Game won't start "The game cannot continue..."

[Mickstache]

error message:
"The game cannot continue: Please change your display settings to be 'High Color (16 bit)'"

is this actually necessary to do to play this? it seems like other people are playing it without issue. and it would be inconvenient to switch for one game and switch back to normal for everything else.

i was also getting another old error message about not having enough hdd space, despite their being plenty. but i tried switching to the beta and back and that one stopped showing up.

[Critter Consortium]

You can navigate to the game's install directory and enable the 16-bit color compatibility setting for the engine.exe.

1. Right click on the engine.exe and go to properties.
2. In the compatibility tab, enable "Reduced colour mode" and set it to 16 bit colour.

That should make it work.

You can disregard the error message about not having enough hdd space. I assume it's because this is very old software and that running on modern hardware makes the detection a bit wonky.

[Critter Consortium]

Originally posted by Mickstache:

i think thats only on win10. that compatibility option does not show up on windows7, is there anything else that can be done to make it work?

I believe in that case you would have to switch it back and forth manually.

Originally posted by Mickstache:

also, i see on gog there is creatures exodus, which says it is a recompilation of C3 and DS that works on win 7, 10, 11.

is that different from this version on steam?

Yes, we made a number of improvements compared to the "Exodus" version, as you can read here:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1659050/announcements/detail/3103539908188968530

[Donnerwurst]

Appreciated, after switching manually to 16bit game is working on Win7.

[Jeremy]

I can't seem to get it to work on my Windows 7 and I manually changed to High Color 16 bit in screen resolution > advanced settings > monitor, yet it just won't work. I get the same prompt.

[Jeremy]

I can only seem to get the biochemistry set, genetics kit, and brain in a vat programs to run. But not the base game. It tells me to switch to 16 bit even though I already have.

[Jeremy]

Oh, ♥♥♥♥, you see, I got it off of Steam, not GOG. So I have no idea if it's just the Steam Version that's giving me this issue, but it could be.

[Critter Consortium]

That's odd! If the GOG version works better with Windows 7 out of the box, we should be able to adjust our version accordingly. We'll investigate.

[Critter Consortium]

Originally posted by Mickstache:

im not sure about ALL the differences but the winner for me is it just runs without asking for the colour change. i really just didnt want to be hassled to change it for one game, would mean a bunch of changing back and forth.
although i appreciate win7 are the minority and as such not always a priority for game updates/fixes.

I know it's a hassle. If there's a way to make it work in our version, we'll see what we can do!

[Sjellokat]

Heyy, soo... Is there an easy way to fix this on Linux?
Steam OS3 (Proton)

[AyleeDrake]

@Sjellokat, I was able to get around this bug by adding "-16bpp" to the launch options in Steam.

You don't happen to have a working machine.cfg now do you? (See my post, "Failure to Launch on Steam Deck")