Black Screen

Hi Everyone,

When I log into City of Heroes and select my server it takes me to the screen that lists the characters I have on that server. However, there is a noticeable lag between my mouse and it highlighting/clicking items. Everything except the character names is completely black (i.e. I select a character name, but no character is displayed -- just blackness).

If I log into the game, I see the UI but nothing else. The actual game screen is black save for the occasional name of another player passing through my field of vision. But again, all I see is the name... everything else is black.

I am on Windows 7, 32-bit. And use dual NVidia 8800 Ultra video cards with the latest drivers (266.58).

Any suggestions for how to fix this would be appreciated. Thanks!

Did you change anything (drivers, settings, etc.) before this started happening?

Try running in single video card mode instead of SLI. Try verifying your game installation using the launcher. Instructions were in another post for the NCSoft launcher. If all else fails, try using system restore to a point where you know CoH worked.

Did you change anything (drivers, settings, etc.) before this started happening?

I'm returning after a long absence, so it's hard to say. But the last time I played, it was on this same computer. To the best of my knowledge, the only things that have changed are the videocard drivers have been updated and CoH is now on Issue 20. I have also installed Norton 360 in the last couple months, but I don't see how that could cause this kind of problem.



Try running in single video card mode instead of SLI.

It turns out I was running in single video mode. When I turn on SLI it gets even worse... when I access the character select screen in SLI it crashes the whole computer!

It definitely sounds like you need to verify the game installation first. After that, I would install the latest WHQL video drivers.

I'm thinking this may be a hardware issue, though. Try playing with only one video card in your computer. The 8800 series runs very hot and may have been damaged by heat in the past. It is possible for it to run fine on other games because most other games don't use OpenGL.