Some useful information for new runners

Hi, everyone!
Here is some general info that I think could be useful for future runners. 

1. Safe cracking is bound to your FPS! I would recommend the runners to cap their FPS at 30, which is what the Xbox 360 runs the game with. I think that is the intended safe cracking speed. Uncapped FPS is going to give you super speed when turning the cog wheels during the safe cracking mini game. You should definitely avoid this. 

Keep in mind that with capped FPS you can't do the Iceland fence skip. It only saves 2 seconds if done perfectly. I don't recommend going for that skip in full game runs anyway. 

2. How to prevent audio glitch softlocks: use the [widescreen fix](https://github.com/ThirteenAG/WidescreenFixesPack/releases/tag/scda) and then change the settings there to windowed. Playing on 1 or 2 CPU threads apparently also helps with this.

3. How to decrease load crashes: 
Don't input anything during loads. No mouse moving, no keyboard inputs. Nothing at all. Still doesn't work? Make the game run on 1 or 2 CPU threads. Still doesn't work? Make a shortcut of the game and add -ll as an option. I have no idea what that actually does, but it was suggested in some nVidia post as you can see here: [https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2079/~/splinter-cell-double-agent-crashes-when-loading-a-single-player-game](https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2079/~/splinter-cell-double-agent-crashes-when-loading-a-single-player-game "https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2079/~/splinter-cell-double-agent-crashes-when-loading-a-single-player-game") .

4. How to prevent the Cole Yeager interrogation room at the end of JBA HQ Part 1 from softlocking: 
That cutscene softlocks because Jamie doesn't spawn into that room correctly. This happens if Jamie is not in the server room but is stuck in front of the room's access panel. After fulfilling all objectives, make sure to go to the room with the access panel and watch Jamie activate it and enter the room. This will make him get teleported into the interrogation room correctly later on. If Jamie is not in front of the panel, that means he is already in the server room. That means you're fine. Just make sure you make it back to the training part in time before Moss does, so you don't lose any time. There is plenty of leeway, though. 

With all this info the game should hopefully become more runnable. Good luck!

Version 1 (PC) anti-crash methods

So the PC version of Double Agent is a mess. And I can’t guarantee you that the game won’t crash (a lot) but here’s some things I’ve done to help mitigate it a lot. 

Shanghai Audio Bug (can be present in other levels too)

This one you might have experienced is when the audio completely stops, by which I mean, there’s no in game music or voices. It’s also really disconcerting cos all you really hear is Sam’s breathing. It can happen in **any** level. Sometimes it saves time too, but due to the fact it’s a somewhat random bug, it’s not allowed for speedrunning. 

Unfortunately though, if it happens at the beginning of Shanghai, you’re going to softlock. You may have experienced this bug, when in the helicopter with Emile, there’s no dialog playing. The best guess as to why this happens is the game doesn’t properly manage memory, in this case RAM. It’s most likely loading files into the RAM to access them quickly, but it fails to load in the audio files it needs, or loads too much into RAM and can’t access them quickly enough. In any case, the symptoms of this bug are simple enough: 

Audio will not play in the chopper, all you’ll hear is background noise and Sam breathing really loudly. In Shanghai, this leads to you being stuck on the helipad when you land forever. The reason being, it can’t play the conversation with Sam and Hisham. 

To mitigate this, when you’re doing attempts (either full game or ILs) after a while RESTART the game. Depending how far your attempts go before a reset, I’d suggest restarting at least every 15-20 mins. Again, this is in my own experience and it helped the issue immensely. 

Another issue you may encounter & again, this is in Shanghai, is freezing during an auto save checkpoint. Unfortunately there’s no easy fix for this, some suggestions are changing the core affinity in task manager and allowing only 3-4 CPU cores OR reinstalling the game. I found this issue persisted on my Steam copy, but not with Uplay, so it’s hard to say for sure what will fix it. 

Crashing during cutscenes

This one is the most ridiculous, I think. It only happens when playing in a 16:9 aspect ratio. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean you need to play in 4:3 on your modern widescreen monitor - ThirtheenAG created widescreen patches for all the older splinter cell PC ports. His Github page is: https://thirteenag.github.io/wfp#scda

How this one works, is it tricks the game into thinking you’re playing in a different aspect ratio, so cutscenes won’t fail to load properly. It also unlocks the ability to select modern widescreen resolutions in the games options, otherwise you need to set your resolution inside SC4.ini. 

So, hopefully if you’re encountering crashes, bugs, etc these ideas will help you. Or at least make the game less of a headache. 

Glhf!

Name	Author
Some useful information for new runners	Distro 9 months ago
Version 1 (PC) anti-crash methods	Deleted 4 years ago