Game hangs at blank screen with little pointer at startup.

#1 Hi Bruce,

Sorry for the troubles. I'll do my best to help you get Orbz running on your machine. I did notice that your machine falls pretty far under our minimum system requirements (P3-500), however, there may indeed be a few things we can do in order to stop the game from crashing. After that, we can tackle performance.

First things first, I would like to see your full system configuration information. You can obtain this by running "DXDIAG" in the Start/Run menu. It takes a moment for the application to load all your system configuration information (little progress bar in lower left). Once the application has loaded, there should be a button on the bottom called "Save All Information". Click that and follow the prompts to save a text file with all your system config data in it. Please send me that file to orbz@21-6.com.

Before closing DXDIAG, the next thing to try is to switch to the "Display" tab and run both the DirectDraw test and the Direct3D test. These tests can be started by pressing the "Test DirectDraw" and "Test Direct3D" buttons, respectively. After each test, check the "Notes" section of the dialog and look for any problems. Please report back the results of your tests.

Finally, I would like you to send me the Orbz log file after the game crashes. In other words, run Orbz until it crashes then send me the following file: c:\program files\orbz\console.log. You can send the file to the same email address as above.

There are even some more steps we can take, but let's start with these and see where the results lead us.

Thanks for your patience, hopefully we can get you up and running.

Justin

#2 Hi Bruce

Thanks for sending me the files I asked for. Everything looks pretty good in your log files. Up-to-date video drivers, DX 8.1, great video card, etc. You lower-end processor shouldn't cause a crash but may affect performance.

It appears that when you are crashing is right when the main menu (which is all nice and 3D) is being rendered for the first time. Therefore, I'm inclined to still think this is video card related. Here are a few more things to try in order to gather more data. If any of these different instructions cause a crash in the game, please send me the console.log immediately after the crash and let me know which test you ran that caused the crash.

Run Orbz from the command line, with the windowed parameter, like this: "Orbz windowed". The game should run in a window on your desktop.

Run Orbz from the command line again, with the directx parameter, like this: "Orbz directx". The default renderer is OpenGL, and this command line will force the game to use DirectX instead.

Also, have you run any other Torque game on your computer the way it is configured now? Like Marble Blast or Tribes 2? If you haven't tried yet, maybe try the free demo of Marble Blast as a test.

Thanks for your patience, we will get this bad boy running!

Justin

#3 The pentium pro did not have mmx as far as I recall. Without mmx, any torque-engine game will crash as soon as a mission with a terrain block is loaded (practically all of them, and also the orbz opening scene). The terrain texture blender requires mmx, although a c version can be enabled at compile time (with a significant performance penalty).

Really the engine should just bail out gracefully when it is started on a machine without mmx.

#4 Currently I'm running into the same problem with a crash when the Main Menu screen should come up. I'm getting the typical 'page faults with Kernell32' errors. My guess would be that OpenGL doesn't work well with our systems, and I'm trying the DirectX command you mentioned now.

I'll give more feedback afterwards.

#5 Ok, the -directx paramater helped :)

I was able to get into the game but I had to drop alot of the detail in order to get a decent framerate (from 2.0 average to 8.0 fps now).

I can run in fullscreen, D3D, 16 bit color, all low settings. Of course, the frame rate is better in the actual game rather than the Menu Screen :)

Hope this helps out :)

#6 Christopher, can you send me your DXDIAG info using the following instructions please?

- open your Start Menu and select Run
- type in DXDIAG and hit Enter
- the program takes a moment to run as it collects all the stats for your machine (progress bar in the lower left).
- when it's done, select the "Save All Information" button on the bottom of the dialog
- enter a filename to save the data to
- send that file to me at justin.mette@21-6.com

This info should give me an idea of why the game isnt performing very well on your machine.

Thanks,
Justin

#7 Also, send me c:\program files\orbz\console.log if you would after playing the game for a bit and shutting it down normally. Thanks.

#8 I sent it out there for you:)

The big similarity I've seen between our systems so far is that they're both P3s! That could just be the problem there, lol.

Thanks for jumping right on it, good luck on your 'investigation' as well:)