Here is what I was getting:

When I would start up Sins the screen would be black for a little bit, as it always is on start up then I'd hear a windows error ding and the game would not load. Sometimes I'd still be looking at a black screen so I would Alt-Tab out of it and see a mini-dump report. Other times I really couldn't do anything. I updated to the latest drivers for both video and sound and even reinstalled but also made the mistake of putting the custom galaxies and bonus content back in the game folder, so it still didn't work.


Well in retracing my steps to figure out where I was going wrong, I found out it was a custom galaxy file that I created and put in the galaxy folder but the specific line item (in my case) that was causing the error was a string I added that I thought would turn off the local militia. I had seen this earlier on the boards but it may have been from a beta version or not verified so the line item in particular was:

hasStartingPlanetPirates FALSE

After removing that I was able to load up the game just fine. The IC/SD reps or moderators have been coming on to say the issue sounds like a corrupt file and in this case it was, so although yours may not be the same exact issue go back and double check all the galaxy files you may have edited outside of the Galaxy Forge (i.e. in Notepad). If there was anything custom you did it may be incorrect syntax and is causing the problem. Furthermore, if you downloaded other user's custom content you may have to try just removing them 1 at a time or all to get it to work again.

Again, this exact scenario may not be the same for you, but I bet most of the "black screen" issues are from corrupt user modified .galaxy files. Maybe a compilier or error checker upon save of some sort will help prevent this in the future because user content can easily be pushed (posted) with issues.

Thanks,
~JO