NWN2: Storm of Zehir – Assertion Failed!

Veggen — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:16:57 +0000

Sure, it’s nice to fire up your game, kick back and enjoy whacking mooks, but what do you do when that other thing happens? When your game refuses to load and splats an error message over the screen instead? And it turns out that your almost-end-game saves are corrupted?

Well, Storm of Zehir gave me quite an opportunity to explore this situation… Every time I tried to load a saved game, I’d get this:

Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library
Assertion Failed!

Program:…
File:.\exoresman.cpp
Line: 4221
Expression: 0 && “Huge file requested in resource manager. Please see exoresman.txt in the log directory for info.”

After some time of aimlessly mucking around, I decided to take the extreme route – reinstalling an 11GB heavy game and re-patching it with a gigabyte worth of fixes… Still, that had to fix the issue, right? Well… wrong! The same ugly error kept clawing at my nerves, over and over again.

But, it is in the vilest of nights when the brightest of lights shine, and thus, the (not so) hidden genius in me awoke in this dire moment and came up with a solution! It couldn’t be that all the files in my save got corrupted! If I could just locate that rotten one… Hmmm… So, I eagerly started a new game and made me a fresh save to play with. Copying and overwriting randomly chosen files soon began to point out the perpetrator. It’s name was G_X2.Z and it had to pay for it’s crimes. A merciless deletion was in order, and a fresh copy from my newly made save soon took it’s place. Now, the moment of truth was upon me… Will it load? …some seconds passed in tension… and… YES! It worked!
My characters were waiting for me, right where I left them, ready to leap into the next quest. But after all that work… I just wasn’t up to it…

Instead, I went to bed feeling all warm and fuzzy on the inside, thinking about all the relaxing time I’ll spend with my characters tomorrow.

***

Now, here’s a quick overview of the process that will get you back in the business after the dreaded “Assertion Failed!” message spoils your day:

Start a new game (the same campaign as the one you’re trying to load), and save as soon as you get the chance.
Go to the folder where the saves are kept (inside My Documents under Windows).
Open the new save and copy the file named G_X2.Z (for SoZ, different name for other campaigns) into the save you’re trying to load, overwriting the existing one.

NOTE: Some map nodes will disappear (as if you haven’t discovered them), but you will be able to load your game. More than acceptable in my opinion.

Go ahead and enjoy this strange mix of innovativeness and utter shallowness, known as Storm of Zehir.

That other thing

NWN2: Storm of Zehir – Assertion Failed!