Mine won't start either

[Fu]

I bought the DVD and installed it today. The game won't start. I get a small splash screen for a nano-second and then nothing at all. Nothing showing up in the task manager so I guess she ain't running.

I got the updated exe (1.9.5.8 I think) and installed it then came to these forums and did all the stuff I could find like altering the Startup.ini file to turn off the movie (movie=0) and updated all my drivers etc. I then took a deep breath and ran as admin but still nothing.

I'm running Win 8.0 on a desktop with an i7 4770K, 16 Gigs Ram, Nvidea GTX 760. Any ideas will be very welcome.

[Fu]

Just an update. I didn't download the program from anywhere. I simply installed it from the disk so it looks as though I have completely by-passed Steam. I don't have a \DistantWorlds folder in my Program Files(x86)Steam\SteamApps\Common folder tree. Both times I installed it the xnafx40_redist.msi text file was just hanging in an open Notepad after the installer had finished and said 'Installation Complete'. I had to actually kill the Notepad window to get rid of it. .. My guess is it was lost because it couldn't find it's home.

I'm going to try simply creating the folder and reinstalling, again, and see if that .msi file will bed in properly. Tomorrow, not today. I've had enough of this for one day.

Ps, I do have a steam account with at least one active game so if I have to do something with them I guess I'll do that. To be honest though, one of the reasons I bought this game was I thought it wasn't on steam.

[Nanaki]

This sounds like a Windows 8/8.1 compatability issue, my hardware is almost identical to yours with exception of running windows 7 and it runs perfectly fine without Steam. Have you tried running it in compatability mode?

[Fu]

I got it sorted. It was the xna 4.0 framework installation. It just wasn't installing properly off the disk. (Just hung around as a Notepad file).

What I did was.

Downloaded the xnafx40_redist.msi from the Microsoft download pages.

Installed it manually with the command line (msiexec /package xnafx40_redist.msi)

Played the game.

That was it. I hope this helps someone else.

Cheers