If you still have audio problems, try this...

[Twig314159]

If you are still having audio problems on Windows 7 or Windows Vista, please follow the following steps and see if it fixes the issue:



1. Go to Start > Control Panel.

2. Double-click on the Sound icon.

3. Single-click the Speakers to highlight them.

4. Click on Properties near the bottom right corner.

5. Go to the Enhancements tab and click on it. If you don't have an Enhacements tab, you may have a tab called "SoundBlaster".

6. Make sure "Disable all sound effects" is checked. Or if you have a "SoundBlaster" tab, make sure the checkbox labeled "Disable enhancements" is checked.

7. Click OK

8. Play Defense Grid!



I'd very much appreciate users that are having audio problems reply to this thread saying if the above steps did or did not fix their problem.



I would also like to thank the users that worked with me through email to help come up with this solution. Hopefully this solution will work for anyone else still having problems!

[Panic66]

Hey Twig314159, Thanks a million this worked fine, I now have sound again! Gotta go, got aliens to obliterate! Thanks again... ATB Panic66

[Trasyd]

Hi,

I tried this with my x-fi xtreme but same thing happens everytime, still sound then black screen followed by a horrible pitched squeal which forces me to turnoff at the mains as everything just freezes.

[jeff]

Yeah, the X-Fi Xtreme has drivers that aren't Windows compliant and there isn't much we can do about that.* The sound engine we use is part of DirectX and we'd have to use a completely different sound engine to try to work around this which isn't an option for this version of Defense Grid.* Using a different sound engine*is something we'll look into in the future.





Jeff

[Trasyd]

Thanks jeff, Not what i really wanted to hear of course and pretty annoyed with creative to release such an expensive soundcard with no WHQL.....I'd be interested to know what sound cards do work....i wouldnt have thought in a million years to look for certificates for a soundcard, you naturally assume its going to work fine with everything.

Good work creative, £40 on empire total war i could never fully enjoy and now defence grid, should dig out my £6 soundblaster of old!

[Trasyd]

Now this i've found interesting, I've disabled my X-FI Xtreme and enabled my realtek onboard sound, the game works fine for about 20 mins except when i get to the misson called 'THE LONG DESCENT'' then it just crashes about 3 mins into the game each time, same issue, black screen but with no high pitched squeal this time. I ticked the box for no enhancements but that makes no difference, any ideas people?!

Just disabled all sound totally and yet the game still crashes......baffled now! Does the X-FI literally have to be taken out the machine for it not to affect this game or does disabling it do the trick?! either way im stuck for ideas now, Not happy having to yank the power lead out of my comp everytime it crashes...

[jeff]

So when this happens - 20 mins of fine with a sudden crash - that typically identifies a situation where the graphics card overheats.* While it would seem that a small indie game like this doesn't push your graphics card the way say a top FPS would, the sheer number of animating objects and particle effects can actually be more demanding on the graphics card than other top games.* The X-Fi if disabled shouldn't have any effect.* The first thing I'd do is download a gpu temperature monitoring software program and see if the temp gets hot (say over 70-80 degrees C) and reaches its maximum just before the crash.* If that's happening, I'd adjust the cooling on your system (where it is placed, if fans are set to high rather than quiet, open up a side of the box, etc.).* If the temp doesn't go up, and it still crashes, I'm not sure what would be causing that, and we should take a look.* Send us the output of the DXDiag.exe program to info <at> hiddenpath .com and we'll take a look.





Jeff

[jeff]

To my knowledge - in answering posts on the board at least - the X-Fi is the only remaining Desktop hardware we know of that has a problem with the game.





In the past there were some Laptop motherboards we had issues with, but to my knowledge we have solved all of those.* I think the X-Fi and it's non-WHQL drivers are our only known incompatibility.





Jeff

[Trasyd]

Hi jeff, i did what you said and got a GPU monitoring program and just before it crashed my temp was 64 degrees C, im guessing thats not high enough to cause it to fail right?! ive also sent the DXdiag files from my comp, hopefully this will show something!.

thanks

[jeff]

I would tend to agree.* It doesn't look like overheating.* The DxDiag didn't provide any obvious problems either to my eye so I'll have to get it to the programming team next week and see if they see anything.* We may have to try another step after that with you as well.* Sorry it will take some time, but we'll keep on it.





Jeff

[Trasyd]

Hi jeff,

Thought you might be interested to know this....i decided to update my video drivers to the latest Nvidia gforce 197.45 and the whole black screen crash affair was happening on desktop, just looking at google was making it crash constantly, So i decidd to roll my drivers back to 186.18 which i know ive had pretty stable gameplaying with and i got well over 30mins playtime on defence grid although now i get a different sort of crash! now the game just freezes with looping sound, i did stil have X-FI active so im guessing this could now be the culprit but it seems the video drivers were making it crash first time round...

[jeff]

Wow, that's always the fun thing in debugging computers, it's never just one thing.* I hope the older vid drivers combined with the disabled X-Fi solve the problem.* Let me know if that isn't the case.





Jeff