Screen goes permanently black after shutting off car battery

[enorvelle]

Greetings all,

I recently purchased the OS X version of Penumbra: Overture, and have made it through the first couple of areas (the game is excellent, kudos to the developers!).

I have just crossed the electric fence which protects the storage room with gunpowder, dynamite, etc. Just behind the electric fence, there is what appears to be a car battery. When I touch this battery to turn off the fence, the entire screen goes black and the CPU usage hits the roof.

I can still hit [Tab] to pull up the Inventory screen, and I can hit [ESC] to get back to the menu (although both of these take a second or two to pop up, due to the CPU overusage).

The only "solution" is to quit the game and restart, but I'm stuck because I can't turn off the electric fence.

I am running a MacBook Pro 2.2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB memory, OS X 10.5.3. My version of P:O is 1.0.3.

Has anyone else run into this problem, or is there anyone from Frictional monitoring this forum that could help me resolve it?

Thanks,
Erik Norvelle

[Urkle]

Can you zip up the saved game from just before that and attach it to this thread?

Also, what resolution are you running and what video card.

The saved games are in your home folder under "Library/Preferences/Frictional Games/Penumbra/Overture/"

[enorvelle]

I posted this message before discovering that the problem DOES reoccur... please see next post below
-----------------------
Greetings and thanks for the quick reply.

I had been playing at 800 x 600. I changed the resolution to 1440 x 900 and the problem stopped.

Strange!

Cheers,
Erik

[enorvelle]

Sorry about the earlier post, it turns out that the problem DOES reoccur after switching the resolution to 1440 x 900.

My graphics card is a GeForce 8600M GT.

I have attached the save file for your reference.

Cheers,
Erik

[Urkle]

Hmm..

Is you desktop a 1440x900? I do know of issues with the ATI cards that if you don't run at the correct aspect ratio things don't display quit correctly.
Anyways. I'll load up the saved game on my box and test.

enorvelle Wrote:Sorry about the earlier post, it turns out that the problem DOES reoccur after switching the resolution to 1440 x 900.

My graphics card is a GeForce 8600M GT.

I have attached the save file for your reference.

Cheers,
Erik

[enorvelle]

Greetings,

I am able to get around the problem by not shutting the battery off directly, but instead going to the storage room and breaking open the gunpower barrel. I don't know if that has any cause-effect relationship, but when I went back later to try to deactivate the battery, it worked.

Thanks again for the quick responses.

Erik

[ikir]

I have this problem too. When i turn off the battery all goes black i can't do anything.

More strange i loaded the last saved game and i can't move the wood axis anymore, when i use them with left mouse button they totally disappear.

Please help

PS: i play in 1680x1050 as my desktop res. NVidia 880GT MacPro quad 2,66

[Lysius]

You do not need to disconnect the battery. You just have to get back over the fence. If you build a bridge over the fence you can use it in both directions.

[ikir]

Lysius Wrote:You do not need to disconnect the battery. You just have to get back over the fence. If you build a bridge over the fence you can use it in both directions.

But it is a bug anyway...

[Lysius]

ikir Wrote:

Lysius Wrote:You do not need to disconnect the battery. You just have to get back over the fence. If you build a bridge over the fence you can use it in both directions.

But it is a bug anyway...

Sure.
I wanted to say that this bug might be annoying, but it should not stop you from continuing the game.