Loading freeze - Cannot play

[Waldo_II]

Today I finally received my English boxed copy of DCS: Black Shark. I installed it just fine, and started it up. The first thing I did was change the video settings to "High," to display fullscreen, and set to a resolution of 1440x900. Nothing unusual. (see edit at the bottom of the post for first start) I then went to the "training" menu, selected the familiarization course, and hit the start button. What happens next is what happens every time I do anything related to loading the game, whether I am going into "Instant Action," any training course, whatever.

 

First, after I click on the start button/Instant Action button, the DCS window disappears. I see my desktop and all other windows if I have any windows up (usually the task manager or Windows Explorer).

 

Then a small screen pops up in the middle of my screen, an image of a pilot walking towards a KA-50 in a field. I assume this is what is supposed to happen. After a few seconds, the screen disappears. In the bottom right corner of the screen it says "Version 1.00"

 

Next, a fullscreen window pops up, I assume this is the loading screen. A blue DCS: Black Shark logo stripe in the center, with two stripes of black on the top and the bottom. At the very bottom there is the grey loading bar. The loading bar moves quickly at first, going through stuff like loading ground objects, I can't remember all of them, except that the final thing I see is "Initializing effects." The bar then resets to the left, then progresses about 25% of the way to the right with the text "Please wait..."

 

The screen disappears, and I see my desktop. Any windows that are up in the background have no content on them (All black or grey or light grey). The grey loading bar remains at the bottom for the most part, the windows Start menu button is visible along with the system tray icons and time. I have waited as long as ~15 minutes before getting so frustrated that I end it via the task manager.

 

When I alt-tab to the task manager, I see DCS.exe*32 using plenty of memory (~400,000 kilobytes of memory), and it is using nearly 100% of the first CPU core.

 

 

Windows XP Proffessional x64

4096 MB of DDR2 RAM

nVidia GeForce 8800GT 512MB RAM

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ CPU (Dual core Windsor @ 3.0GHz)

Xtreme Gamer soundcard

English box version of DCS: Black Shark.

 

 

 

Please help me run this game. I have been looking forward to playing this for a very long time. I have searched through your forums and I have not found anything relating to my problem (if a situation such as mine as been brought to you before and answered, I apologize). I have seen the "long load times" thread, but the only solution found in there (using Cacheman) doesn't work, and in their case they can get the game running, whearas I cannot.

 

Thank you, Waldo.

 

 

 

Edit:The very first time I tried to load up training, I was able to get into it. However, I got a "Hit Pause to continue" message (or something of the sort), and I quit that session to look at the controls. I tried again, and this is where the problem first came up.

Edited April 24, 2009 by Waldo_II

[EtherealN]

On the "hit pause to continue" thing, there really isn't all that much controls to look for - the default is the pause key. I realize most games out there use the P key for pausing, but there is a key called "Pause" on standard keyboards (some keyboard manufacturers believe they don't have to follow standards though), usually somewhere right of the F-keys alongwith Print Screen and Scroll Lock.

 

So that message isn't actually telling you to "unpause", it's telling you to hit that key.

 

It is possible to re-map that one though, in case one doesn't have a Pause/Break key. (Such as on Apple hardware or some real fancy keyboards that think they don't have to follow standards.)

 

The loading error will take a bit more thinking though, but some spontaneous thoughts is that it is nothing strange in it using 100% of a core - this is a very CPU-intensive simulation so it'll use all it can. Does it actually crash and give you a crash dump somewhere in the temp directory, or does it only freeze?

 

If it just freezes but your computer is still responsive, you could try running Process Explorer (freeware) while doing this and see if it can show anything - like it freezing when calling a specific piece of hardware or something.

[Waldo_II]

I found the "pause/break" key soon after posting.

 

I seem to have half-fixed the problem. I changed all of the settings back to the factory settings and it works perfectly. I changed settings one-by-one and I have concluded that the reason for the failure was the fullscreen option. I have no clue as to why that was causing the failure; I'm baffled.

 

 

And no, it never actually crashed. It just froze up.

 

 

Thanks for responding, though. I'll come back if I experience any more problems.

[EtherealN]

You don't use SLI, right? I did find an error report that seemed to have similar behaviour, and that was with SLI enabled. (No fix in that thread beyond disabling SLI though.)

 

Which driver versions do you use? You could try rolling back or updating (depending on which one you have), or both, and see if the problem is independent of driver version.

[Decoy]

Thanks Waldo II, the no full screen thing works for me too.

 

:pilotfly: