Hello. I've gone through a ton of guides here, and on the net elsewhere, to try and fix my issue to no success so I've decided to finally throw in the towel and post. The day before yesterday I brought Planetary Annihilation on the Humble Store, got a steam key for it, downloaded it and so on - no problems. However I've continually had issues since starting it up. First time I started it, it crashed upon launch with "ran out of memory" error. So I try again, all good - I get past the first screen. I bring up the tutorial video, and 3/4 of the way through the video I get "PA.exe has stopped working". No more detail than that. So, I started up again, this time tutorial worked fine, I go to make a world (via play, not system editor), all good. And I get the list of games, I hit create game to take me to the screen to set up a game. And it crashes. "PA.exe has stopped working." So, 4th time lucky, I try again. This time it lets me bring up a world, set up a game with me vs an AI. All good. And I hit launch, and it freezes and then crashes. "PA.exe has stopped working". So, I went and read a few guides - updated my graphics drivers, the soundcard drivers didn't have a newer update. I try again, and same problem - crashes on launching a world. So, this time I try again without changing anything, and it crashes, and takes the whole computer with it. I had to force restart by the power button, because it froze everything. So, then I found a guide that told me to use Steam to verify all the local files were present, which it confirmed they were. So, this time I go to my computer makers website and try to use its driver update instead of the one windows update gave me. All good, I download that ... and all hell breaks lose. The driver must've been corrupted, because once it installed it caused Catalyst Control Center (AMD's graphics control program), Steam and Google Chrome to stop functioning all together. The first two just continually cycled through trying to start themselves up automatically and crashing. Google Chrome meanwhile suddenly would no longer work in metro mode. Well, that's all annoying, but not really PA's fault, so I system restored to yesterday and re-installed Planetary Annihilation, since it was wiped in the system restore. Same issue all over, crashes on game launch. I'm at a loss of what to try now. So I've attached my system specs; My graphics card, which is not listed, is a AMD Radeon HD 8730M. I know my system isn't high end. Now, I don't think its a specs issue. I ran task manager while launching it a couple of times, and according to it, PA was using between 2-10% of CPU and 1.6gb of memory when it crashes. If you let me know which file to grab, I can upload a crash report but I've no clue which one it is presently.
Both graphics drivers is still outdated. Integrated Intel HD4000: Code: Card name: Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000 Driver Date/Size: 10/16/2012 20:39:22, 12604416 bytes To update drivers download and install "win64_153318.exe" from Intel website: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=23714 If you get "not validated for this computer" error then download ZIP version of driver ("win64_153318.zip") from same page and then install it using this instruction: http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/2/558749190911446231/ AMD Radeon HD 8730M: Code: 9/11/2012 06:09:46 First you might try drivers from AMD website: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/mobile?os=Windows 7 - 64 Due to poor AMD mobility drivers quality you can met number of problems within installation so in this case check this how-to about AMD mobile drivers updates: http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/2/558749190925676183/
Thanks. Should've known not to trust Windows when it told me it'd updated them. Will run the updates now.
Windows don't update drivers on it's own and even when it's do (Win 8.1 have some drivers for sure) those usually just old or lack of OpenGL support. So you should always update drivers on your own.
I used device manager to check for driver updates, which is what a friend who knows more about computers than me recommended. And then I also checked the dell website, and googled for my card (but that didn't find anything from AMD, only Dell). The dell websites update wrecked my computer and forced me to do a system restore.
