Game crash

[armstrong251589]

I just purchased and downloaded this game. As soon as I get to the controller selection portion of this game it starts loading and then it crashes. Is there any way to fix this problem?

[Brucie Angus]

You might want to run the Steam app that checks for missing files.

[Bullseye]

At least your launches, mine crashes before it even gets to a startup screen. Updated video drivers, unloaded all the running apps I can think off and still no go, good thing I bought it on sale bc it isn't even worth that at this point.

As was mentioned, due the file validation to ensure nothing is missing.

[Hellofaputt]

Originally posted by Bullseye:

At least your launches, mine crashes before it even gets to a startup screen. Updated video drivers, unloaded all the running apps I can think off and still no go, good thing I bought it on sale bc it isn't even worth that at this point.

As was mentioned, due the file validation to ensure nothing is missing.

[Hellofaputt]

Originally posted by Hellofaputt:

Originally posted by Bullseye:

At least your launches, mine crashes before it even gets to a startup screen. Updated video drivers, unloaded all the running apps I can think off and still no go, good thing I bought it on sale bc it isn't even worth that at this point.

As was mentioned, due the file validation to ensure nothing is missing.

go to settings on windows turn off xbox gamebar fixed mine its under gaming

[Brucie Angus]

Originally posted by Bullseye:

good thing I bought it on sale bc it isn't even worth that at this point.

Steam will refund your purchase if the game hasn't been played more than two hours. Sounds like yours hasn't if you can't even start it. Good luck.

[Bullseye]

Originally posted by Hellofaputt:

Originally posted by Hellofaputt:

go to settings on windows turn off xbox gamebar fixed mine its under gaming

Thank you for the suggestion, my xbox game bar is already off. It would be nice if there was some way to actually troubleshoot the error. The windows application log points to a number of files that are created in the AppData folder when an application crashes however they don't seem to point to any particular setting and or subsystem.

I updated my NVidia drivers to the latest from a couple weeks ago however that did not help. The fact that the game does not even start correctly is frustrating. Are there any known command-line parameters that can be added to the PGATOUR2K23.exe to produce startup logs?

Regards,

Mike.

[Bullseye]

Originally posted by Brucie Angus:

Originally posted by Bullseye:

good thing I bought it on sale bc it isn't even worth that at this point.

Steam will refund your purchase if the game hasn't been played more than two hours. Sounds like yours hasn't if you can't even start it. Good luck.

Thank you for the reminder on the refund time allowance. So far my game time shows 2 minutes and I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel just yet.

I have found this page and will be continuing my quest to get her going!

https://support.2k.com/hc/en-us/articles/5534336523155--2K-LAUNCHER-TROUBLESHOOTING

Regards,

Mike.

[Brucie Angus]

Originally posted by Bullseye:

Thank you for the reminder on the refund time allowance. So far my game time shows 2 minutes and I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel just yet.

I have found this page and will be continuing my quest to get her going!

https://support.2k.com/hc/en-us/articles/5534336523155--2K-LAUNCHER-TROUBLESHOOTING

Regards,

Mike.

Cool Mike. It's a very good game, worth the headache of trying, hopefully anyway. It plays like a more finely-tuned version of 2K21. Someone posted a fix for similar issues, on another thread that I came across. I'll see if I can find it.

So the issue I read about had to do with fixing stutter issues, which doesn't help you. (See Choppy choopy choppy thread on page 2). However, one of the fixes listed was to go into the Nvidia panel and tweak the settings for the 2K23 launcher. I had to do that with FIFA a few years back. It crashed every time I tried starting it. I went into the Nvidia panel and changed the preferred processor setting. That fixed it. Not saying this will help, and if it doesn't, you could also try setting various launcher settings for 2K23 to bare minimum, maybe that will allow it to at least start.

To access the panel, right click on your desktop. In the upper left, click on Manage 3D Settings. In the panel on the right, choose your graphics card as your preferred graphics processor. Also on the right panel, click on Program Settings. This will bring up a drop-down menu that allows you to search for and select your 2K23 launcher. You can then edit all the various launcher settings.

[Bullseye]

Originally posted by Brucie Angus:

Originally posted by Bullseye:

Thank you for the reminder on the refund time allowance. So far my game time shows 2 minutes and I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel just yet.

I have found this page and will be continuing my quest to get her going!

https://support.2k.com/hc/en-us/articles/5534336523155--2K-LAUNCHER-TROUBLESHOOTING

Regards,

Mike.

