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I suspect that your video card can't handle the game. 
That's a pretty low end graphics adapter (meant for laptops).
| Also, in response to what you said earlier about "Well I hate to break it to you but welcome to PC gaming..." I gotta say - that shouldn't be an issue with a game like this. I can promise you that the audience that plays this game is much more concerned about functionality than graphics. I'm sure that fans would gladly play this game entirely 2D as long as the strategy part of the game remained the same (or was improved). I might be wrong on this, but I'm guessing that a great many people who buy this game are not hardcore gamers who thought to buy a non-integrated video card with their computer. Just something to keep in mind for future versions. |
| Well, not much has changed for me. I tried doing everything that was suggested in this forum. I updated my ATI drivers (by the way, in my Display control panel, it says ATI Radeon IGP 320M), updated DirectX, tried running it in window mode (though it doesn't appear to open in a window - it still takes over the whole screen), and anything else that was suggested. Nothing's happening. When I open the game, it goes to the intro movie. This plays fine, without a hitch. I hear the music and see the animation. Then, when the intro is over (or I skip it by hitting esc), I go to an all black screen. I can hear music playing, but I can't do anything. Usually my cursor gets really big and turns orange, but when I click around on the screen, nothing happens. If I try hitting alt-tab, the program crashes (I get a window saying something like "Windows recovered from a system error") and I go into what looks like safe mode (640x480, 4-bit color). |
| I was having the same problem with the black screen at the beginning as well. I could hear music, but there was no display. I tried all of the suggestions above including the command line change etc. I am now able to get to the main menu however when I click on one of the game play options nothing happens. The curser highlights the buttons, but is non-responsive to a click. |
| Okay, Here's the thing. I bought this game earlier this week. Now I wish I hadn't. I can not only NOT return it for a refund at wal mart, I'm stuck with it. So, what to do? Well, Just to play this game I'm shelling out nearly 100.00+ dollars out of pocket to buy a NEW Video card. I'm mad as Black Hell having to do this because I am out big money. My only other alternative is to choke on the 20.00 and take a a hammer on the CD. I can't figure out why this game had to be made with such a high end video card. It doesn't have any complex animations in it. I managed to see this game finally on a friends computer who was good enough to let me take a peek at it. The only thing I can figure out as to why it was programmed with such high end video cards is that the programming staff must have had some strong drain cleaner with their meals one day and burned out their brain Cells (whoooohooo!!) So, I am going to play this thing but I'm not very likely to buy any more products in the near or far future from this company. |
Good grief guys, what do you want from us? We're sorry your video cards aren't up to snuff on this.
Here's a list of some fo the games that Intel has verified that don't work on that video card:
http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-010468.htm
That list includes Lord of the Rings, Grand Theft Auto, Microsoft Baseball, Morrowind, Rise of Nations, Knights of the old Republic, Tron 2.0, Battlefield 1942, C&C Generals. These aren't exactly obscure games.
We are obviously trying our best to find ways to make the game work on these machines. Our work is slowed because very very few people are giving us feedback. We put out a link or an email to someone and we rarely hear back.
The game isn't programmed with "high end" video cards. Just ones capable of doing DirectX 9. The built in Intel graphics controller is not meant for games. It can't even do 32bit DirectX. But despite that, we're working on trying to find a way around these limitations. But it's pretty hard to do that when few people give us any useful information.
For example, REagan's clone, do you provide any info on your system? No. You just flame us. Do you want to be helped or do you just want to complain?
Aaron, you say you're certain it's not your video card but you tell us nothing about your video card.
Basically it boils down to this: The game requires a DirectX 9 capable video card. That doesn't mean top of the line card. It doesn't even mean a new one. It just means, generally, that at least the video drivers have been updated to support it. Some video card manufacturures won't do it. Others can't because they didn't implement the APIs.
All we can do -with user help- is find out hards have a problem and try to get them here. The game is out there on a LOT of machines. Obviously this isn't a very widespread problem. But we do want to help. But at the same time, we'd appreciate some understanding. It's not like the game is buggy or something. We made the game, tested it with a pretty decent sized beta group. Put it through QA and it worked on all the machines in ours and Ubi Soft's compatibility labs.
So far from actual data here all we know is that on those low end integrated Intel graphics adapters the game has problems. That on an older laptop based ATI graphics adapter it doesn't work. And on the 3 year old Hercules Prophet 4500 it has problems which I think is caused by them not having made new drivers in a very long time for it.
| I've been having similar problems - the game would crash to desktop at the end of the intro sequence; if i tried to skip past the intro sequence; if i used the nointro fix; and after I updated to 1.01. But then I tried the test.exe suggested by the moderator, and the game's running fine now. So cheers for that, Frogboy. System specs: AMD 2400+ 512Mb 120Gb GeForce Ti4200 64Mb XP SP 1 DX9.1 |
That's a different problem. That's due to the Safedisc copy protection. Contact [email protected] or [email protected] and they can give you a build that removes that to see if that helps.
I can assure you there is no "If graphics card == Intel then don't work" type code in there. The question is why doesn't Intel support the DirectX 9 APIs correctly?
I just listed a bunch of games that it has problems on, don't you think that maybe Intel shares some level of responsibility on this? Rise of Nations does't have "complex animations" either and it doesn't run on there. The games on that list are not all first person shooters.
We are *trying* to figure out the cause. Look, we call the DirectX APIs and if the hardware isn't available it will then use the OS's software mode. Some video drivers don't properly do this. We have a Dell machine here with an Intel graphics controller (newer one) and it works fine. It seems to be the 82810E and earlier chipsets.
This thread is the "Cannot initialize display" thread. If you're not getting THAT error, then please post in a different thread so that we can keep on topic here. (and I don't know what "games screws up" means. Crashes? Has graphics corruption?).
It would help us to know what kind of computer you have. Not what Ghz it is. But what brand. The intel chipsets are integrated onto the motherboard. Are we talking some sort of laptop or what?
Stardock *will* fix this problem but how long it takes will depend on how much help we can get. First we have to find out why it doesn't work on that chipset. And one way of doing that would be for us to go out and get a computer with that chipset so we can try it out.
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