Game stops responding upon startup

[Spacecadet]

ORIGINAL: tedmc

When I doubleclick the start 'Play Distant Worlds' icon to start distant worlds, I get a little popup that says (in the title bar - Distant worlds - not responding) & (in the body - Distant worlds Return of the Shakturi). At the same time I get a microsoft windows popup that says 'Distant worlds has stopped working'.

Also, Merry Christmas to everyone!

tedmc, you might want to give the tool procedure I mentioned a couple posts up and see if that helps.

[SykoFused]

ORIGINAL: Spacecadet

ORIGINAL: SykoFused

ORIGINAL: Spacecadet



I'm not sure of this, but you may need to run DW in 32 Compatibility mode - right click on the .exe and set it.
Not familiar with Win 7, and yes DW original runs fine, but it's worth a try.


EDIT:

Actually you may need to run the Expansion installer in 32 bit mode, and then it may run okay.
Just a couple things to try.

I gave both suggestions a try but either worked. Next thing I'm going to try is removing DX11 and put on DX9.0c but I'll be doing this Saturday.

On a side note, It's kind of ironic I managed to get Longbow 2(a old game thats tough to run on winxp) to work with win7 but yet the ROTS expansion has me completely stomped.

I would think DX11 should have backwards compatibility built in, but I haven't gotten into that yet.

You might be onto something though, I believe DW is developed on .Net 2.x & 3.5, and I'm not sure if they were doing DX11 when those were in use.

Two other thoughts come to mind here.
There's a tool on the Tech forums to basically rip out .Net.
You could try uninstalling all of DW, and you might need to delete a few DW directories afterwards, and then use the tool to clean out .Net.
Do a new full install and let it do DX 9 and .Net 3.5 and see if it works then. Maybe the .Net's hosed up, it happened to me the very first time I tried to install DW way back.

The other option I don't know if I'm too keen on, as it would involve installing .Net 4.x.

I think I'd try using the tool to clean out your existing .Net and go from there.

I also installed .Net 1.1 and 1.1 SP1 just in case something was used in that. These two aren't included in the .Net 3.5 package.


EDIT:

It could be something as simple as your Anti-Virus interfering with it.
You might want to check what and how many processes you have running.

DX11 does have backwards compatibility however, in its current state some cases are impossable to deal with. I just found out that DX11 is built into the win7 OS so theres noway I can see to test if DX9 will run the game.

As far as I know DX11 was built around .net 4 while the older .net versons fall under the "compatibility mode". I think this may be where the problem is with ROTS as I use alot of mods that deal with .net files for other games. This may cause some weirdness with how DX operates. Alsoly, I seen in another thread that mods that change/use .net files has stoped ROTS from running and once those mods were uninstalled the game worked for them. I'm currently looking into this.

Alsoly I've tried removing .net completely and tryed 3.5 that came with the game. I alsoly tried added 1.1 and 1.1 sp while 3.5 was installed. I alsoly added .net 4 to the other versons and removed them all while added .net4 alone. Every case ended with the same "distant worlds has stoped working". While uninstalling and reinstalling Distant worlds every step.

Thank you to everyone thats trying to help and Merry Christmas.

[SykoFused]

I'm happy to report the game is working. I read another thread that they were having the same problem and they installed the game to another directory and it worked. Looks like a few computers have trouble with the default install directory.

@tedmc,

If you havn't already tryed I suggest you try uninstalling then reinstalling DW and ROTS in another directory such as C:\DW\Distant worlds. Hopfuly this will work for you aswell.

EDIT: fixed a typeo

[tedmc]

Thanks Everyone
I reinstalled the game with the default directory, as SykoFused suggested. The games running fine (it crashes every couple of hours now, making 'fine' a relative term) and I'm enjoying the game. The game seems much more polished and easy to use, compared earlier versions of DW.