[Solved] Blank screen issue

[ulterior]

I have recently purchased the game via impulse.

I am experiencing a blank screen after having loaded either the tutorials or the main game,  sound continues and clicking seems to evoke a response from the invisible game entities, I am able to bring up the game window and end the game.

It sounds similar to http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,1514.0.html however I have installed the DirectX redistributable to no avail.

I am running Vista Ultimate 64 bit with SP2 (which I believe added DirectX 11 in any case)

[Volatar]

Do you have ALL of these? http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,1811.0.html

[x4000]

Sorry to hear of your troubles.  When you go into the Settings window for the game, there is a Game Data Directory folder path at the bottom.  Can you go into that directory and look for error text files, and post them (or the contents) here?  Most likely UnhandledErrors.txt or something like that.  That would at least explain what the issue is.

What is happening, at any rate, is that Direct3D is completely failing to run from the sounds of it.  The menus are GDI-based, which does not require DirectX or hardware acceleration.  This most likely means one of these things:

1. Outdated graphics card driver (or a buggy more recent driver, either way -- it happens with both nVidia and ATI).

2. Messed up DirectX 9.0c.  It doesn't really matter if you have DirectX 10 or 11, you still need 9 to run this (and many other) games.  The different DirectX versions are basically separate products, from a programming standpoint.  It sounds like this may not be your issue, though.

3. Some sort of issue with SlimDX.  You can try to reinstall that here if you think that might not be working:  http://www.arcengames.com/dl/SlimDX%20Runtime%20(March%202009%20SP1).msi

Your OS and everything should be fine, we have plenty of people who use Vista 64.  I'm on Windows 7 64 myself, for that matter, and it's very similar.

My money is on the graphics card driver here, but the error text files would help us determine if this is a SlimDX issue or something else strange, rather than a graphics card thing.

[ulterior]

Thank you for your swift responses :-)

I have looked inside the AppData directory and find no error log files just a settings.dat file.

It might be worth mentioning that after returning to the main menu from a blank game the menu's space background is no longer visible. Also sometimes for a brief moment the game seems to visible.

Am busy downloading the latest Nvidia drivers (via a slow South African internet connection) and will let you know what effect that has.

[x4000]

It sounds like this is a graphics card issue, then, if there's no errors logged.  That's a very curious thing.

Alternatively, one thing that did occur to me -- are you using any other software that plugs into games?  For instance, FRAPS, XFire and the Steam Client hook into AI War and work just fine, but I have had a report in the past that Mumble causes issues.  There are a lot of those sorts of programs out there, so depending on what you might have, that might be part of the issue.

Hope this helps!

[ulterior]

Thank you for your help, after all of that it was indeed a graphics driver issue which is now nicely sorted out.

[x4000]

Excellent!  Glad to be of service, and thanks for your support!

[asalamayca]

I'm having a similar problem, sometimes i can get a few minutes of gameplay in before it goes completely black (sometimes cant even get to the main menu)--> i can still click and it seems to respond, music is playing, the game still responds to me hitting esc to get out of the game, and when i get back to the main menu the background is black also

i redownloaded all the prerequisites for this game (first post on this forum) and updated my graphics card (nvidia)

i went to the game data log part in the settings menu and this message was in the blank space-- 

c:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\ai war fleet command\

i dont know if that means anything special, but thought id give it to you

I'm interested in this game and would definately like to play, any help would be appreciated A LOT

[x4000]

Sometimes strangeness with video is caused by having too NEW of a driver (since sometimes bugs creep in) and other times it is caused by some other program such as any graphics performance monitoring peograms or anything with an in-game GUI aside from the supprpted steam, Xcode, traps, etc. 

I would either try downgrading your graphics drivers a bit to see if the latest ones are bugged, and also close any graphics-related programs that might be interfering while the game is running.

The fact that it works for a while and then gives out is very strange, though, and makes me suspicious that in your case there could be a hardware issue (overheating or otherwise).  Doing some gpu stress-testing (there are various programs if you google them, though I myself have not really used them) may be a good idea if you want to rule that out. Hope that helps!

[asalamayca]

ok so i downdated my driver, started the game, and a screen pops up right as the game's starting saying something about directX could not be initialized and then two more screens pop up one reading "D3DX error" (or something like that I'm doing this by memory) and the other saying something about an "Unhandled Error" or something like that, again by memory. sooooooooo i redownloaded all the prereq's.. again and tried the game again....... same result

[asalamayca]

alright so i just ended up backdating my driver card, then redownloading all the prereq's again like i said and still didn't work like i said.. then started having problems with my screen for normal activities on my comp so decided to just redownload my updated driver annnndddd thought i'd try the game, turns out it worked.. thank you for the help, i wouldn't have figured it out myself

[x4000]

No problem -- sounds like the graphics card driver had not installed completely correctly the first time, or something of that sort.  Pretty odd!

[darke]

Just a semi-relevant FYI, I'm noticing that in a lot of new games tech support forums (lots of new games coming out and I tend to like to know what problems to expect before I buy them ), at the moment there are lots of complaints about the latest Nvidia drivers (191.xx) causing more then the usual problems. Apparently they might also be managing to kill some nForce based motherboard chipsets as well, bizzarely enough.

In any event, this might be the case of a few of the odder graphics glitches around the place if the users are using nvidia cards.

[x4000]

Oh, very good to know -- thanks!

[seandrake6]

I've been having this same problem as well. I tried updating my video driver but that didn't help. is there a way to make sure my driver is installing fully?