Hello all, got a bit of a strange issue that I haven't been able to find anything remotely related to online. I noticed it first with the 2nd or 3rd tutorial when trying to make units from a factory. If I clicked at a rate I'd consider normal for queueing up units in other games, the game would just close. No freezing, no errors, nothing. Just gone. I was later able to replicate this on the menu screen by just clicking quickly, although sometimes it just makes the screen flicker. On my second monitor I notice the tab for the program slides over itself in the Windows 8.1 task bar with every click. That is, it slides away like it was being closed, and slides back in. This occurs on every click, although slow clicks don't cause the game to close. Rapid clicking just speeds up the rate of this sliding, before it quits. I've had issues with other games seemingly losing focus randomly on mouse clicks, keyboard input sometimes, and rarely game pad input. I suspected malware was doing it, but I ran scans and I'm of the belief my system is clean now. These games (DungeonDefenders Eternity and DD2 come to mind) seem to have problems when played in fullscreen mode, and I've had no problems running in windowed (borderless) but running PA:T in windowed causes untold 'focus flickering', so much worse than fullscreen, making the game unplayable (it's pretty unplayable in fullscreen actually.) Does anybody have even the remotest idea what's going on here? I recognise it's likely some underlying issue with my PC, but as it seems to be affecting Planetary Annihilation the hardest, I figured it was worth a shot asking here. I did run a tool called focus.exe from happydroid.com to find out what was occurring with each closure of PA and I get the message '1620:Could not open process' although these number codes may be related only to focus.exe (it is not very well documented, at all). Nothing else seems to be happening on closure. Like I say, multiple scans come up clean (CCleaner, Glary, Spybot, ESET Anti virus etc.), Latest NVidia driver was installed today and tested - no change. Planetary Annihilation is the worst affected program by this If anyone has any idea how to even make the game playable, I'd be grateful for any suggestions . I can't really discipline myself not to click the mouse more than a few times a second just in the hope I don't crash. As of now I haven't passed the tutorial yet, just clicking around too fast kicks me out. Thanks in advance! DXDiag and Log attached (log is from last time it booted me).
Since you described a clicking problem, I looked at the input section, and TiltWheelMouse.exe looks unusual. Unfortunately most of the search results are spammy file info sites, which I'd treat with caution. I can say that my windows 10 machine does not have this file in dxdiag.
Hi, Thanks for the suggestion. I disabled that, and I think it was my mouse driver. My mouse has variable Dpi, and on disabling this all that happens is it disables that feature of the mouse. Game still doesn't work. I've noticed on startup, the whole screen flashes between the desktop and the game, with a sort of screen-tearing effect, and continues to do so until I click in the window. Then the cursor will change rapidly from the game cursor to the windows 8 spinning wheel. Sure enough, I went and tried to complete the tutorial and it closed again when clicking a few times to build units No further forward. I've also tried disabling Classic Shell (start menu for win 8) and ultramon (multi monitor handling program) as I suspected these as culprits, but to no avail. Thanks anyway, it was worth a shot.
Could you try to do a clean boot? That would temporarily disable all other background programs that may interfere. Instructions are here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135/ If PA runs fine with a clean boot, then there is some background program interfering. Otherwise it's something else.
Ok, just done a clean boot, even the Steam service wasn't running, so I ran it from the steamapps folder exe file, just in case steam was the culprit. Sure enough, same problem, although I did have to click a little more aggressively before it crashed, it still crashed. I don't trust it enough to try and play a full game, especially online, given that the rapid click thing is just one way I know of reproducing it, not necessarily the only way. Thanks for the suggestion though, seems it is some other underlying cause and not some rogue program stealing focus and causing havoc. I've opened a topic with the guys on Tom's Hardware too, see if they can help get to the root of it, and hopefully solve all my gaming woes. I've uploaded recent DxDiag and PA:T logs from the clean boot, in case there is anything blindingly obvious that now stands out without the other stuff. Thanks.
There are also a bunch of error reports in your DxDiag.txt complaining about the input drivers. It doesn't sound bad, but I'm not sure what it means. Most seem to be about your "Afterglow Gamepad for Xbox 360" though. Actually, could you try unplugging that thing and see if it still happens? Maybe it's interfering somehow. Probably not, but who knows.
Never had any problems with it in games that use gamepad, but I've removed it anyway. Same problem Edit: Okay, I know this is drastic, but might there be any benefit to doing a complete OS reinstall to a new partition? Will PA and my other steam games remain in place on the old partition?
Sorry for the late reply... While the data will remain in place on the old partition, many of the configuration files will be stored on the OS partition. Steam Cloud saves may work for some games, but PA doesn't use that for instance. PA stores its config in "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation" (copy-paste that in the address bar of Explorer). Other games may have something similar. It's quite a hassle to reinstall the OS, but since it's happening in other games as well it is probably something weird with Windows itself. Especially since the clean boot didn't help. One last thing you could still try is using the SFC tool that comes with Windows. It will check your system files for corruption. I think the chances of it working are also low, but it's easier than reinstalling. Instructions for that are here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/929833 At this point I would even try a different mouse...
hi and i have the same problem as well on steam gameslinke rust and brawl hallah ando ther games it is very frustrating and i want it to stop so if you guys have found a solution in the time from your last posts and now please get back to me i will be very grateful
Hey, I used to have the same problem but finally managed to fix it a few days ago... sadly i'm not entirely sure what I did as I tried a lot of things at once in an attempt to fix it. But note that the problem lies with steam itself and not actually the game, I realised this when quite a few of my other games started crashing as well. Anyway, try running steam as administrator or in compatibility mode. I feel like this was most likely what fixed my games. Also running the game in windowed mode stops it from crashing as well, but is kinda annoying.
Hello. I am also experiencing the same problem; However it also works on different minimized games and or full screened games, such as ROBLOX. I need help aswell xD
It happens to me when I am clicking multiple times but pressing another key. I will inform you: When you have this problem it is not your type of mouse, something on your computer or other. ( there are exceptions , virus , cheats , ddos , old mouse, horrible computer , slow computer , etc ) It is possibly your driver ( GPU , CPU etc ) or settings. When you are clicking, sometimes you must press another button to activate it or do another action or complete the action after clicking ( most likely while clicking ) Spamming it causes it to crash. Just a warning, if you ever get this problem don't switch mouses or anything before trying one of these: Minimize Lower Resolution Changing Certain Mouse Settings Ask help. If none of these work, consider on a new GPU , CPU etc. But still, even if that doesn't work... Well IDK. I haven't even fixed my problem
