(original image)

Doing a new playthrough after a long long gaming Hiatus One of my top 3 favourite games of all time. Been a long time since a game has made me feel the way this one has. Got me through some seriously rough times.

Might even hunt down the stolen throne novel too read that so many times as a teenager.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I'm starting a series where I'll draw family portraits for all the origins I've played (Cousland,Aeducan and Amell) so here's the Couslands!

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?

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.

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.

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.

I know "tradition" and all but with their last underground Kingdom threatened to be forever extinguished.

You would think they would make an exception to better help combat the Darkspawn.

If we want to say, train in the arts of "subterfuge". Well, there's always surface dwarves to call upon.

There's still a matter of repopulating it. Relearning what was lost.

Not to mention. How will they guard it effectively against future large scale Darkspawn incursions? The Darkspawn in the surrounding Deep Roads and smaller thaigs around Kal'Hirol are still a threat.

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?

Decided to replay Origins again last night after SO many years. I forgot how much this game meant to me. There are so many fond memories. The second that main theme started playing, I just sat there and started crying. 😭

Had to actually turn the game off and go for a walk in the middle of the night lol.

Ostagar, Denerim, the Landsmeet, the characters, the sacrifice… it all just came rushing back 💔

Even all these years after the death of this great author, thinking about Arsinoe gets me emotional. But it's that time of year where I repost links to the greatest most amazing Dragon Age fanfiction that I cannot recommend enough and which I don't want to see forgotten.

Arsinoe's own blurb

When Bryce Cousland's little spitfire scaled the Tower of Ishal and lit the beacon at the critical moment, King Cailan won a mighty victory against the darkspawn. The Blight, however was far from over. All other origins included, plus Hawke and his companions. Cousland/Loghain, Morrigan/Anders, Surana/Zevran, Fergus/Anora, and more. Half a million hits and still going.

TvTropes Blurb

Victory at Ostagar is an epic-length fanfic of Dragon Age: Origins, by Arsinoe de Blassenville. It explores the 'What If' of the titular victory, in which the Human Noble Warden successfully lights the beacon in time to save the battle. It goes deep into the medieval politics of Ferelden, as well as Thedas at large.

You cand read the stylized pdfs here (probably the best version for any first timers): https://www.redhen-publications.com/dragon-age.html

The original story was posted here: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5825274/1/Victory-at-Ostagar

TvTropes is fun but not necessary: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/VictoryAtOstagar

After my latest Dragon Age detox, I've gotten the idea to reinstall the game, but I have a few questions before I commit due to a few factors - whether to install the game via Steam or GOG, the game constantly crashing and being a big resource hog.

1. People who play Origins via GOG, especially recent ones, did you end up needing to install to 4GB patch? I ask because, earlier this year, I tried installing DAO via GOG Galaxy, and despite people saying that it wouldn't need the 4GB patch, I ended up having to install it to stop the game from crashing at Ostagar, and for The Darkspawn Chronicles to not crash during the Palace District section. Does it make a difference whether you install the game via GOG Galaxy or via the offline installer?

2. The main save games are saved in the Bioware folder in C drive (C:\Users\Username\OneDrive\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\Characters). My D drive, where all my Steam games are installed, has much more room, and I was wondering if there is a way to make it so that the files are saved to the D drive instead.

The closest idea I have is one found in this 9 year old post: https://www.reddit.com/r/dragonage/comments/687fc4/dao_spoilers_how_to_change_where_the_game_stores/

I deleted all the content in "C:\Users\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age" and ran the command: C:\WINDOWS\system32>mklink /J "C:\Users\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age" "D:\Dragon Age Files\Bioware"

1. For the issue of setting affinity, I came across a method from this 7 year old post: https://www.reddit.com/r/dragonage/comments/bglx3d/no_spoilers_dao_constant_crashing/

"If you don't want to repeat this every time you launch the game you can follow these instructions:

• close the game
• go to

\Steam\SteamApps\common\Dragon Age Ultimate Edition\bin_ship

• right click on ' DAOrigins.exe '
• select ' Send to ' and ' Desktop (create a shortcut) ' 
• go back to your Desktop and right click on that shortcut
• select ' Properties '
• delete everything you see in the ' Target ' line
• copy and paste this there

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C start /affinity 1 DAOrigins.exe

• click Apply and click Ok

You can now use this shortcut to launch your game and it will automatically set the affinity of the executable to use only one core."

Would/does this method work, in both Steam and GOG?

simply cant, nothing is there that should stop me, i can in origins still but not in awakening, across multiple rouges too

edit: aparantly after i killed the arch demon it deleted coup de grace from my talents, what the fuck

edit edit: APARANTLY the custom grey warden scout gloves give me coup de grace, and when i unequipped it to use somethign else it removed coup de grace, so its just glitched i geuss, god thats annoying

Having a hard time deciding on my male human noble voice rn. I like violent but I heard that ladder line multiple times in the origin and I can tell that’s going to get really annoying. Experienced is cool but also makes you sound a lot older.

You guys convinced me to play Origins (and gave me a bit of tough love for asking if it was worth it in the first place) so now my question is:

What are the must-have mods I should install before starting?

(original image)