Game Won't Start

[consolegamer]

I just purchased the game from Direct2Drive. After downloading and installing, every attempt to start the game shows the small square logo, followed by the mouse pointer, and then a short repeating sound followed by a black screen. I'm able to bring up Task Manager and kill the program to regain control. I have attached the error screen that appears after ending the program. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit. I have also attached my dxdiag. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[Nike-it]

Please contact our support team (support@1cpublishing.eu)

[Pointman]

I had the same thing happen. I think that there may be two problems, but I am still playing with it.

1. If I disable my firewall and anti-virus the game will load, but it still sits on that first black screen for a couple minutes with a static sound before I get the initial 1C screen.
2. If I try to change the resolution it goes to the black screen and does not recover. The ATI site is down so I have been unable to check for a newer video driver. (Possible fix in post #4 below)

If you get any answers from support post them here if you can. May save the rest of us having to do it.

[Pointman]

I think that I have it figured out now. The firewall was displaying a message that I could never see because of the video problem. I think that the video problem was caused by having multiple monitors. I disabled my second monitor, configured the firewall (could see the message now), and the game loads first time every time now. No black screen and static. Hopefully works for you too.

[consolegamer]

I was able to see the firewall request and granted thegame.exe access during my initial run. How does the rule appear in your firewall? I doubled checked the firewall rules and found it was disabled as Domain entries (TCP, UDP). I added it manually as a Private rule (standard, like all the other games that have made the request and subsuquently granted) and deleted the Domain entries. I tried running it again and got the same issue.

I tried disabling my two additional monitors (I have three total) with the Nvidia Control Panel and confirmed with the Windows Screen Resolution dialong. I still have the same problem. I cannot get it to run. How did you disable your second monitor?

Do you only have one video card? I have two. A GTX280 (drives a 37") and a 9500GT (drives two 19"). I wonder if the game can't handle multiple video cards. I don't think it's approriate for me to have to remove a secondary video card to play the game. That's asking a bit too much.

[consolegamer]

Well, this is odd. I went back in and deleted the rules I had made for the firewall in an attempt to allow the game to "reset" them to see if what I had added manually matched... and the game worked!

So, feeling frisky, I turned back on my two additional monitors and it worked. I also had to reset my scaling option as I like things to stay native and it still worked after that and even after I created a profile to turn on Vsync.

So, I'm not quite sure WHAT the issue is but after I deleted the rules from the firewall it worked. And, it still works with 3 separate monitors all enabled.

Oh well... at least now I can begin enjoying the game I bought on Friday!

I hope it stays stable!

Thanks again for your input.

[consolegamer]

Well, it's not quite perfect by a longshot.

Watching the first video going through the tutorial has the voice over blanking out similar to the original skipping sound issue. As the narration plays, it "skips". Talking... silent... talking... silent. It makes the video useless as I can't make out the dialogue at all. It would be tolerable if there were subtitles but I feel like I'm missing out big time on the story.

Any clues as to what's causing this?

The tutorial that involved the actual game seemed okay. Action is a little slow but nothing seems "wrong".

I'm fearful of continuing until I can set some insight into why the videos don't playback properly.

Any ideas?

[Pointman]

I use Zone Alarm and just gave exe access to trusted network. My video card is an ATI Radeon HD 3850. In the Catalyst Control Center I went to 'Desktops & Diplays', right clicked on monitor #2 and selected disable. If I extend the desktop display to the second monitor I immediately get choppy video and other issues again.

I bet if you play around with it a bit you can find a setting where you can leave both video cards in and still get good video. Having to disable the monitor doesn't bother me much, only takes about 30 sec. Good luck.

[consolegamer]

I tried disabling the monitors and the secondary video card. No luck.

One thing I am convinced of now is that this is a problem with Bink decoder used by the game. I've read far too many similar problems with other games citing the same stuttering video issue.

I sure hope 1C can help me with this problem.

How important are the videos to the storyline? Can I play the game and understand and enjoy it minus the cinematics? I don't want to have to do this. I want a working game! However, I need to be prepared if I'm not going to have this issue resolved.

I even tried modifying the nvdd.ini file and running it in Windowed mode. No luck there either.

[consolegamer]

I took the time to unpack the archives (media.pk and media1.pk) to extract the videos and play them with the RAD Video Tools. They still skip. It's definitely in the videos.

I've attached the playback summary from the first intro (the 1C video) and it had 8 sound skips.

Anyone know what might be causing this?

I was hoping I could just watch the videos externally as I was playing the game. I would just Alt-Tab out, find the video, watch it, and Alt-Tab back into the game and continue. Annoying, but at least I could fully enjoy the game.

[Sneaksie]

Did you try to defrag the HDD partition where the game is installed? Either this or a codec problem. I would uninstall all third party codec packs like k-lite and try playing the videos, then reinstall codecs and try playing the videos again.

[consolegamer]

It's not an HDD issue because I when I used the RAD player, I selected the option to load the entire file into memory before playback.

I only had one additional codec installed, Xvid. It shouldn't matter since it's not used, but I uninstalled just for testing purposes. It didn't make a difference.

I now realize there are only 5 movies. 3 "logo" files, 1 intro, and 1 outro. So, with that knowledge, I just used RAD to convert the intro into an AVI and watched it. Since I won't run into any movie issues during normal gameplay, I'll just go ahead and start playing!

I guess in the end, I can just forget about it.

[Gniarf]

What happens if you replace the game's binkw32.dll with the one included with your rad player?

[consolegamer]

The RAD tools don't include a binkw32.dll.

From the Bink FAQ:

"Bink DLLs are NOT replacable! If you copy a different version of the DLL onto another pre-compiled application (like a game), then you are likely to crash. The RAD Video Tools don't even have the Bink DLL built into them, so this will have absolutely no effect. Please contact your game maker for support."

[Gniarf]

Duuh! My bad I had completely forgotten that.

[Tpek]

I can't get the game to start either.

Whenever I click the shortcut, only the game's directory pops up. And whenever I try to run the exe file, it just starts and immediately exits.

I tried giving it rights via the firewall/AV, but this changes nothing.

Any fix for this?

[Sneaksie]

Where did you install it?

[Tpek]

I managed to solve it.

The problem is a rather strange bug, where if there is a window of the game directory open when running the exe it will do nothing.
One has to close the window first before running the game. :P