Crash at startup - Brightness setup

[Bonze]

Can't get any further than the initial brightness setup.
I see there was a discussion of this before, but with no fix.

ATI 5870 - with latest drivers
Win7 64bit all patches

[Maddogcollins]

Just bough tthe game myself, one suggestion was to reload direct x file and annother file, did nothing. After reloading the files I get a black screen with sound. I too was hoping for other's having the problem and there being fixes. If I don't hear back from steam I will be contacting paypal to open a complaint, ridiculous I spent up to 3 hours on this. Bugggy, buggy buggy.
I sent a question on dirt 3 not atrting a week ago with no answer.

[jacob]

I have the same problem, crash at initial brightness setup. Anyone have a solution?

Intel i7 990x
Radeon HD 7950
Win 7 x64

tcoll, you will NOT want to contact paypal for chargeback, as I'm pretty sure it has very negative repercussions for your steam account.

[Maddogcollins]

I hope not, but not about to pay for a game that doesn't work, even if it was only 10 bucks.

[your evil twin]

You would be better off contacting Steam support again, and if hear nothing then contact them to ask for a refund due to being unable to play the game. If you still don't hear anything, then maybe think about a chargeback.

[your evil twin]

To clarify what I just said there... asking for a chargeback is a really bad idea. So even after everything else, you probably still shouldn't do it, unless you don't mind losing access to all your other games. So don't consider it as "step 3 after other options", consider it "step infinity after you no longer give a crap and just want your money, screw the consequences".

Steam support might not be much help at first because they probably have no clue as to what is causing the problem. But I've known people that have contacted Steam to ask for a refund because they are unable to get a game to work, and they have been successful.

(I don't think they are obliged to give a refund, but it would be bad PR for them to keep your money on a game you aren't able to play, they'd rather you were happy and bought stuff from Steam again in the future.)

Since you are using an ATI card, you might want to try going into your Catalyst AI settings and changing the slider to High Quality. That disables the calatyst AI optimisations. They are supposed to make games run faster using game-specific performance tricks, but when I had a PC with an ATI card I remember having a problem where HL2 crashed constantly until I turned off the catalyst AI optimisations.

[Madval]

Hi there !
I have the same problem. I contacted the support of the game, who asked for my DXDIAG.
They replyed to me that I haven't any problem and my pc and drivers was perfect.
Next they says that they didn't know why there is this problem, and suggested I ask steam a refund. Nice... I don't want a refund I want to play my game. My PC run all game on earth without any problem ever. But I don't know perhaps this game was made on Mars. The devs and the support have no clues and will not patch the game ever. They just don't care, and says : Sorry. Too bad for you. Have a nice day sir.
Pfffff.
Good Luck.

[Pudenfuhrer]

I've had this problem on one of my machines. I noticed the installer behaved differently on that machine. Deleting the file installscript.vdf in the Inversion game directory fixed the problem for me - I hope others can confirm this for the "brightness crash" bug

[Pudenfuhrer]

Nah sorry - it randomly let me in but this doesn't seem to work again. I'm giving up on this game. For what it's worth, having now set the brightness up and so on and had a little play- the thing that causes the crash is the NETWORKING bit. As soon as you press SPACE at the start it starts doing the network thing. Now something is wrong somewhere. I know it uses Gamespy for the network matching stuff. Perhaps we suffer from having an old .dll (or whatever) installed somewhere from some other gamespy based game and it is using that instead of the correct thing? I don't know. I did have Gamespy Comrade installed -from Battlefield 2 - I removed that - to no avail. At this point I give up - I don't want to break it for all my other games which are running nicely.

[Pudenfuhrer]

Ok - NOW I think I got it. For me - I have to set my steam "friends" section to offline. So long as I do this before pressing Space to enter the menu - then I'm fine and I get no BEX error - no crash to desktop! Please let me know if this works for you!!

YAY!

[Bonze]

Originally posted by Pudenfuhrer:

Ok - NOW I think I got it. For me - I have to set my steam "friends" section to offline. So long as I do this before pressing Space to enter the menu - then I'm fine and I get no BEX error - no crash to desktop! Please let me know if this works for you!!

YAY!

Tried setting Friends to offline, but that didn't help...

BUT..... restarted Steam in Offline mode worked !!
Steam > Go Offline.
Only time it crashes now is when I try to adjust Audio in Options.

on with the game.....

[󠀡 󠀡󠀡󠀡 󠀡󠀡󠀡]

Same thing happens with me, game only works when friends is set to offline. I think the game uses an old version of Steam API that is not functioning with certain accounts properly. I bought the game to play online coop with a friend so starting in offline mode is not a fix as when i change party from local to online again the game crashes. Does anyone know what causes this issue and how to avoid it?

[Obi-Fran Kenobi]

I guess the situation didn't change?