Bizarre game bug (Mass Effect)

[Carfax]

OK, for the last few days I've been struggling trying to get Mass Effect to load without crashing on start up.

I would get the "Failed to load material" and "Failed to find object" error in my log.

I knew it had a problem with my Soundcard, a Soundblaster X-Fi Fatal1ty, because disabling the device in device manager solved the crashing issue and the game would boot normally, but without sound of course.

Many people have complained about this issue judging by what I've read on the Bioware forum and across the net, and have taken drastic measures such as removing and renaming dll files etc.....

I tried all of those solutions and none of them worked. I was getting really pissed off because it's definitely a great game, albeit buggy as hell.

So while I exhausted all possible solutions, it occurred to me that I hadn't even tried the most basic.....which is to switch to a different audio driver.

I had the latest X-Fi drivers from Creative, but I thought that maybe if I used an older one, it could possibly work.

So I went to Creative's website and downloaded their older driver dated for 14 Mar 2008.

Installed it, rebooted and started Mass Effect...

It WORKED! I couldn't believe it :clap:

After much elation, I exited the game and went straight to the audio control panel to set things up.

Started the game again, but this time, it crashed!

I was like, WTF!! :mad:

But I knew I was on to something. Since it worked the first time, I thought that maybe it was something in the audio settings that was causing the crash.

So I tried different settings, ie enabling and disabling the crystalizer, enabling and disabling EAX etc..

None of those worked....but I knew it had something to do with the settings!

Anyway, so I played with it a bit more and finally isolated the problem....and I was shocked!

The problem was the audio volume!!

Apparently, turning the master volume all the way up the max (or very close to it) was causing the game to crash!

I tested this numerous times by trying out different settings, and no matter which permutation, if the volume was maxed out, the game would CRASH on start up.

So now I have the volume three notches under maximum and the game is working perfectly :up:

This is by far the most bizarre game bug I've ever encountered.. :shrug:

[Zigosity]

I had weird crackling\popping audio problems when I played through Mass Effect, I don't remember how I fixed them in the end. Seems like it's pretty hard on soundcards...

-Zigosity

[SamHughe]

Interesting find. I think the problem is stemming from your x-fi rather than from the game. I had a similar problem with Company of Heroes. It would crash no matter what I do. I even considered replacing my GPUs. then I switched to x-fi titanium (pci-e) and suddenly everything works fine!

[Carfax]

Interesting find. I think the problem is stemming from your x-fi rather than from the game. I had a similar problem with Company of Heroes. It would crash no matter what I do. I even considered replacing my GPUs. then I switched to x-fi titanium (pci-e) and suddenly everything works fine!

Apparently, the problem isn't only with Mass Effect, but with Gears of War as well. Maxing the volume crashes the game.

I think it must be an OpenAL issue, because I don't have problems in all my other games when I max the volume.

[Katanai]

Yeah, I had problems with sound too. I think I just changed the in game setting to 2D audio to make it work. It seems that the game is buggy that way. Nonetheless with all its flaws it's one of the best games ever imo.

[insayno27]

There is some good info on that problem listed on http://www.tweakguides.com. It helped fix my X-Fi problems anyways.