Startup Issues (Steam)

[blackworx]

Hi,



First of all thanks for a great game - it has sucked up many hours of my spare time over the last few weeks!



I've been having startup issues. The same problems occur whether starting from within Steam or via the desktop shortcut.



These include:



(1) CTD when restarting a level from the main menu where the level had previously been commenced and then exited from (i.e. when prompted "do you want to resume or restart").



(2) CTD on a fresh start at the point where the main menu would normally show - i.e. immediately after "Defense Grid: The Awakening" title screen appears



(3) Getting stuck on "Defense Grid: The Awakening" title screen (does not freeze - animation continues, as does the theme music)



After (1) and (2) starts happening, the only way to fix it is to use the "verify game content" option in Steam, which would always redownload 1 file, after which DG would start up fine.



At the moment I am experiencing (3) and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do to fix it. The local game files verify OK and nothing has changed in my antivirus/firewall. All my other Steam games work fine.



I don't want to do a full uninstall/reinstall if I can help it. Any ideas?

[jeff]

I'm thinking from what you are saying that you have corrupt files on your disk and that redownloading them fixes it, but only for a short time.* That means to me that whatever is causing the files to be corrupt on your computer is still happening.* You could have a bad hard drive, or perhaps some process such as a desktop search or antivirus (or perhaps actually a virus itself) that is affecting your files.* Nothing in what you are saying sounds like it has to do with the game itself unfortunately (because if it did, I could suggest a fix).





Jeff

[blackworx]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your reply but I have to say I'm sorry it's almost certainly not any of the things you suggest. I'm a full-time sysadmin and tend to keep my PC pretty healthy. My PC doesn't have any viruses and my antivir (Comodo) hasn't been the cause of unexplained issues like this with any other programs, either now or in the past.



With regard to possible disk corruption: like I said I keep my PC in good shape, but in the interests of ruling that cause out I have done a surface scan of both my system disk and steam install disk and both are fine.



I think what is more likely to be happening is that the crash is causing the file corruption and not the other way round. The reason I think this is because the crash is easily reproducible but also avoidable. i.e. restarting a game from the resume/restart prompt after a fresh startup of DG will almost always cause it, but if I avoid doing that then DG works just fine and doesn't crash.



I'm not saying the crash is necessarily down to the game itself - I know there's every chance there's something about the setup of my system that is causing it - but I do find it strange that the only prog that has any issues is DG.



BTW problem (3) mentioned in my first post was fixed by reinstalling.



Thanks again,
blackworx

[blackworx]

*bump*

Are you still there Jeff?

[jeff]

Yes, sorry to not have more answers.* We haven't ever run into this before, so I don't have much in the way of any previous experience with these problems to help you.





Also, I am confused, your point #2 would indicate that you crash even when you don't resume a level, so how*are you able to work around that?*





One new thing I just thought of that did happen to one other person, is perhaps if you have moved files around is that maybe some of the save game files or config files are set to read-only and the game isn't handling that well.* I can't remember what exactly happened to the person who had this problem, I think it was a bit different than your scenario, but they had backed up files, restored them, and*the restoration had set the read-only flag on all the game files causing problems (but not crashes).





I'm not sure how to better help you here.*





I'm pretty sure this isn't a faulty game since you appear to be the only one experiencing these strange crashes and nothing like this showed up in hundreds of hours of testing, but I'm sure there is some conflict between software or software and hardware, and I'm*not sure how to identify it and help you work around this problem.





Jeff