Belizan

Join Date 02/2006

[1.06.19] Corruption Bug

Unfortunately I do not have a debug.err file for the initial event because I didn't think much of it at the time and debug.err gets overwritten every time you launch Elemental.

Where I am now: When I try to launch Elemental, the game "starts" with a black screen. I hear music but nothing else. It will continue like this indefinitely (longest I waited was 12m). I have rebooted, Verified my installation from Impulse, exited every other application on my machine--Nothing works. Presumably I'm going to have to reinstall.

Proximate Cause: The last time I was playing Elemental I was continuing a fairly involved large map game. I had just won a battle with my daughter and her new party of Shrills and the game crashed after closing tactical combat. I hadn't felt like restoring at the time (because I knew that meant my wounded squads were not going to be single units from a different bug), so I decided to go do something else.

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double post

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A quick PS. In the interim between the two events, I installed Vis Studio 10 and Expression Blend 4 and built/ran some Silverlight apps, if that potentially makes a difference. Nothing else of significance was done on this machine.

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Can you post the dump file from the time of the crash? The file is located in C:\ProgramData\Stardock\Elemental - War of Magic

(ProgramData is a hidden folder, make sure you can view those)

You can upload the file to a free file hosting site or www.dropbox.com

Also, can you post your dxdiag file by uploading its contents to http://pastebin.ca/ ?

You can do a Direct X Diagnostic by going to Start -> Run -> and type "dxdiag"

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I skimmed the debug files sticky, missed the "Game Data" vs. "Game User Data" directories. Presumably, this is the correct crash file.

http://drop.io/corruptcrash

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DXDiag data is in the head of every debug.err file, but I uploaded it anyway. I also uploaded the 64-bit version, because, honestly, I'm not sure if it contains any additional useful information, and I am running on Vista 64.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

That one seems to indicate a normal exit from the menu, so it was probably from a crash on exit.

Go ahead and grab the current debug.err from my documents\my games\elemental if you had the issue on your last run and we'll take a look.

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Quoting Belizan,

reply 5

DXDiag data is in the head of every debug.err file.

Didn't you say your debug.err file was lost? Or did I misunderstand?

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I added my debug.err, but like I said, it seems to get reset everytime you launch Elemental, and I tried launching Elemental about a dozen times working around the corruption issue.

Edit: Trying to work around the corruption issue :/. I didn't succeed.

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Oh, and that's the most recent .zip file I have there. No dmp files at all. I'm assuming that's because it did not crash gracefully.

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Hrmm.. reinstalling has not worked either. Is there some sort of conflict between Elemental and Visual Studio 2010 or Expression Blend 4?

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Alright... I uninstalled everything. When by hand and erased the Elemental directories in the My Games folder and the Program Data folder. Reinstalled with fresh reboots in between (harking back to Win95 days of installation/uninstallation paranoia). The game still loads to a blank black screen and the feather cursor. Now with no sound until I hit escape or space bar (skipping past the initial non-player media?) then the theme music starts up. Again, the only thing that has changed on my machine was the installation of Visual Studio 2010/Silverlight/Expression Blend 4. Any ideas?

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

I added my debug.err, but like I said, it seems to get reset everytime you launch Elemental, and I tried launching Elemental about a dozen times working around the corruption issue.

If you're still seeing the issue then the most recent debug is fine. It should tell us where it's getting stuck at when you try to start.

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I put one up in the drop.io collection above. I could put another up if you like? The trouble is, the game isn't "crashing", it's simply not rendering any video feed. So I get sound, and sometimes (although not as often/where you would think, which makes me wonder what resolution it's trying for) I get the mouse over sound for buttons, I have the feather cursor, and a blank, black screen. The game only exits when it gets a WM_CLOSE from the task manager.

Even though the game was running "fine" a few days ago, I went ahead and updated my video drivers just in case. No effect.

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On the grasps at straws level, it occurs to me that I also updated Flash and Adobe Reader in the last few days.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

Are you using any utilities to force games to use particular refresh rates?

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I haven't been that I am aware of, before or after these problems began. I do have the Nvidia graphics utility installed and it is capable of doing that, but it is not configured to do that at the moment, as far as I know, and I have not altered its configuration in any way since in the interval between when Elemental worked and when it stopped working. I did try to run Sword of Aragon in that interim, which I couldn't get to work, but in the process of doing that I tried to force that application to run in specific video modes (via the compatibility tab of its exe, which should not effect anything else).

I did a sweep of the registry, other then MUICache, Typelib, etc. Elemental has no settings there at all. The ini for Elemental is set to my screen resolution (1680x1050).

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Well, somewhere between patching, chkdsk'ing, virus scanning, reinstalling, rebooting, etc., etc., etc. the game now works again. Yay . No idea what was wrong.

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