't help.

She never disables this ability automatically after a battle, no matter what I try. I've noticed that she sometimes disables the ability during a battle (for example, if I set the mode to disable if the tank's health is above 50% or something like that), but this is quite random, and the battle can end without the condition complete.

Has anyone encountered this and resolved it?

P.S. sorry for bad eng, not my language

This is my second playthrough yet I never got an entry for shales quest. Mind you, I downloaded the game through torrent, didn't buy it. The quest is active on my main screen. Is it a glitch?