Possible fix for crash upon startup

[Mediocrity]

Hi all, I recently tried to run the game and quickly ran into the same issue that appears to have plagued many other potential players - the dreaded crash after the splash screen. Now, this isn't a thread where I start complaining and ranting about the inability to play the game, though I was pretty annoyed about there being no official solution for it.

After a few tries with several workarounds (inclusive of the rather questionable priority and core affinity setting ones), I decided to simply break it into Visual Studio's just-in-time debugger just for the heck of it. I noticed openal32.dll in the call stack leading to the crash, so I decided to check that file. I dug up its properties and noticed that its version was 6.14.357.21. Quickly asked Uncle Google if there was anywhere I could download a newer version and was promptly directed to this site[connect.creativelabs.com] (update: Creative has apparently taken this site down, refer to post #4 further below for the archived links). Not feeling too confident, I downloaded and installed the latest version of OpenAL, renamed the dll of the same name that was supplied by the game and tried running it again. Turns out that that was really all that was necessary to get it going.

For reference's sake, I'll post the relevant details of my aging rig here:

• Intel Core i7 920 (old, I know)
  
• nVidia GeForce GTX 560
  
• Creative SBLive! 5.1 Digital Entertainment SE (the oldest card I have in my system)
  
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (no service pack, no platform update)
  
• Frontlines: Fuel of War v1.0 (retail edition, no patches applied)
  
• nVidia GeForce Driver v301.42
  
• AGEIA PhysX Driver v7.11.13 / nVidia PhysX Legacy Driver v9.12.1031[www.nvidia.com] (tested to work on both drivers)

tl;dr/dc

Long story short, try this:
1) Download the latest available version[connect.creativelabs.com] of OpenAL (contains OpenAL32.dll version 6.14.357.24 at the time of writing) and install it.
Update: Creative has apparently taken this site down, refer to post #4 further below for the archived links.
2) Hold off the temptation to start the game - we're not quite done yet. Navigate to wherever you installed the game and enter the Binaries folder.
3) Look for the file openal32.dll and rename it to something else, such as openal32.dll_bak or the like. The objective here is to prevent the game from loading this particular binary, which seems to be incompatible with Windows 7.
4) Try to start the game, if all goes well you should now be able to see the introductory videos and play the game.

While I cannot guarantee that this will work for everyone, it's at least worth a shot, don't you think?

Good luck, I hope it works for you too.

Edit:
Also want to add that the game works perfectly fine on my rig. There will be massive amounts of stuttering right after you finish loading a level, but bear with it for about a minute and it will smoothen out after that (~23-30 fps -> ~60 fps).

[Surogat]

I only write this for people scared by your post. Installing the game with PhysX Legacy Driver from Nvidia does also the job. It took me 5 minutes to install this game. No more was needed to run it fine and without stuttering of any kind. ;-)

[Mediocrity]

Haha, I tend to go on verbose mode a lot.

Glad to hear you found a way to get it running. :) What a shame though, this game honestly wasn't that bad at all.

[Nebbie]

@ TESLA-X4, many many thanks for your suggestion to download the Nvidia Driver. I had the problem with my new computer that the game was crying out for the Ageia Driver. Using WIndows 7 these days & the unavailablity of the Ageia Driver led to a lot of frustration on my part.

Anyone having problems with this imo very good game for its time, should download the Nvidia Driver & in 98% of cases the game will run.

Once again thanks for the tip Tesla. I would buy you a drink if it was possible. Thumbs.up.

[Mediocrity]

You're welcome :)

Oh and since the OpenAL site has apparently been taken down (way to go, Creative!), here's an archived link to the, well, archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130602222739/http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/oalinst.zip

Other versions are available here (Wayback machine FTW!).
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/oalinst.zip

Edit:
Whoops, looks like Steam community forums tripped on those links, fixed!