[4.1.0.21] screen turns black after each movement

[larryfulkerson]

Most of the time when I set a unit in motion it gets to the edge of the screen and then the screen freezes and doesn't respond to any inputs by the player. Then when it's been enough time for the unit to arrive at it's destination the screen turns this color and stays that way until you move your mouse. I'm running WIN10. Anybody know what I can do to fix this?

[Lobster]

Lots of us are getting black screens at different times in the game. No idea what is going on. [&:]

[Shadrach]

I would definitely create a support task first and foremost. As a paying customer they have a duty to help you sort it out. Even if dealing with support can be a frustrating experience, especially for the more technically inclined of us.

The first things support will do is obviously to ask you to upgrade graphics drivers. In my experience upgrading graphics drivers rarely helps things like this - UNLESS the drivers used are ancient, like 10 years old or something. This game is built on an ancient core and I doubt any "newer" version of drivers than what most users are already running will help anything.

If support suggest reinstalling the OS you can suggest they stick that idea somewhere dark and warm... an issue like this is *their* responsibility, it's probably caused by *their* bad code, and they can't expect users to spend hours to reinstall their OS based on a hunch it "might" fix things.

Have them analyse the issue and help them with any logs and dumps they need.

One suggestion, when the issue occurs, open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+ESC), right-click the game, and select Create Dump File. The dump will end up in:
c:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp\
Copy it out, compress with zip, and attach to the case. Any decent support person will have the tools needed to analyse such a dump file, i.e. a debugger. They can see what threads are running, what the threads are doing, and if they are deadlocked. This is basic stuff.

[Edorf]

I`m running the game on Windows 7 but have yet to try it on any of my Win10 computers. My experience on 7 is that the game isn`t optimized to run on modern computers and the interface is terrible laggy. I find it quite awkward to be honest. I guess if support is notified here they should be able to reproduce the black screen issue some users are experiencing.

Personally I have ways to to get most older games running on newer OS`s. I do not install games inside program files (86X). I always install directx 9.0c (june 2010) and usually visual c redistributables 2008 and 2010, x86 and 64 drivers. It is also not recommended to always update graphics drivers to the latest drivers. Some drivers can make older games unplayable. If that`s the case it could be a smart move to roll back to an older graphics driver.

All of the above should apply to both windows 7 and 10. Unfortunately Windows 10 automatically installs newer drivers thus software can suddenly behave erratic even though it worked fine the day before. And on Windows 10, make sure DirectPlay is activated.

To activate DirectPlay:
Press the Windows key (between Ctrl and Alt) and the R key at the same time.
In the Open box, type Control Panel and click OK
Then, select Programs.
Finally, click on Turn Windows Features on or off and turn on the DirectPlay feature in this new window.

So for Windows 10 I would try to activate DirectPlay first and if that doesn`t help then install the drivers above if not already installed.

Good luck.

[Shadrach]

I think the issue here is not running the game, but that the game goes all black after moves. Personally I suspect something needs to be optimised with the way the game draws to the screen, for instance simply moving the map should not result in nearly a second to redraw the area around the dialog panels.

Some of the things mentioned above are good, like installing in another location. But any recent PC should already have both DirectX and the Visual C libraries installed. The game will also install them on setup if not. There are redists included in the game folder under 'redist' and a DXSETUP.EXE there. It couldn't hurt to run through it.

It is also not recommended to always update graphics drivers to the latest drivers.

See, no wonder users get confused when some people say always install the newest drivers, and some say don't... Honestly I think there's a belief in that computers are some kind of 'black magic' going on here, and it leads to no end of confusion. Unless people are running the very latest 3D-heavy games, the drivers that are installed with the OS are perfectly good, otherwise getting the latest tested drivers are always a good idea. But this is rarely the issue - bad code in the game often is.

And on Windows 10, make sure DirectPlay is activated.

I've seen this advice before on these forums, and not sure why. Do people mean DirectX? DirectPlay was a mostly networking-related API and was deprecated over a decade ago. Maybe the game still uses it, but I don't have it installed and have none of these issues. The game is old, sure, but hopefully they've removed any dependencies on this very old API by now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectPlay vs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX

It might be worth it to try the different compatibility settings in the properties of the game executable. But this is for really old games, like Win98/XP era.

[Edorf]

DirectPlay is a component of earlier directx versions. Without this enabled on Windows 10 many older games are not playable.
If an old game doesn`t work well on windows 10 then it would be a good idea to turn this on. I seldom install newer graphics drivers and usually never bother updating unless something is clearly broken. But then again I really don`play demanding pc games. I play a lot of games that runs much better on windows xp than on 7 or 10, that`s for sure, so I`m dealing with these kinds of problems all the time[:)]

[cpt flam]

I get sometimes black screen too, but calling that's game is not answering (ne répond pas)
second later back to the move