DescentBB

Hey all,

I've having problems getting UT:GOTY to load after weeks of it working perfectly fine. When I try to execute the game using the enhanced OpenGL renderer, the splash screen appears. After a few moments, the screen goes black as if preparing to load the game, but then crashes back to the desktop with an unrefreshed splash screen, background, and elements of the Windows taskbar. Ctrl-alt-del is the only way to properly kill UT:GOTY via UnrealTournament.exe. The task manager reports that UT:GOTY is taking about 70 MB of RAM, so it's clearly trying to load. Also, although UnrealEd2 works fine even with the real-time rendering on, executing the game from here also crashes. Additionally, trying to load the game in DirectX 9.0c crashes fatally to a black screen, and a manual reboot is needed to get back to Windows.

This is the second time I've had this issue. The previous time, no amount of reinstalling UT:GOTY or updating drivers fixed it. I had to do a fresh reinstall of Windows XP to get it working once more. It has functioned happily since then, until I tried executing it this weekend and got the above results. Searching the forum, there are some posts about similar problems. I've updated my graphics drivers to the latest Catalyst ones from ATI and updated the enhanced OpenGL renderer to 2.8. No luck.

I really don't want to embark on the insipid 3+ hour journey of releasing Windows XP again and I'm looking for any other solutions.

The system is a Dell 3.06 GHz with 512 MHz of RAM. The graphics card is an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro running the latest Catalyst drivers from ATI (dated earlier this month) and the desktop is running at 1600x1200 with 32-bit color. The OS is Windows XP SP2 with the latest patches from Windows Update. UT is version 436 with version 2.8 of the enhanced OpenGL renderer. Short of the Windows updates, no drivers have been updated until now and the game had worked fine since the last reinstall. It might be worth noting that UT2004 does work.

Things I've tried:
- Updated ATI Catalyst drivers to latest (release Feb. 9th, 2005)
- Updated enhanced OpenGL renderer to 2.8
- Running in DirectX (fatal crash)
- Running from UnrealEd2 (same crash)
- Rebooting Windows, restarting PC
- Manually editing UnrealTournament.ini so FullscreenViewportX=1600, FullscreenViewportY=1200, FullscreenColorBits=32
- Updated sound card driver (ES1969 from ESS Technologies)
- Running with various options in Safe Mode. Could in some cases get game to run without sound, but setting the same options again sometimes resulted in the same crash.

Uninstall then Re-install DirectX9.0c. Theres a good program on guru3d Click Here that will help you uninstall it. Here is the tricky part though.

Theres a little bug in the DX9.0c installer from Microsoft where it will say it installed but it didn't install anything.

What you need to do is get the DX9b and DX9c REDIST (Full installers) from somewhere like Fileplanet. Create DX9b and DX9c folders wherever you want and extract the files into their matching folder. Copy the "dxsetup.exe" and the "dsetup32.dll" from the DX9b folder into the DX9c folder. Overwrite the existing ones. Now run the dxsetup.exe in the DX9c folder and DX9c should install properly :phew:

Hopefully re-installing DirectX will solve this issue. Sometimes it gets corrupted for some reason even though other applications that use it may be working properly.

Is there a reason why a corrupt DirectX would affect the OpenGL implementation of UT?

The only reason I suggested it was because you said that it caused a fatal crash while running it in DirectX 9.0c. Usually something of that nature might indicate a corruption of DX drivers. I'm not sure how much DX has to do with OGL, if anything at all, but it was just a suggestion.

I've been under the impression that Unreal and UT were D3D applications too. So that kinda influenced it a bit. I'd suggest doing it anyways to remove all doubt that DirectX might be to blame and then go from there. Worst case scenario is that you're right back where you started