Black Screen when starting the game

[Diia Blood]

Most of the times it happens and I can't hear nor see nor do anything, but sometimes, the game works and loads into the main menu.

I thought it was a reading speed issue since my HDD is pretty slow, but even after moving the game to my SSD, and even doing a reinstall, the game simply refuses to load into the main menu most of the time

[Diia Blood]

Update: after I've done everything one can imagine to fix the game, the solution, so far, has been to simply delete the "Exodus" folder in the AppData\Local folder.

[Mika]

Appreciate the report. Can you provide some details on your hardware, such as cpu/gpu/ram? One of our testers had this happen once on initial boot after updating their graphics drivers, which made me think it was due to initial shader compilation (which should only take a couple seconds).

[Mika]

Deleting that folder would also nuke the shader cache and force it to rebuild, so that kinda aligns with my expectation here.

[Diia Blood]

Originally posted by Mika:

Appreciate the report. Can you provide some details on your hardware, such as cpu/gpu/ram? One of our testers had this happen once on initial boot after updating their graphics drivers, which made me think it was due to initial shader compilation (which should only take a couple seconds).

I have the following:
- 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-11300H @ 3.10GHz 3.11 GHz
- RTX 3050 Laptop
- Running Windows 11 Home
- 16 GBs of RAM
- GPU drives are the latest

[Diia Blood]

Would love some error or something to direct me, or any other user, in the right direction if this happens again. A black screen is quite difficult to deal with.

[Mika]

Appreciate the info, hopefully I can track down the exact cause and work around it. Seems to happen pretty rarely, but its a bad first impression for the unlucky few that hit it.

[Eden Hazard]

I'm having the same bug, black screen and when i go to task manager is says not responding. Tried deleting the Exodus file, had to keep the binares file to run the game. It redownload what i believe is the shader cache. But still have the black screen bug.

[Mika]

Originally posted by Eden Hazard:

I'm having the same bug, black screen and when i go to task manager is says not responding. Tried deleting the Exodus file, had to keep the binares file to run the game. It redownload what i believe is the shader cache. But still have the black screen bug.

I think you may have deleted something else. Try looking for this hidden folder:
users/<yourname>/AppData/Local/Exodus/Saved/

In there should be something called Exodus_PCD3D_SM6.upipelinecache which you can delete, hopefully that'd kick it into gear.

Out of curiosity, did you have the "Loading..." text in the bottom right corner, or was it completely black? I pushed an update today which added a little pre-load thing that should show that text, but if it didn't show, I'm wondering if you didn't have the latest version, or if it just failed to work.

[Mika]

Hey guys, I did some more digging on this and I'm pretty sure I have a fix.

I just updated the main branch with what I THINK will solve the problem. Turns out its a relatively common issue in Unreal games, even Hogwartz Legacy had it last year. The fix appears to be disabling shader precaching, which is totally unnecessary for a game of Zombieville's complexity.

Anyway, if you grab the latest patch it should be fine now, fingers crossed!

[Eden Hazard]

New update Fixed it 😁👍. Thank you

[Mika]

Such a relief! Thanks for the update.

[Tasha Padona]

Hey Mika, a friend of mine is having a similar problem. When trying to join both singleplayer or multiplayer games the screen goes black and after a while this error appears: The UE-Exodus Game has crashed and will close.

[ShawnGunn74]

Am having the same issue starting this morning. The game loads and goes to a blank screen, I uninstalled the game and reinstalled it and now i can see the start up screen but when i hit start game it just sits on the screen.