Black screen at game startup

[jdawgcurtis]

I play at 1280x1024. I didn't look that closely at the ini. I'll do that tonight though. I don't know why that would have changed, but something must have for it to get jacked up! Thanks.

[RandomPixie]

Well my black screen problem seems to have gone away. I got rid of the Omega drivers and installed the lastest driver from ATi. I was able to get into the game, and played for about 20 minutes. No CTDs or anything like that so far. Hope it's fixed and stays that way.

[Acris]

Hey Random,

A few thoughts here if you would.

I have had similiar issues and have done some testing to find the issue related to actual corrupted files.

Here are my findings:
1. I am referring to a black screen where you would normally see character select, IE AFTER you have logged in and pressed play.
2. When at this black screen if I move the mouse around it responds, and as such it also seems to be able to pickup something on the screen as the pointer will change at various locations on the screen, however placing the cursor at the *play* location on the screen does not work.

If these are the same as your findings please keep reading:

1. I have two computers with 2 accounts. Fortunately they are side by side and allow me to test a few things.

When this error occurs I have used Synctoy from the NON effected machine to sync (overwrite) the affected machine. THIS always works as long as I am NOT in game on the *Origin of copy* machine.

If I am in game and try to copy the files that are *different* it doesnt work and I have to resort to Plan 2.

What I have noticed are certain chunk files seem to be affected. Not anything character specific. In my testing I have also found that FULL FILE SCAN didnt do a darn thing. Resulting in the same issues.

So my suggestions is this: If you have the option to place the play files on one machine and mirror to another machine or directory. Then use Synctoy to ONLY move back the files that changed since last patch, this will get you up and running in 10-15 minutes. IF this doesnt work, copying the ENTIRE directory works, and its baffeling why a FULL SCAN doesnt fix this but copying the entire directory from a known good backup does.

Causes of this issue as far as I am concerned is CDTs related to my network (I hate comcast) getting dropped for 1-5 seconds then starting back up. The result is I am sitting at the random screen with the load bar, as if it was trying to get to the character select screen but hangs there due to network failures.

As such it would remain there forever (Have waited up to 15 minutes testing) and it wont respond, which means alt+tab to get the windows bar, or 3 finger salute and kill the app.

Now here is my theory. The character select screen poles the login servers to determine where all your characters are. I believe this error I am seeing corrupts all the chunk files for all my characters locations. Hence why I see the chunk files being the ones that have the newer dates after a CDT.

Just a theory, in either case I have learned how to get around it. But let me tell you the first few times doing a FULL install and even LONGER patch were really annoying.

Hope this helps. Bottom line copy a FULL directory to somewhere on your HD and just copy back when it does this (slower but works everytime). Worst part is forgetting to update your backups after a patch day.

-Acris
Hilsbury

[RandomPixie]

Thanks but I solved my issue by switching from Omega drivers to the official ATi drivers. It worked after that. The Omega drivers were causing other graphical problems too.