Demo won't run on my Windows 7 box :(

[rlpowell]

So, I'm on the Windows 7 beta. Trying DoP for the first time. Got the latest demo.

The window comes up (I altered the config to make it windowed). And that's it.

Takes all the CPU on one core. Stays black. Very boring.

Tried XP-SP3 compatibility mode, and running as administrator. No help.

Any ideas?

-robin

[rlpowell]

Kivi's underworld beta does the same thing.

-Robin

[Shadow]

Hmm, you could try the usual stuff, update your graphics drivers and make sure you are using the latest DirectX install. We do have some Windows 7 users that I know of that run the game fine. What kind of graphics card do you have btw?

[rlpowell]

Originally Posted by Shadow

Hmm, you could try the usual stuff, update your graphics drivers and make sure you are using the latest DirectX install. We do have some Windows 7 users that I know of that run the game fine. What kind of graphics card do you have btw?

Yeah, I've done all that to make my other games run. I was wondering if it's just the demo.

DirectX 9 or 10?

The card is a GeForce 8800 GTX. Should certainly be sufficient.

-Robin

[Shadow]

Yes, that is way better than you need and both games don't really use any features from recent versions of DirectX. Some people have had luck fixing problems by upgrading to the latest version of directX in the past though.

[rlpowell]

Yeah, I just checked and the March 2009 redist of DirectX 9 I have installed is the latest redist available.

And Windows Update says I'm up-to-date.

Grabbing the latest NVidia drivers, but not hopeful.

Any other ideas?

-Robin

[rlpowell]

Disabling sound init got it to run. (this would be User\default.cfg, setting s_initSound to 0).

Played with the sound device, closed, turned sound init back on, and now it works no matter which sound device I pick in the demo.

I have a Creative X-Fi XTremeGamer, FWIW, should anyone else hit this.

-Robin

[Shadow]

Oh, cool. That probably figures that it was a sound issue. I hope you enjoy the games.

[rlpowell]

More details: when you do this, user.cfg (which is in a *really* weird place on Windows 7 for the full game, but is in the same place as default.cfg in the demo) will end up with init_sound set to 0, so no sound until you manually edit it.

A better thing to do is to set the sound device to 1, which is DirectSound (rather than DirectSound3D), at least on my machine. That seems to work on my machine; I have sound now.

As a totally separate issue: the game is great!

I bought the full game. You should expect a flurry of minor feature requests from me any time now. (just UI stuff, really)

-Robin

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by rlpowell

More details: when you do this, user.cfg (which is in a *really* weird place on Windows 7 for the full game, but is in the same place as default.cfg in the demo) will end up with init_sound set to 0, so no sound until you manually edit it.

Vista, and I would assume Windows 7, don't like applications writing out data to directories in Program Files. If an application tries it, it silently redirects it over to a VirtualStore directory fairly deep in the Users directory structure. I would guess this is what you are seeing. The demo should do the same thing except you ran it as administrator which allows it to write directly to where it wants to.