Right, so I bought this game from Steam yesterday, have been playing it for a few hours straight since, it runs perfectly fine. Now though, I've hit a problem.

I'm on the chapter where you first fight Orcs, I've killed a load and met a big evil dragon thingy, hooray, but after that you meet with a soldier and head through this little passageway and jump off a small ledge, here it hits the usual 'Loading' bit you get between areas. Normally that finishes relatively quickly and I move on, but not here, after waiting several minutes it eventually crashes to desktop with the error in the title.

Like I said, up to this point it's been running very well, just now it won't go any further.

Cheers, Crimson.

The Steam version is automatically updated (unless you disabled that option in your Steam Preferences) so it can't be a lack of patches.

quote:

I'm on the chapter where you first fight Orcs, I've killed a load and met a big evil dragon thingy, hooray, but after that you meet with a soldier and head through this little passageway and jump off a small ledge,

Nope. After the dragon (PaoKai) you kill 2 goblins, free a pillar by cutting a rope, walk over it, kill 2 more goblins, see a fence going down before your face, return to Leanna, enter a spider pit and... more, much more.
The first human soldier you meet is in the next level. Could you be more precise please.

It could be you jumped between textures (can happen), then reload previous savegame.

Could also be you need driver updates and/or your settings are wrong.

Check this thread out.
If you would like my active assistance follow the link in my sig.

I guess he was talking about Duncan, Nero.
Anyway "classname" is an entities key in the .bsp files, this error could be achieved with a corrupt game file.
You (Crimson) could try exctracting files from mm_levels_public.gcf with GCFScape (the link is somewhere around, too lazy for clicking the "Find" button...), or try refreshing the Steam content for the game.

Duncan is the one I do believe, it's where Leanna tells him to go look after the ship. If you can't tell, I have a bad memory! If it is really necessary, I'll go back and check for you.

'Corrupt game file' sounds vaguely ominous, I'll try doing what you say with the extracting bit, and then if neither that or reinstallation works, then... eh, let's just hope they do.

Edit:

Or at least, I would try what you said if I could find that link, I've tried seraching for mm_levels_public.gcf and I didn't find much, any help here?

quote:

classname missing from entity!

can happen when you have cheating enabled, and/or spawned npc's.
Or when your system is underspec or drivers outdated.
Also, try to run "Verify integrity" and "Defragment" in Steam > My Game > Dark messiah > Properties.

Ok here's the link.
From its readme.txt:
Q.
When I open a package I get the following error message:
"Corrupt file."

A.
GCFScape will display this error when it maps a package file to memory only to
find there is not enough data in the file for the resulting map. This may or may
not mean your file is corrupt but almost certainly means GCFScape would crash it
continued to load your package file.

So far, one error in GCFScape means a corrupt file to me.
Then, since each entity in map files must have a "classname" key in order to work...