Black Screen Workaround

I apologize about not being exactly sure what your looking for.  I do have a "black screen" after starting the game (Rebellion, not Trinity) that lasts anywhere from 5-10 sec...is this what you are referring to?

ditto the beginning movie clip wouldnt play at the beginning but never caused a crash...?

It sounds like an actual crash that does not allow the game to boot. I had this once upon a time with Trinity but that was hundreds of games ago. I haven't had the problem since (I usually have my intro movie disabled though).

I been getting the black screen after the opening movie in rebellion after the 1a patch. I just get a black screen and a blinking cursor, sound plays, and if you click the right spots you can navigate the menu's blind.

The game doesn't minidump so I can't do #2 on that list.....

All I get is a long wait on a black screen 10+ seconds on launch before the movie starts, but no crashes on startup. Don't know if this wait is normal or also some unnecessary delay.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit on bootcamp. MacBook Pro 2010 17' 8GB RAM, GeForce 330M 512MB, HDD 750GB, 400GB allocated to NTFS partition.

I made a post in an old thread regarding this problem, sent in a support ticket with the required files and got no response.  I assume no progress?

edit: tried to force the game to start in windowed mode, still crashes

Yep, I've also been afflicted with it. Sent in a ticket and nothing back yet. Provided all the necessary files. Hope They come up with something soon. Dying to play!

I have a noticeable pause at a blank/black screen at startup on an i7 with 16Gb RAM - my mates with slower PCs say the screen can stay for a few minutes at a time. Are most people going to wait that long or just assume it's hanging?

can you please at least keep us updated as to how the search for this bugfix is going, even if there is no progress?  it is a bad feeling knowing that it has been a week since i sent in my report with the required files and i still have gotten no real acknowledgement other than an automated instant response from from you guys.  please, we deserve better as customers to at least be updated once every other day as to if any progress/leads have been made

I can't play the beta to day which I pre order today because of this black screen I tried offline mode and admin. Today im a sad panda:(

For clarification, this is not regarding the game taking a while to load - it's literally a crash before you see anything and will happen immediately. 

So far we have still not been able to reproduce the issue internally, but everyone's reports are helping us out. 

I've had this happen before...I don't have any files to give you but I was personally able to get this problem to manifest itself many times...

I usually do a clean reinstall of my OS every couple of months...after drivers and my internet browser, the first thing I'd usually install would be Impulse and then Sins (Diplomacy and Entrenchment as separate downloads, not trinity) so it could download while I'd be updating other things...

It would turn out that I would always be able to run Sins fine the first time, but after that initial launch, the game would always crash upon start-up...clearing everything in AppData did not help, and so I'd always have to reinstall the game in order to play it again...after reinstalling the game, I'd never see the problem again...

This has happened every time I've reinstalled windows 7 (about 5-6 times) except the most recent time, where I installed impulse and sins after installing MS Office and a few other programs...

I assumed it was because I had some bad sector on my hardrive or something, and Sins (since it was always installed first ) just kept being put there after each time the OS was re-installed...strangely, no such bad sector has ever been detected and no other program has had this program, so maybe it was a different issue...

I know this is not rebellion or trinity, but it is diplomacy and it did occur consistently multiple times under the same conditions...sorry if this isn't particularly useful but it's all I got....

*stares at stardock tech support*

WTF

i usually just get a blank black screen when i start up the game, but when i alt+tab to something else and them go back to the game the starting video begins.  i seem to need to do this pretty much every time i want to play.  i have no idea if is related to the issue here though.

You can disable the intro videos (all of them, including the animated company logos) through the settings file...instead of a "video" of the stardock and ironclad logos, you'll just see a still image fade it and fade out...I've personally found it helps loading on my computer but in general this may not be the case since the loading is probably slowed down by the amount of game assets, not the intro movies....

That being said though it may be worth a shot for you....

just a thing that i see: i have the ffdshow videocodecpack installed. this pack asks me if it should be used for sins. I can remember that i had installed k-lite codecpak before it. this pack just jumped in if some games play bik videos and the game crashed. 

so my tip for blackscreencrashers: uninstall all codecpacks and try again...

Yeah, with Nightraid3r here. I'd love to hear if any progress is being made. I would have bought the game anyway at release, but I kind of paid for it now so I could be in the beta and I haven't seen so much as an intro movie yet. Would just like some confirmation that it's being looked at is all. 

Seriously? No update on this yet? Not even an acknowledgement? What is going on? Are Nightraid3r and I the only people with the problem? What's the deal?

I have the issue as well.....Hoping for a response sometime soon, I'd really love to be able to play.

I have a black screen on start up that last forever, but after a couple minutes, rebellion starts fine.

Not a single crash until now though

This is typical the first few times Sins starts up either after install or after it has not been played for some time. The more you play it the less that wait is. Typically if you play once a week you shouldn't see a wait of more than 10-15 seconds during startup unless you restarted recently, then it might be closer to 20-25 seconds.

This is normal.

Apologies for the slow reply. We are hard at work tracking this issue down.  It's been a pain as we're unable to reproduce the issue internally.  It is happening on a small subset of laptops, but so far we've been unable to find a common pattern in the hardware/software configs people have sent in.  If anyone is getting this issue that hasn't followed the instructions at the top of this thread, please do!  Thank you for your help and patience with this problem.

I had this problem too, but after verifying the game cache twice it started working.  I don't have the minidump files anymore, but sent a copy to stardock.

^ Is this something that you would be willing to recreate (i.e. uninstall Sins, scrub, then reinstall?)