it sounds like Dark Places is starting out with the real time lighting option on. You'll need to go to the graphics menu and change the setting
option labeled rt_world from on to off. Once the rt_lights are off, Dark Places will function pretty well for any graphic card. Yeap, it will take about three to five minutes just to get to that menu unless you have a blazing fast video card.:( 

That sounds like when I tried running a GL engine with a Glide Wrapper on my old ATI Mach 64 once... 

graphics card? Lemme guess it's some cheap ati? 

Turned off rt everything, decreased the screensize to a tiny little box, Then it ran with improvements. But thats no way to play the game!!

Do I just need a better video card? Im running it on a 2002 dell. I dont even have a Ati, just whatever came with this computer. 

check the video card in control panel, display devices.

no way to help you without havin some more info unfortuantely. 

Its very odd, I mean I could run darkplaces / fitzquake in 1024x768 just fine on my old geforce 3 what 4 years (??) ago. The only thing I can think of is to re-install your graphics card drivers, check that you dont have other programs running in the background, etc. 

Well, since they decided to fuck up the default config and not give the possibility to make it right in the menu, you have to resort to config editing. Here's how you fix it back to usable:

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/firefox-2/geek-to-live-top-firefox-2-config-tweaks-209941.php 

it's sometimes hard to find what embedded graphics you have.. you could try with sisoft sandra or some debugger memory print hacks or just looking at the motherboard.

Perhaps you don't have good opengl drivers for it?

Did the computer come with a manual or some driver cd? That could help too. 

This is just a heads-up for those of you that have orderd Dark Messiah of Might & Magic on STEAM.

Once the game has fully preloaded, right click on it go properties and then click on the "local files" tab and then click the "verify integrity of the game cache" button.

The reason is that the pre-load is missing sound files from the game which results in most spoken dialogue being replaced by an awful white noise that will destroy your playing experience and also your ears too...

Verifying the game cache takes 20-30 minutes and then steam will download all files that were missing and you will be good to go.

On the game itself, I've only played the tutorial mission and about 10 minutes of the game proper, so far so good, cant really comment on the gameplay yet because its mostly scripted stuff so far =) 

White noise....

Von and I will like that :) 

if you can comment more on it when you've had the chance to play, i'd appreciate it :) 

Intel (r) 82815 graphics controller.

As for a manual or a driver cd, the computer was given to me. Dont get me wrong, it has a pentium III. Its not a piece of junk. Its fairly new, so I cant uderstand why quake wont run darkplaces. I agree, it should! 

my gateway thingy uses the 82845 chipset, and i had a hard time running fitzquake at high quality settings. darkplaces ran like a disco strobe until the rt lighting was turned off.
..you need a gfx card 

try to run in software... i don't know which clients have software mode. Maybe joequake.
For starters you could just try fuhquake (quakeworld), it's very compatible. 

"Dont get me wrong, it has a pentium III. Its not a piece of junk. Its fairly new, so I cant uderstand why quake wont run darkplaces."

Does... Not... Compute 

So Im upto chapter 5-ish now, heres what I think so far:

The game design seems to jump from great to mediocre from map to map, there are some great set pieces and combat areas followed by some dumb chase sequence or a "proetect the NPC with 5hp" situations that get frustrating quickly, but on the whole so far it has been very enjoyable and I can overlook some poor segments as the good parts overshadow them well.

Combat is very good and feels meaty, if you've played the demo you know what to expect, the full game adds a lot more weapons, spells and bow types which all have their own special abilities and combos. The RPG element shows through in the weapons as the more powerful ones require skill points placed in certain skills in order to use them.

Ahh yes the skill system, well you are given skill points for completing mission objectives and finding secrets and completing side areas which you can then spend on upgrading a variety of your characters skills. These are set into 3 basic categories, Warrior skills, Assassin skills and magic skills. Putting more points in to warrior skills can earn you more HP, different combo attacks, increased weapon damage etc. Assassin skills can let you walk undetected, allows you to backstab enemies that have no detected you, and all kinds of things like that, while magic skills open up new spells, increase your mana pool etc.

It seems the game is quite generous with skill points too, so you can have a totally maxed out warrior build but also a fair few points in assassination or magic too, so there is plenty of room for quasi-warrior-mage characters.

The game has some really cool maps, my favourite so far is set in s string of mini-islands with lots of buildings attached to the sides of sheer cliff faces, with all manner of rope brides, cave systems, and rocky outcroppings to explore.

Overall I am enjoying it so far!

PS - This game has spiders, and they make my skin crawl! No other game has given my shivers when spiders appear quite like this one! They even crawl up the walls to get you! Yikes! 

Daz go map :p 

Agreed =) 

After the tutorial level the entire game consists of staring at a loading screen for Chapter 1, whose loading bar gets to about 70-80% and then never progresses any more.

Quite a lot of people seem to be suffering with this bug, and there are some more nasty ones like memory leaks slowing down the game massively on certain combinations of hardware and drivers. If you're thinking of buying you might want to wait until after the first patch.

I've tried some workarounds from Ubisoft's forums, they actually made matters worse for me as the game now freezes when loading my previous saves. 

Any finnish people here? (Friction I think?)

Could you please find me a contact email address for http://www.mbnet.fi/ or http://www.mikrobitti.fi/ (seems to be quite the same)? Some site/network/files admin one's prefered. I can't read a thing...

Thanks! :) 

what's czg05 infamous for? you ought to finish it, just because it's so far along and contains a lot of neat designs. cramped bits could use some cleanup, and the pipes generally horrify me, but there's a lot of awesome in there.

need to dress it up in idbase, though. the textures you used are a monotone horror (and I should know) :) 

I just went ahead and bought this and am installing now.

Probably because I'm just stupid. Also hopeful and optimistic. But mainly stupid.

Does anyone else appreciate the irony that the user agreement has both "licence" and "license" on the same display during installation? Also, from the box copy:

Notice: The game contains technology intended to prevent copying that may conflict with some disc and and virtual drives. (emphasis mine)

I'm sure that the presence of typos and errors in the installation and on the box don't mean anything though.

Also, when I manually edit the install path from the default
C:\Program Files\Ubisoft\Dark Messiah of Might and Magic to
F:\Ubisoft\Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
and click "Next", it changes the fucking install path to
F:\Ubisoft\Dark Messiah of Might and Magic\Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

I have to manually change it from the default (with the M&M folder included) to just F:\Ubisoft and then hit "Next" for it to sort things out and not shit all over itself with redundant folders.

Things that bode well = 0 

I got an email address. Thanks. 

pjw: Yeah I noticed most of that stuff, it's not exactly encouraging.

I've been able to experiment a bit more with making it go better: I had bought a boxed copy and just used the key to unlock a Steam preload so I didn't have to faff about putting the DVD in the drive. I tried installing the SP off the disk instead. With the DEP disable workaround and a massively bigger swap-file than I usually use, I can finish chapter 1. And then it locks up loading chapter 2.

Up until then, the disk version seemed to work a lot better than the Steam one. The disk install loads levels in about 15-20 seconds rather than the 3-4 minutes it takes the Steam version (both are installed on the same partition by the way). Some people were claiming that the Steam version's GCF files are more heavily compressed, but that's almost certainly untrue as the files are all exactly the same size between the two installs. 

Got it off steam earlier today, only had one crash (after a few hours of play, I'm up to chapter 5). No other problems with it though, it runs fairly well and load times are reasonable.
I'm quite enjoying it anyaways, going with an assassin at the moment, and dispatching people is fairly satisfying, just hope I'll be seeing some more monsters soon, humans are boring...
I like the fact that there are lots of secrets to find all over the place, encourages exploration.