A long time ago I bought PA while it was still in Gama. Initially I was able to play a few games, but then a particular pattern of crashes began cropping up. Seeing this I thought "oh well, the game's in Gama, I guess there's just some issue with it" and I stopped trying to run it. Today, months later, after watching the forums and youtube videos for some time I decided that there was no way that a bug this important hadn't been fixed yet, so I tried to run PA again. The game still crashed in the same way though. This lead me to the conclusion that the game was actually running fine, and that it was a problem either with my computer or my method of running the game which caused the issue. So I decided to post on these forums and ask if anyone knows what could cause this kind of crash on this machine. I have no computer skills at all so this whole issue might have a very obvious solution or might obviously have no solution at all, or I might be providing completely the wrong information to determine the cause of the crash. Please tell me if any of this is the case. The crash occurs as follows: I open steam and click "play" PA. The game opens normally, showing me options for multiplayer, singleplayer, etc. I can click on any of them just fine, but whether I enter multiplayer, singleplayer, or try to run a replay (in singleplayer AI skirmish I can change the system of the game just fine), the same thing happens. The game "builds planets" for a while, then lights up the button to "Start Game" I click that button and it transports me to the system. Then either before I can zoom in on a planet, as I scroll around the planet, or very soon after my commander drops in a diolouge box pops up saying "PA.exe has stopped working" giving me options to "close the program" or "check online for a solution and close the program" and the game freezes and greys out. The diolouge box, under the dropdown menu "show problem detail" has the following text: Problem signature: Problem Event Name: APPCRASH Application Name: pa.exe Application Version: 0.0.0.0 Application Timestamp: 54dba841 Fault Module Name: MSVCR110.dll Fault Module Version: 11.0.51106.1 Fault Module Timestamp: 5098826e Exception Code: c0000005 Exception Offset: 000000000003c3b9 OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.4 Locale ID: 1033 Additional Information 1: 6c13 Additional Information 2: 6c13b60287d7d196ef8ec11d068e6686 Additional Information 3: ea4f Additional Information 4: ea4f2e89bbd38df6941d8aa619291867 My computer is a Lenovo Thinkpad. My operating system is windows 7. My RAM is 8GB. I have a 64 bit operating system. My processor is an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3520M CPU@ 2.9GHz. I have a dedicated video memory of 64MB and a Shared system memory of 1632MB for a total Available Graphics memory of 1696MB or 1.696GB. I have PA set to the lowest possible graphics settings I'm not sure what affect this has if any. I also disabled firewall but that had no affect. Any help finding out why I am unable to play PA would be appreciated.
Could you make a DxDiag.txt and upload it here? Press <WinKey>+R, type "dxdiag", and press the "Save All Information..." button. You can upload the resulting file here using the "Upload a File" button on this forum.
Your graphics driver in 2 days will celebrate it's 3rd birthday: Driver Date/Size: 9/3/2012 11:52:36 You will probably need an update on that, dunno where the find the intel hd 4000 driver though, google may help.
Yeah, drivers are here: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/24593/Intel-HD-Graphics-Driver-for-Windows-7-8-8-1-64-bit You should try the .exe first, but likely it will complain about "Not validated for your computer", because laptops are like that... If that happens, you can download the .zip and follow the instructions here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/2/558749190911446231/
Oh, and I noticed you also have a NVidia card on that thing, but the drivers seem odd? So you might want to download the drivers from NVidia: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us I'm a bit puzzled though as there seem to be multiple versions of that driver for the same card. Quadro, Autocad, 3ds Max? I'm not sure what the difference is.
Its a workstation class card, the quadro drivers are the main ones, use them the others feature specific changes to suit the application listed, though they can cause issues with pretty much anything else...
Its working now! Thank you to everyone who posted help! I've already figured out how to beat the absurd AI and played my first ranked game. This game is just as fun as it looked.