Updated Compilation of Vista Issues/Fixes
By
Adar_ICT,
Posted on: 2007-03-12 11:34 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Did you do -compatiblecursors 1 first? What have you actually got in your shortcut?
That fixed it Zloth! Thanks.
I also backtracked and found another change for dual cores so I stuck it in just in case it needed it. -renderthread 1
Thanks again. 
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Alissara, what do you mean by 'ghastly'? Sometimes my mouse pointer comes up grey instead of blue but that's all I've noticed.
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Interesting. For me the cursor goes to a dithered black and white monstrosity. It's the right shape, but after the nice colored cursors in game (blue hand, gray arrow, etc), monochrome black and white just don't cut it.
Mind you, that's on an Nvidia 7400 Go in a laptop. For better or worse, my desktop runs XP, and I have absolutely no plans to upgrade in the near future, so I can't comment on how a higher quality card would do.
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@Alissara - an Angry Angel
The Angry Angels. When it absolutely positively has to be spanked today.
Hopefully some of you guys can help me out with a Vista 64-bit problem, as you've already enabled me being able to run CoH on my new desktop via the recommendation of using the 101.70 beta drivers for my 2x 8800 GTX's.
My problem is this: The game runs very well for the most part, except for the occasional stutter for 2-3 seconds every minute or two. I've tried changing all of the graphical settings I can think of to fix it, but none of the settings impact the stutter. While the game looks great and plays well besides this, the constant stuttering really detracts from my enjoyment.
Some of my system specs, if that will help:
ASUS 650i motherboard
2x GeForce 8800 GTX's running SLI
Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
2 Gigs of RAM
Plenty of hardrive space
Using the latest drivers for both the motherboard and 8800's.
Actually, solved the problem myself. The issue was actually my wireless router. Plugging the computer into the router itself removed the problem.
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Interesting. For me the cursor goes to a dithered black and white monstrosity. It's the right shape, but after the nice colored cursors in game (blue hand, gray arrow, etc), monochrome black and white just don't cut it.
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You're not alone; I get exactly the same thing, and I'm running a 7950GT, 158.18, Vista x64.
Even more fun, CoH crashes every single time I exit the game, bringing up it's error reporting dialogue which (usually*) claims the dll at fault is PhysXloader.dll. I don't have an ageia card, but I have nonetheless tried installing the ageia drivers to see if that helped (it didn't).
I have no doubt that some combination of I9/10 and new Nvidia drivers will eventually fix these problems, but until then I've just learned to live with them.
-k
*Usually, sometimes it claims that "" is responsible. Helpful.
The game uses Ageia physics, emulated in software if you don't have a card. Just a FYI.
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After reading through the replies everyday I can't stress this enough:
READ THE FIRST POSTS BEFORE YOU ASK QUESTIONS.
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After reading through the replies everyday I can't stress this enough:
READ THE FIRST POSTS BEFORE YOU ASK QUESTION.
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Whaaa? You got some kinda problem with n00bs asking the same stupid questions over and over and over and over and over again? Ones that have been answered over and over and over and over again ad nauseum? Are you trying to say they are all lazy [censored] who can't be bothered to read before they write?
CAUSE THEY ARE.
Carry on...
I have a Nvidia e-GeForce 7100 GS graphics card, and I have everything updated, but I am having a some issues with the brightness as well. I know some others have mentioned it, but so far the only answers to the questions seem to be that it's ATI related, but that's not the case here. I wondered if there was something in-game I could do to adjust it and make it at least somewhat more doable or not. Anyhow, I appreciate any tips or help I can get on this. >.<
T.
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The game uses Ageia physics, emulated in software if you don't have a card. Just a FYI.
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Yes, I know. It's not supposed to crash every time you exit the game however; I mentioned I didn't have a PPU to pre-empt anyone asking the question.
-k
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The game uses Ageia physics, emulated in software if you don't have a card. Just a FYI.
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Yes, I know. It's not supposed to crash every time you exit the game however; I mentioned I didn't have a PPU to pre-empt anyone asking the question.
-k
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Well I'm going to be rude and state the obvious -- better that it crashes when you quit then when you're in the middle of the game. All in all this is the last thing I would be worrying about.
That said, do you have the Ageia runtimes installed? Have you tried updating them? Uninstalling them? Installing them if you haven't?
Of course since it really has almost zero impact on the game you could always just ignore it and wait for a future fix. But NAH, what kind of fun would that be?
UUuuhhh.... maybe, depends on when the crash happens. If the crash is early enough, you could get stuck doing the Verify Files every time you try to play. Ugh.
Kal, have you got the Aero (sp!?) features turned on? It's a random shot in the dark but you might try going to your Windows settings and turning them off to see if it makes the crashing stop.
P.S. But, if the newbies don't keep asking the same questions over and over, how the %#@! am I supposed to ever answer any questions in this topic!? 
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Ive tried the cursor fixes and I still cant see my cursor, I am also getting that nasty gray screen and screen over lap when I try to create a character. Ive running vista on a new dell xps any Ideas what i should try or do?
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Well for me the grey screen and overlap was fixed once I turned off Depth of Field and Bloom in game...
Willy -
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Well I'm going to be rude and state the obvious -- better that it crashes when you quit then when you're in the middle of the game. All in all this is the last thing I would be worrying about.
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You're right, it's not a show-stopper, but it is damned inconvenient. As Zloth surmised, whenever it crashes, it forces a full file scan on the next start, which means every single time I launch the game I have to sit through the file scan which takes several minutes and is tedious in the extreme!
