Game crash on area load.

My game is crashing quite regularly, when zoning into Lahtenda Bog. Although sometimes it lets me in just fine.

I've seen from other posts that this could possibly be a corrupt .dat file. Where would I go to redownload this file?

Also, I'm running Vista 64, i7, GeForce GTX 285 graphics card.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments

Try the -repair command and if that fails use the -image command. It might also be worth checking for driver updates for your graphics card as well.

Thank you,sir. I will give both of those a try when I return home from work, much appreciated.

Also, I have already updated the Nvidia drivers from Nvidia's site for that card in my first attempt to resolve the issue.

I've run both variances of updating the .dat file. I've updated to the latest video drivers.

I've even went in and turned the graphic settings way down. This allowed me to enter the zone, and get through 3-4 fights, before just completely going black and locking me out.

I'm thinking its some combination of Enabling post-process effects, the texture quality, and shader quality. But again only in this zone.

I cranked my settings back up, the defaults for me were all high, with vert sync, post-process enabled. And continued on with the primary questing, into new areas (areas I haven't been) and played flawlessly for hours.

The area as far as I can tell, if scrolled out, and with certain settings must have some incompatibility with my graphics card.

Please any other suggestions would be most appreciative.

Only Lahtenda Bog? That certainly points towards a .dat problem in my book.

-repair is very hit-and-miss - it quite often doesn't help at all. All -image does is update your .dat to the latest info - it doesn't replace what's already there, necessarily.

What you should try is deleting gw.dat altogether, then running gw.exe with the -image switch. That will give you a totally fresh .dat, and hopefully cure all your woes.

Lengthy download, though...

I would go with snograt's advice and if everything is working perfectly, backup your Gw.dat file in case the problem arises again.

I will try the removal and redownload of the gw.dat file tonight.

I skipped the area for now, and went on playing. I left the Nightfall area, and went to Lion Arch, and trekked across 5-7 zones trying to reach Fisherman's Ward. While on the way, went into Bergen Hot Springs. After being there for awhile and selling stuff, my wife wanted to ask me a few things. During that time, the game went black, and the sound started looping until I hard booted my machine off.

I run SpeedFan all the time to monitor heat and my card hovers at 70.

ThanX for the additional advice, I'll keep trying as I don't like the idea that I can't go to a specific area. I'm just glad I finished the primary quests in that zone prior to it not allowing me back in there for very long.

The re-download of the gw.dat file solved the issue for Lahtenda bog. Played fine for days. Now started a new Prophecies character, playing fine until I failed and was on my reattempt of Fort Ranik mission.

I died when the second wave came in, I didn't stay by the second trebuchet. Anyhow, now everytime I attempt to redo the mission, either right before I finish repairing the 1st trebuchet, or immediately after. The game goes to black, and the sound loops.

So with the logic above, I figured my .dat file was corrupted somehow. This somehow corruption might need to be addressed. However, since the last time I downloaded, I made a second copy of it prior to loading the game so I wouldn't have to download it again.

I proceeded to replace the file, and confident, marched right back to the Fort Ranik mission. Played through, completed the first treb, made it halfway to the second, and black screen sound looping.

I'm looking for any other suggestion on how to correct this, as in this instance I cannot proceed with the primary storyline.

Also, does anyone have insight on how or why the gw.dat file is corrupted. In my business I work with 300G DBs, and 50G data files, read/writing tons of data, and only in about 0.1% of the time getting straight up data corruptions due to hardware. If "bad data" shows up, nearly everytime its related to a coding error.

Quite odd, I've never heard of a .dat (or any database for that matter), corrupting that many times in quick succession... It suggests to me that it might not be a .dat issue after all and may be a problem with your hard drive. Might be worth performing a scan for bad sectors etc.

Yeah, it's a dat error but it's the cause of the dat error that's the issue. If you have more than one HDD installed, you could try moving the GW dir to the other drive. If not, get one - they're cheap!

Guild Wars is quite happy being moved around. When you start it after a move it will ask you where the data files are - which is rather friendly of it, in my opinion ^_^