Game won't load

[Robbo33]

I can see the Steam box pop up briefly center screen when I try to run it but the game never loads. If I try to load through the library I can see the attempt fails after a few seconds and the button says "Play" again. This system I'm using has worked pretty much flawlessly on any game here (except Capitalism II for some reason). Is this a known issue with some systems? I don't see anyone else reporting this so far. I expected to find a workaround but I don't see one.

I have an i5 3330S processor on a MSI B75MA-P45 motherboard.
8GB DDR3 Ram (8,9,8,24)
GTX 770 Video card
Still running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit
(and debating switching over to my Windows 10 to see if that helps)
Standard onboard Realtek hardware on the motherboard for sound.
Could it be something simple like Quicktime not being installed?

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling already, rebooting goes without saying.
Any ideas?

[Robbo33]

Oh, also my screen resolution is 1600 x 900.

[Cletus Grahame]

I don't see any immediate reason why the game should not run on your system. Can you please post the log file? It should be found at a path similar to:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Victory and Glory The American Civil War\User Data\ACW Game Log.txt

I will have to gather a little bit of data to figure out why it's not running on your machine. You don't need Quicktime to run this game.

If you have G-Sync globally enabled, you might want to try turning that off for "ACW".

[Robbo33]

On Windows 7 the game never creates the User Data file and crashes before doing anything. On this same system running Windows 10 it does launch and it does create the log file. When I'm downloading this game I am getting DISK WRITE ERRORS and the download pauses. That happened on Windows 10 as well. It says Update Needed I believe. Anyways after a few resumes I managed to at least get my Windows 10 copy to work so I am happy enough with that. I am surprised if I am the only person experiencing this though. As I said I have no trouble running a large array of software with no difficulty whatsoever on Windows 7.

[Cletus Grahame]

Since you are able to play the game on Windows 10 the most immediate problem is at least postponed. So I am glad for that, and that you can play the game.

Now, for your Windows 7 issues: is this a dual boot, or two different machines? I need to know a little more about your system in order to try to diagnose the problem. The fact that you are getting download errors on both platforms makes me think the problem is not the game itself.

[Robbo33]

It was a Windows 7 machine and I installed a windows 10 OS as a Dual boot using standard Microsoft installation tools. Well, what I found interesting is that it always pauses in the same place during the PDF file part of the download and gives me that disk write error. I can open that pdf file okay once i retry a few times and finish the download rather forcefully. I will run a check on my disc overnight, but its a fairly new WD Black drive and this is literally the only thing that doesn't work lately. I've installed several other games in the last while on that same drive.

I'm totally fine with using Windows 10, it just seems like a huge chore migrating all my games over since they are all installed on my Windows 7 partition. I'm mostly interested in helping you to help anyone else who may encounter this same problem to get past whatever the hurdle is. The game looks great and it would be a shame if someone couldn't get it running. I noticed on my windows 10 install there seemed to be Java errors in a log file in the game directory. I haven't actually had any time to play the game yet but it seemed to load okay. Could it be a finicky Java issue?

[Robbo33]

I just tried another download and it gives me that same disk write error 3 times and when I hover the mouse over the DISK WRITE ERROR words I get a small pop up with the path for the pdf files every time. On the right it says Update required. Its a little bizarre. I have like 150 games here and have never seen this.

[Cletus Grahame]

Well, I don't know about a Java issue. I'd have to see the log file. It seems more like something blocking the download, like an Antivirus. Maybe it thinks the PDF files are suspicious? I mean, they are not, but...something weird is happening.

Do you remember which PDF file was causing trouble? ACW_Manual.pdf? Hot Keys.pdf?

It might help to uninstall the game and then try to download the game. Maybe that will get it clean with Win 7 on your machine. Just an idea.

I am going to upload a new build, probably tomorrow. Perhaps that will help just by updating the required files.

[Robbo33]

I did verify the integrity of the files and yes I Uninstalled and reinstalled each time. Something is stopping it from initializing. I caught a screenshot of the steam window that pops up for a second and it said something like Preparing the game for first use ... thats usually when redistributables get installed etc such as C++ libraries but I have so many games on here Im sure I have them all. I see in the User Data Folder of my Windows 10 that the first thing would be the screen resolution and my hunch is the problem occurs before that even happens since the User Data folder is never even created in Windows 7.

I'm sure I disabled the antivirus and firewall but I will try that again too and do a fresh install once again.

[Robbo33]

I just downloaded it without the errors at the PDF files with antivirus and firewall off, (Yay!) but the problem of the game not starting persists under Windows 7 for me (boo!). I will try it on another Windows 7 machine just to verify that it is specific to my PC and maybe the problem is just something gone wonky internally with Windows in which case hopefully I am really the only one. If someone else encounters this they can contribute in the future. For now I will go enjoy the game on Windows 10. (Yay!)

[Cletus Grahame]

Well the news about Win 10 is good, especially that you can enjoy the game now.

If you do decide to try Win 7 again, the game will sometimes write additional data to output.log or error.log when it doesn't want to depend on the 'regular' game log. It may tell us something. There is no need to dig for that now, of course.

For what it is worth, the game is running fine on my Win 7 test machine, which is much less impressive than your rig, I have to admit. :-)

[Robbo33]

One of the the things I love most about computers since the 1990's is all the fun I've had troubleshooting all the different hiccups and glitches along the way. They seem to be few and far between now compared to then. If I can figure out what's wrong I will definitely post it here at a future date.

[HeinzHarald]

Originally posted by Robbo33:

I just downloaded it without the errors at the PDF files with antivirus and firewall off, (Yay!) but the problem of the game not starting persists under Windows 7 for me (boo!). I will try it on another Windows 7 machine just to verify that it is specific to my PC and maybe the problem is just something gone wonky internally with Windows in which case hopefully I am really the only one. If someone else encounters this they can contribute in the future. For now I will go enjoy the game on Windows 10. (Yay!)

My guess would be that you have something running in the background on your Win7 install that conflicts with the game for whatever reason. So I'd suggest trying to disable as much as possible, especially anything that has some kind of control over your hardware or OS while running (such as gaming optimizers for instance).

[Robbo33]

I don't have anything like that running but I agree, there is something very specific to this game and my machine not co-operating. I've tried a ton of things so far and still no luck. I'm no optimization novice as I have done tech support for audio recording software in the past and my experience with computers goes back to DOS. I am suspecting something is amiss with Windows in which case I may never solve the issue personally but it wont matter if that's all it is.