Difficulty opening game (window) [Solved]

[Reincarnate]

I've been looking through the various problems people have had, and haven't been able to fix this one on my own.

The game runs fine, but the window seems to minimize each time the game loads. It stays in the taskbar, and when I click on it, my resolution changes.. black screen, then switches back to windows at normal resolution.

I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium. Intel Core i7-4820k CPU @ 3.7GHz. GeForce GTX 970 (now with latest drivers). And 16 GB RAM.

I've tried the adding the XNA dll (as suggested in previous comments). I do run a dual monitor set up, but this being switched to single screen doesn't help. I've also adjusted the NVidea game preferences to use application settings from Blood and Bacon.. when that didn't work, I tried disabling pretty much all advanced functions. In short, I got no game.. so to speak :)

A friend of mine also bought the game, and it works well for him. Which sucks more because he keeps talking about how much fun it is.. and then laughing as he kills things...

Thanks for any help or advice you can provide.

[BigCorporation]

Did you hold down LeftShift or Rightshift when you start the game ? Do this, and hit PLAY in steam, do not let go of leftshift or rightshift until the game starts. This will start it in WINDOWED mode.

[grifter]

He has left for the night im the friend that the game was working for
i did see the shift thing in one of the other posts and just rote it of as a joke
thank you for helping so quick
hope it works when he gets to try

[Reincarnate]

I'm about to head off for work. I'll give this a shot when I get back. Thanks for the help.

[BigCorporation]

Originally posted by Reincarnate:

I'm about to head off for work. I'll give this a shot when I get back. Thanks for the help.

Ok good luck, sorry for your troubles. We can get it running. If you get no big error message thats a really good sign its just a configuration.

[Reincarnate]

I agree with you.

And I do have some good news. After loading my computer and retrying the game (after the latest update, of course)... the game works fine. It does seem to change resolution a few times, but after some monitor flickering, it runs!

Thanks for your offer to help, and all your hard work getting the game running.

I do appreciate that this doesn't help anyone else who is having similar issues. It's either the usual 'did you turn if off and on again?', or the fancy new update fixed the issue.

With any luck, other people don't have similar problems in the future.

[BigCorporation]

OK please mark topic as (solved)

[Reincarnate]

Sorry to come back with some more bad news.

While the game now loads, and remains in full screen mode, there are some.. graphical 'glitches' happening. Now bear with me, because this is going to difficult to describe... in fact, it may be easier to do a video capture and show you. Let me know if this would be helpful for you and I'll sort it out.

The game seems to switch between panels/displays/menus/frames... every 0.6 (ish) of a second, it flickers between what you last had on screen, and what you are now looking at. If I open the settings menu, part of the home menu is displayed intermittantly, overlaying part of the settings menu; usually the upper half to three quarters of the screen space. Interestingly, this 'overlay' also blocks me from selecting menu items in the current page. Initially, I assumed this was a graphical issue.. but I'm not entirely convinced this is the case.

Each time something changes on screen, whether animation in game, opening a menu, or cut scene in the game, it alternates between displaying that content, and a static image/overlay of the previous event.

I tried to persevere through this visual onslaught for long enough to get into the actual game play.. mostly to see if it would clear up. But, I could feel parts of my brain melting, my eyes started twitching, and I .. wait... it's 8:30...? What happened to the last 3 hours..?



Naturally, my goal here is to help you fix some issues before they reach a larger audience. Let me know if I can help with any more details.

Cheers

[BigCorporation]

The game has no cutscenes either so, your saying while playing the game you see frozen images ? What do you mean by animations in game? Since the screen was flickering and changing resolution a couple times when you tried to run the game I have to ask the question do you have multiple monitors or multiple video cards?

[BigCorporation]

Please check file integrity, and try pressing F10 in main menu to go into windowed mode. Never had one report of this type of glitching.

[Reincarnate]

I did get a screenshot of the visual flickering. While this doesn't give the effect any justice, it'll still give you an idea of what's happening on my side. Not sure if you still want this (after reading below), but I'm happy to pass it over.

The multiple or single monitors doesn't change the flickering.

Saying running the game in windowed mode fixed the issue, while true, also implies that everything is running smoothly.. which it isn't. While there's no visual flickering anymore, the game still plays like it's running at less than 10 frames a second. There's likely some issue that's happening behind the scenes.

The 'cut scene' I mentioned was the camera transition from the start of the game to the barn. This taking roughly 45 seconds will give you an idea of the lag / frame rate issue I'm getting. There's also a bit of a delay between mouse movements and on screen response. I have to gauge the right amount of mouse movement to line up a shot, wait, see the 'bacon' has moved, line up again, and hope I predicted the pigs movement well enough for a shot. While this likely sounds worse than it is, in terms of game play, it feels 'wrong' enough for me to be sure it's not normal.

[BigCorporation]

Yeah something is clearly wrong. The game runs at a smooth 60 fps even on 10 year old computers.

Sounds like there is a hardware driver issue. What did you set the games resolution and anti aliasing at ?

Maybe lower them, but this sounds like a major conflict. The graphics are driven by xna high def profile. Ever try diff settings on your video card, like letting app choose the settings?

[Reincarnate]

I'd expect the game would run smoothly.. mostly because I have a decent computer. It feels like some sort of driver or hardware conflict.. like something is competing for resources.

The resolution is set at 1920 by 1080 in the game, and .. for normal compputer use. Anti-aliasing is set at 0. Changing these did not seem to affect performance. Nor does having my dual display turned on or off.

On the off chance, does the game store data on the C:drive? I tend to be habitually low on hard drive space there.

[BigCorporation]

It does store on the C: Drive but not a lot is required. And it does not make a lot of calls to the hard drive. I am assuming your playing single player, and having 10 fps. How did you install XNA 4.0 , was it automatic from steam ?

[Reincarnate]

It wasn't automatic from steam.. I followed some manual directions I saw in another post. I'll see if I can get the XNA istalled via steam and see if that helps.

[BigCorporation]

Originally posted by Reincarnate:

It wasn't automatic from steam.. I followed some manual directions I saw in another post. I'll see if I can get the XNA istalled via steam and see if that helps.

Actually do this, go into browse local files for BloodandBacon and in _commonredist folder you will see the latest XNA4.0 and .NET 4.0, please install the XNA from inside there.

This might fix the issue, you may have the wrong drivers from XNA framework.