Cool Mike. It's a very good game, worth the headache of trying, hopefully anyway. It plays like a more finely-tuned version of 2K21. Someone posted a fix for similar issues, on another thread that I came across. I'll see if I can find it.

So the issue I read about had to do with fixing stutter issues, which doesn't help you. (See Choppy choopy choppy thread on page 2). However, one of the fixes listed was to go into the Nvidia panel and tweak the settings for the 2K23 launcher. I had to do that with FIFA a few years back. It crashed every time I tried starting it. I went into the Nvidia panel and changed the preferred processor setting. That fixed it. Not saying this will help, and if it doesn't, you could also try setting various launcher settings for 2K23 to bare minimum, maybe that will allow it to at least start.

To access the panel, right click on your desktop. In the upper left, click on Manage 3D Settings. In the panel on the right, choose your graphics card as your preferred graphics processor. Also on the right panel, click on Program Settings. This will bring up a drop-down menu that allows you to search for and select your 2K23 launcher. You can then edit all the various launcher settings.

Awesome stuff Bruce, thank you for those suggestions. I have gone through the EXE properties section already (things like compatibility mode and disable full screen optimization) and sadly no love. As for the NVidia control panel, I started down that path and got sidetracked with updating the drivers instead. I will revisit.

I also went a little deeper and ran procmon while loading the game. Seems that after the Direct3D initialization occurs, it attempts to access some 'device' It does not specify which one and displays an error Invalid Device Request. This is while executing read ops on global-metadata.dat. Immediately after this, Windows Error reporting kicks in and the Steam crash handler also kicks in to deal with the impending or executing crash of the application. The steam logs aren't helpful as they only report that these handlers are invoked.

It's interesting you mention FIFA as I have both FIFA 2K21 and 2K22 and both run without issues. Also PGA 2K21 still runs flawlessly. It seems they have made a fundamental change in how PGA 2K23 initializes. All games are installed onto the same drive so I am skeptical that is an issue (assuming the load method is the same and maybe it isn't).

I'll post back once I have had an opportunity to play more with NVidia control panel settings.

[Bullseye]

Originally posted by Bullseye:

Originally posted by Brucie Angus:

Cool Mike. It's a very good game, worth the headache of trying, hopefully anyway. It plays like a more finely-tuned version of 2K21. Someone posted a fix for similar issues, on another thread that I came across. I'll see if I can find it.

So the issue I read about had to do with fixing stutter issues, which doesn't help you. (See Choppy choopy choppy thread on page 2). However, one of the fixes listed was to go into the Nvidia panel and tweak the settings for the 2K23 launcher. I had to do that with FIFA a few years back. It crashed every time I tried starting it. I went into the Nvidia panel and changed the preferred processor setting. That fixed it. Not saying this will help, and if it doesn't, you could also try setting various launcher settings for 2K23 to bare minimum, maybe that will allow it to at least start.

To access the panel, right click on your desktop. In the upper left, click on Manage 3D Settings. In the panel on the right, choose your graphics card as your preferred graphics processor. Also on the right panel, click on Program Settings. This will bring up a drop-down menu that allows you to search for and select your 2K23 launcher. You can then edit all the various launcher settings.

Awesome stuff Bruce, thank you for those suggestions. I have gone through the EXE properties section already (things like compatibility mode and disable full screen optimization) and sadly no love. As for the NVidia control panel, I started down that path and got sidetracked with updating the drivers instead. I will revisit.

I also went a little deeper and ran procmon while loading the game. Seems that after the Direct3D initialization occurs, it attempts to access some 'device' It does not specify which one and displays an error Invalid Device Request. This is while executing read ops on global-metadata.dat. Immediately after this, Windows Error reporting kicks in and the Steam crash handler also kicks in to deal with the impending or executing crash of the application. The steam logs aren't helpful as they only report that these handlers are invoked.

It's interesting you mention FIFA as I have both FIFA 2K21 and 2K22 and both run without issues. Also PGA 2K21 still runs flawlessly. It seems they have made a fundamental change in how PGA 2K23 initializes. All games are installed onto the same drive so I am skeptical that is an issue (assuming the load method is the same and maybe it isn't).

I'll post back once I have had an opportunity to play more with NVidia control panel settings.

Well played around with the settings to no real change, game still crashes although the output seems a bit different. I also tried lowering the resolution (my monitor is natively @ 1920 x 1200 so I tried 1920 x 1080 and 1680 x 1050, no change.

