Game Not Loading Menu (White Flash on Black Screen)

[Octahedron]

Just downloaded the game on my new machine. When I boot I go to a loading screen but the loading circle just sits and doesn't do anything even after some time. Then if I press any key I get a white flash. I have tried deleting my saves, running in OpenGL (using "-force-glcore" doesn't work. I get an error saying the engine can't be initialized), and disabling GPU scaling. Any advice appreciated.

[Octahedron]

Disregard this. Solved by rebooting. Thanks Windows

[William Chyr]

Glad to hear this is resolved!

If you're stuck on the loading screen indefinitely, but the loading icon is moving, that generally points to a save file issue. Usually it's because there's a null reference and the game is looking for something, but can't find it. We've eliminated most of these, but there might be a rare edge case here or there.

If it is more like what Octahedron described where even the loading circle is stuck, then that probably is something else. Maybe it was a driver?

In any case, turning off and on again is always a good thing to try :)

[M-Wrex]

I'm getting this exact same problem - just bought the game last month (August 2022) but I see this has been an issue for over a year and this isn't the only thread on this subject. While the developer response has been good going by the various threads, nonetheless I would expect this to have been resolved by now and am disappointed I've had to run into the same issue all this time later. Alas, the bar is set high for devs; I don't have this issue with anything else in my library and have an expectation that basic bugs preventing playing a title need to be definitively squashed, not left for others to re-experience. I think I will seek a refund.

[William Chyr]

Originally posted by M-Wrex:

I'm getting this exact same problem - just bought the game last month (August 2022) but I see this has been an issue for over a year and this isn't the only thread on this subject. While the developer response has been good going by the various threads, nonetheless I would expect this to have been resolved by now and am disappointed I've had to run into the same issue all this time later. Alas, the bar is set high for devs; I don't have this issue with anything else in my library and have an expectation that basic bugs preventing playing a title need to be definitively squashed, not left for others to re-experience. I think I will seek a refund.

This exact issue can be due to a number of causes - the particular specs of your PC, a controller that you have, or something that happened to the save file. I understand your frustration at having the game not work when you first open it, but it is impossible to account for all the configurations that exist and the multitude of edge cases.

We take bugs very seriously, as you can see in our responses throughout the forums here as well as the support page[manifold.garden] on our official website. You can also see in the history of patches that we are continuing to update the game and fix bugs, almost 3 years after the initial release. We want our players to have a positive experience with the game and will always do our best to resolve any problems they are having.

If you're having an issue, you are welcome to post here or send an email to [e-mail] and we will help you.

For this particular bug, without knowing your PC specs or which controllers you have plugged in, my guess is that somehow the settings.txt file got corrupted. You can resolve it by simply deleting the file and restarting the game.

Here are the steps:

1. Disable Steam Cloud save (this is to prevent Steam from replacing the file after you've deleted it)
2. Go to C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\William Chyr Studio\Manifold Garden
3. Delete Settings.txt file
4. Restart the game

Optional Step:
5. You can also try deleting existing save files. If you've started the game, you would lose progress by doing so. Since your issue is on start up, my guess is the culprit is the Settings.txt file. In any case, save files can be found in: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\William Chyr Studio\Manifold Garden\Saves Go to this folder and delete all the files inside.

Restart you machine and let me know if this fixes it for you.

If the issue is resolved, remember to re-enable Steam Cloud if you want saves to be stored in the cloud and not just locally.

If the issue persists, please respond here and let me know. I would need additional info, such as your machine spec, the game's version number, and ideally the Player.log file and the output_log.txt file.

You can find the game's version number here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/473950/discussions/0/3049483103531512407/

The Player.log and output_log.txt files can be found in:
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\William Chyr Studio\Manifold Garden

If you don't feel comfortable sharing information here, you can send an email to [e-mail] and we can take it from there.

[Horus]

I'm going through the same thing right now. Funnily I had just sent a message on twitter saying how great the game is, had a power cut and now stuck on off white screen on what I presume is the final level. So annoyed with myself as I have not kept a working backup of the game save, a similar thing happened with BL3 dropping me from lvl 73 to lvl 10 as it seems game saves can happen at the worst possible time corrupting all saved data without there being a previous file to replace the corrupt one with. Really sad as I was so much enjoying this game. Hey ho, I can see my future as there is no way I will uninstall Manifold like I did BL3. lool