What's perhaps more worrying to me is that I've not heard of anyone else having the same problem - that makes me nervous. If the fault weren't isolated to CoX I'd suspect a more general problem with my machine.
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That said, do you have the Ageia runtimes installed? Have you tried updating them? Uninstalling them? Installing them if you haven't?
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I did mention this in my earlier post - I currently have them installed, but the crash was happening before I installed them, happens while they are installed, and continues to happen if I uninstall them.
Zloth -
I've disabled desktop composition for CoX which effectively "switches off Aero" while the game is running, but I haven't tried disabling Vista's UI entirely. I can't imagine it would make any difference but then I can't imagine why the heck a PhysX .dll is (reportedly) crashing either - I'll give it a shot and let you know what happens.
-k
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Willy -
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Well I'm going to be rude and state the obvious -- better that it crashes when you quit then when you're in the middle of the game. All in all this is the last thing I would be worrying about.
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You're right, it's not a show-stopper, but it is damned inconvenient. As Zloth surmised, whenever it crashes, it forces a full file scan on the next start, which means every single time I launch the game I have to sit through the file scan which takes several minutes and is tedious in the extreme!
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Create a shortcut to the CoX executable file (not the updater) and put -project coh in the target line (or cov if you want to start up in villain mode). This effectively bypasses the updater and will also bypass the file scan. This way, the only time you need to run the updater is when a new patch for live is released. Remember to also add any other switches you may have had in your updater shortcut such as -compatiblecursors 1 and -renderthread 1
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What's perhaps more worrying to me is that I've not heard of anyone else having the same problem - that makes me nervous. If the fault weren't isolated to CoX I'd suspect a more general problem with my machine.
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Actually, you're not the only one who reported having this problem, so it's not just you.
whoopsies, my bad, you CANNOT use -project cov
you can only use -project coh or -project cohtest
sorry bout that. it must conform to the registry entries.
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I am also getting that nasty gray screen and screen over lap when I try to create a character. Ive running vista on a new dell xps any Ideas what i should try or do?
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Well for me the grey screen and overlap was fixed once I turned off Depth of Field and Bloom in game...
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If you do that, are your other graphics for the game unchanged?
If so I will give this a try - those sign-on and costume creator screens being borked is a bigger deal to me than I thought it would be 
UPDATE: I would like to report that Death Bane's fix of turning off your Depth of Field and Bloom works nicely. My character log-in screen now looks as it should. Good-bye black & white vertical lines and overlap.
1000 thank-you's Death
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I've disabled desktop composition for CoX which effectively "switches off Aero" while the game is running, but I haven't tried disabling Vista's UI entirely. I can't imagine it would make any difference but then I can't imagine why the heck a PhysX .dll is (reportedly) crashing either - I'll give it a shot and let you know what happens.
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It's a real blind shot in the dark. If you have the shortcut set to disable Aero then, when the game finishes, your desktop blinks out and comes back. I'm wondering if maybe Aero is turning back on while CoH is still unloading things and it's causing some sort of weird memory collision.
If you're having to do the verification thing, though, that tells me that the game has not actually stopped working completely - it hasn't set the flag to say to skip verification yet. That means Aero hasn't started coming back yet meaning my shot in the dark is going to miss.
It's getting kinda hard to remember all the details of your bug. Does this happen if you just start City of Heroes and immediately quit from the login screen?
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It's getting kinda hard to remember all the details of your bug. Does this happen if you just start City of Heroes and immediately quit from the login screen?
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Yup, although in that case, rather than reporting the crash as being in PhysXloader.dll, it reports it as being in "".
Specifics:
Whenever I quit the game the last image on screen "freezes", and I hear an error beep in the background. Alt-tab doesn't work, so I do ctrl-alt-del->task manager, which gets me back to my desktop with a task manager window open and it also enables me to view CoH's "you've had a crash" box, which I ok, and then I get the "what were you doing when it crashed" box. If I either wait for that to submit or just cancel it, CoH finally quits (the taskbar button disappears) and Aero switches back on.
It feels like a video driver issue to me, although the error does report a problem with a PhysX .dll. Given that, it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that it was a problem with my soundcard drivers, or the phase of the moon maybe
-k
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UPDATE: I would like to report that Death Bane's fix of turning off your Depth of Field and Bloom works nicely. My character log-in screen now looks as it should. Good-bye black & white vertical lines and overlap.
1000 thank-you's Death
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Cool! you're welcome
Yeah this one seems kind of random as for who gets it when...I'm using a Geforce 7300 GS OC with 158.18 drivers and I actually had the grey screen/interlacing overlap all the time till I findled around with the settings and found with either DoF or Bloom on, it'll come back instantly, but works normal with both off.
And thanks everyone for all the fixes on here...using them the only difference I have is a loss of a couple FPS and an ugly looking cursor...certainly playable and I think the key is lots of RAM, I'm running 3GB. So now it's just a driver/patch wait 
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Whenever I quit the game the last image on screen "freezes", and I hear an error beep in the background.
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A BEEP?? Through the speakers or coming directly from your PC?
Running Vista and updated to the new Nvidia Driver, 158.18, for my GeForce 8800 GTX. CoH launches by changing the display to 8-bit color and saying my card does not support some DirectX items "You card or driver doesn't support GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array", etc. Then it tells me to switch to 32-bit color and finally that my card is not supported. I tried going back to an earlier working driver but that did not fix the problem.
Suggestions?
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I'm having the same problem of not seeing my curser. I'm running Vista Pro and using a 8800GTS card. I've checked all the other games that I have loaded up and apparently CoH/CoV is the only one that I have this issue with.
I've tried Alissara's suggestions and they did not work.
Thanks in advance.
Rhonen