I should also mention I am running a Asus GTX 1080 8 GB. One thing I would like to confirm is how do I know the patched version of PGA 2K23? When I look at their site it says 1.10 however as I am unable to launch the game, where would I look. I checked the properties of the executable however it shows 2021.3.5.0. In the Windows error report (report.wer) I see this:

TargetAppId=W:0006442aaeda0c957db5adc1ceb831339ef300000904!0000f871cca6c273b63dc8c862d6fedb84706160a42b!PGATOUR2K23.exe
TargetAppVer=2023//01//31:18:30:09!a45a8!PGATOUR2K23.exe

Again differs from the properties of the EXE. I am going to try my luck at a support case and see if that helps (I know, it's a stretch at this point).

[Brucie Angus]

Originally posted by Bullseye:

Well played around with the settings to no real change, game still crashes although the output seems a bit different.

Well that's the $#!ts. Another suggestion: completely uninstall the game, then reinstall. If you uninstall, you might want to delete all the 2K folders from the two Steam folders and the Users folder, before reinstalling.

C: / Program Files (x86) / Steam / steamapps / common
C: / Program Files (x86) / Steam / userdata / 71992918 / 1588010
C: / Users / Your PC name / AppData / LocalLow / 2K

Have you tried running it without the internet on? I know the game won't initialise any new setup process unless you're online, and it sounds like you didn't even get that far, so maybe this is moot.

Anti-virus programs can prevent programs from starting up, if you have one of those, shut it off and then try launching 2K23.

And I know it's a long shot but did you try running the game as Admin? (Right click on 2K23 launcher, choose Run as Admin option.)

[Bullseye]

Originally posted by Brucie Angus:

Originally posted by Bullseye:

Well played around with the settings to no real change, game still crashes although the output seems a bit different.

Well that's the $#!ts. Another suggestion: completely uninstall the game, then reinstall. If you uninstall, you might want to delete all the 2K folders from the two Steam folders and the Users folder, before reinstalling.

C: / Program Files (x86) / Steam / steamapps / common
C: / Program Files (x86) / Steam / userdata / 71992918 / 1588010
C: / Users / Your PC name / AppData / LocalLow / 2K

Have you tried running it without the internet on? I know the game won't initialise any new setup process unless you're online, and it sounds like you didn't even get that far, so maybe this is moot.

Anti-virus programs can prevent programs from starting up, if you have one of those, shut it off and then try launching 2K23.

And I know it's a long shot but did you try running the game as Admin? (Right click on 2K23 launcher, choose Run as Admin option.)

Ok, let's start with the good news, it is up and running! I would like to give a shout out to Deepesh S. @ 2K Support for providing some much needed reminders on how to keep windows healthy even when it says it is and it really isn't :).

There were two main attack vectors in this troubleshooting:

1. Windows itself
2. Third party apps

First thing they had me do was run System File Checker and lo and behold it found corrupted files, I was a little shocked to say the least given that Windows has been running just fine for the last three years (or so I thought). Anyways, the files it claimed needed fixing were:

Repairing file \??\C:\WINDOWS\System32\\msmpeg2adec.dll from store
Repairing file \??\C:\WINDOWS\SysWOW64\\msmpeg2adec.dll from store
Repairing file \??\C:\WINDOWS\System32\\msmpeg2adec.dll from store
Repairing file \??\C:\WINDOWS\SysWOW64\\msmpeg2adec.dll from store

At this point I cannot say this was the culprit as I did not try and run the game yet...

The next recommendation was a clean boot of Windows meaning I had to disable a whole schwack of startup apps and services (to the point where I was concerned if the machine would in fact boot afterwards haha). I did all that, ran one last local files verify on the install (I did not re-install the game) which came back clean. I then launched it, held my breath and it came up and initialized ok. I then proceeded to re-activate the disabled services/startup apps in batches and re-launched each time to see if there was a conflict. All services/startup apps are back online so it appears there is no conflict or if there was, it was transient meaning that now that the game is initialized, they are running without interfering.

I've only gone through the initial setup, I have not played a round yet or online or anything deeper. This is just the initial success. Thank you for all the suggestions and patience while I worked through it. I hope this can help others who may have run into the same thing. I do see there are in game crashing experiences so hopefully I can avoid those. :)

Regards,

Mike.

[Brucie Angus]

Great Mike.