Game Won't Launch

from Sins Forums
The game won't start for me. When I try to start it, it starts loading then breaks out of full screen mode into a window mode, but the window is just black with nothing in it. The window acts as if its not responding, but under task manager it says it is running. I then have to use task manager to quite the game and which point it generates a dump file.

I tried altering the user settings to turn off the intro movie and to try to launch it in window mode. This resulted in the game not launching at all.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this or any other tricks I could try.

I have already sent my dxdiag and dump file to support

My comp is AMD 3200, ATI x800, 1 Gig Ram, and XP
technical
16,570 views 45 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Are your GPU drivers up to date? If they are not try updating them.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
I have Catalyst updated to 8.1
Multiplicity - Control multiple PCs using one keyboard and mouse
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
I have the same problem too, but I can't Alt-Tab, Ctrl Alt Delete, no nothing out of the game...

I changed all the settings too. All drivers are up to date...

I have Intel Core2Duo 3.2GHz, 4GB of RAM (Actually 6GB, but 32bit doesn't recognise the other 2GBs :P), an 8800GTS, and well over a TB of harddisk space...

Does the patch fix this problem?
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
No, the patch didn't make a difference for me.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
Suprisingly I recieved a reply from Support early this morning (Sunday). Hopefully we will be able to figure this out soon.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
Let us know when you get it fixed. I get the same problem you do and I have nearly the same system, but I have a 9800 Pro instead of an x800.
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
Same issue here with. Just reinstalled XP with latest drivers.
Using a x800.

I wonder if this is some issue with ATI cards? I switched from Vista to XP with Sins not running on both for different reasons.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
They sent me a new .exe file but I got the same results, so I sent them a reply with a new .dmp report. Hopefully Ill hear from them soon.
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
Same issue here with. Just reinstalled XP with latest drivers.
Using a x800.

I wonder if this is some issue with ATI cards? I switched from Vista to XP with Sins not running on both for different reasons.
End of quote



Well SurHa has an Nvidia and I read a couple of similar threads where Nvidia people were having similar issues. But ATI seems to be the trend on the Forums.
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
I have the exact same problem, and I'm running a Radeon 9600. I've changed the ShowIntroMovies to FALSE, patched the game, attempted to update my video and sound drivers (Windows found no updates available), and have Catalyst at 8.1. When none of these things worked, I reinstalled the game, again resulting in failure. Let's hope someone can come up with something...
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
I'm having the same problem with:

Radeon X1600
1g ram
2ghz intel core duo

Should I email the support about this also? Or should we expect a fix for this shortly?
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
I am having the same problem with a new twist on it:

It had been running, now it is not running. The game starts to load then goes black. When I ctrl-alt-delete a message appears telling me Microsoft c++ runtime library error in the .exe

The only thing that happened in between the last time I ran it and this issue is I closed the game and opened the galaxy editor to make some adjustments to a map I was making.

My computer sucks so I am not going to post any info on it. The game had been running before so it is not a hardware problem I think.
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top
I have this problem with a Radeon Mobility X800...which ran Beta 2 just fine.
Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top
just playing around with the user.settings file. Interesting that if you set it to run in windowed mode, the game window doesn't open. It just runs in the background and task manager is needed to see it.

Another user had a similar problem running Vista. Apparently fixed it by downgrading some corrupted nvidia drivers.
Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top

Should I email the support about this also? Or should we expect a fix for this shortly?
End of quote


yes, definatly email support and remember to send them your dxdiag report and your latest minidump (but zip that one up). The more reports they get the easier it will probably be to find the common cause.
Reply #18 from Sins Forums Top
Radeon Mobility X800...which ran Beta 2 just fine.
End of quote


Please report this info to support. If it ran Beta just fine that may be a key piece of info.

Reply #19 from Sins Forums Top
I heard again from technical support yesterday. They just asked me if my game was the DVD or a download. I bought the DVD at wal-mart.

Yesterday, I tried uninstalling the game again, but this time I also uninstalled Catalyst and all ATI drivers. I then rebooted and let windows load the drivers for me rather than down loading them from ATI. Unfortunatly this didn't fix the problem, it did the exact same thing.

Oh yeah, I have no intention of letting this thread die until this issue is resolved. Hopefully more people with this problem will report in.
Reply #20 from Sins Forums Top
My copy was a download. Guess that's not what's common here.
Would love to see some responce from stardock, even if it's just a "we'll fix it in the next patch."
Reply #21 from Sins Forums Top
Stardock / IC are almost certainly hard at work on this -- from experience I can tell you they really hate this kind of issue, as they work hard to bring a quality product. The problem is tracking down what exactly is causing your problems (trust me, that can be difficult), and until they figure out what the problem in the code is, there's no way to fix it -- or even give an ETA.
Reply #22 from Sins Forums Top
I wonder if this is a directX problem. When I went into dxdiag and ran the test direct3d option, it failed. Not sure how to fix it though.

On second though I wonder if this is a monitor issue?
Reply #23 from Sins Forums Top
I wonder if this is a directX problem. When I went into dxdiag and ran the test direct3d option, it failed. Not sure how to fix it though.

On second though I wonder if this is a monitor issue?
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Thanks for the idea. I just tested mine too and it also failed. The error I got was:


This test will use hardware-accelerated Direct3D 7 interfaces....Test failed at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x80004005 (Generic failure)
End of quote


This test will use hardware-accelerated Direct3D 8 interfaces....Test failed at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086c (error code)
End of quote


This test will use hardware-accelerated Direct3D 9 interfaces...Test failed at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086c (error code)
End of quote

Reply #24 from Sins Forums Top
Well as of right now, the game is totally unplayable for me. After two clean installs, one with and one without the patch I still get the same thing. As soon as I launch the game it switches over to a black screen then drops back into windows desktop within 4 or 5 seconds.

I have tried the launcher from the startup menu as well as the ones located in the Stardock folder to no avail.

My current system specs seem to match the minimum requirements and have updated catalyst and sound blaster drivers for my video and sound card.

I am running
3Ghz Single core Pentium
1Ghz DDR ram
80 Gig HD
Radeon 9800 Vid Card
Soundblaster Audigy 2 Sound Card
Windows XP Pro as OS

HD was recently Cleaned and Defragged, all Anti Spyware and Virus programs shut off as well as running minimal Windows Services on startup. It's an older system, but I do take care of it and is home built. This is the first program I've run that I've encountered any problems with.

Hope a hotfix or any suggestions from the powers that be can help. Currently extremely disappointed as I've heard that Stardock is a reputable company that takes care of their customers.

As an aside note I also tried

Possible solutions:

1. Try turning off movies in the user.setting by changing ShowIntroMovies TRUE to ShowIntroMovies FALSE.

and that did not help...

I tried running a debug log and found it to be blank... as in nothing in it, no text...


I ran dxdiag then tested direct3d option and it passed, so not sure what my problem is...
Reply #25 from Sins Forums Top
Jeremy757,
I had the same error messages. I hope this is the common link here.

For something to do with some time to kill today I installed Civ4. It wouldn't run saying something about a directX error.