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just bought the game, but it wont start. please help


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hi all just bought combat mission beyond overlord

for my win XP using a geforce 2 graphics card and directX 9.0. im using the nvidia 6.14 drivers. now then my problem is that when

i start the game im shown a login picture for

a short time on the middle of my screen. Then the

screen turns black and nothing happends.

after a while im dumped pack to the desktop

with an error message saying: could not initialize Direct3D graphics.

now, i have tried turning of anti aliasing and alt+tab back into the game(couse its still running), but the screen remains black and i have to alt+f4 to exit.

any help appriciated.

regards

nappy

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When you first launch CM the game goes through a resolution selection process that only shows text in the middle of the screen in a box that lists the current resolution, refresh rate and possibly the display adapter that it is running on ("primary","secondary" or sometimes a video card name) and a button for "Skip" and "Select". There is nothing else on the screen - it is completely black.

The resolution will start out at your current desktop resolution, but possibly at a higher refresh rate that what you normally run if your driver supports it (which it may). This refresh rate may be beyond your monitor's capability to display it, resulting in a screen that may either be black or garbled. If you wait a 5 or more seconds you may hear a 'click' from your monitor indicating that it is trying a different resolution or refresh rate. Typically it will try the next lower refresh rate at the same resolution, until CM gets down to 60Hz. At that point the next lower resolution will be tried, but at the highest refresh rate that your video driver offers (this may be 120Hz+). Again it will proceed to lower refresh rates automatically if you don't do anything (or you press the "Skip" button if you can see it). If you let this process go down to 640x480 at 60Hz, then the next thing you'll get is the error that you've seen "Can't initialize DirectX....". This is an error indicating that either you never selected a resolution and CM displayed the lowest resolution it could (CM can't automatically start the resolution selection process again) or that there is some sort of problem and you never saw any of the screens. So this error doesn't necessarily mean that you have a problem with your setup; you just may not have selected a resolution.

The 6.14 driver isn't geared for Windows XP; I'm not even sure it runs properly on XP (it was one of the first Windows 2000 drivers). XP wasn't even out when that driver was current. Even the "built-in" driver that XP offers is newer (12.4x). I highly suggest upgrading to a newer (but probably not the newest) driver, like 30.82 which generally has the fewest problems with CM.

There's also the possibility that one of the Windows Security patches is causing problems (in this case it would only account for a black screen when Alt-Tab'ing out of CM). This thread details some of the issues. I'm not sure, but this patch may be built into XP Service Pack 1 and hence can't be removed. However I'm under the impression that there is a newer patch out there that addresses some of the problems the original security patch caused.

This resolution selection process will occur each time you launch CM if you don't exit properly from the game. This is done by pressing Alt-Q. In game it will normally bring up a dialog box confirming exit. Otherwise the game will automatically exit and write or possibly re-write the Prefs file. The presence of this Prefs file holds the resolution that you've selected. Once you delete this file you'll need to reselect the resolution the next time you start CM (and this is the only way to change your CM resolution - other than lowering your desktop resolution below CM's selected resolution - then you have to select again, starting with the current desktop resolution).

[ June 27, 2003, 01:33 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

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