New user - black screen on load

[smg666]

Hello,

I recently bought the game, but on loading I get the start of the music, but just a black screen. When you bring up Task Manager, Factorio is not responding.

I have updated read the forums for similar issues which mostly pointed to driver problems. I have the latest the nvidia drivers and tried most of the various compatability modes in Windows. Recent log file attached. Any help much appreciated.

smg

[daniel34]

Have you tried the solutions posted in viewtopic.php?t=9300 ?

[smg666]

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, yes, I have been through that list. Also, a clean boot doesn't help. Stops exactly at the same place in the log file.

[Zavian]

It still seems likely to me to be a graphics driver issue. eg on my system for a first run of factorio the logfile continues on with

Code: Select all

   1.719 Crop bitmaps.
   6.263 Initial atlas bitmap size is 4096
   6.268 Created atlas bitmap 4096x4080 [none]
   6.269 Created atlas bitmap 4096x1591 [none]
   6.272 Created atlas bitmap 4096x4095 [terrain]
   6.272 Created atlas bitmap 4096x744 [terrain]
   6.273 Created atlas bitmap 4096x1716 [shadow]
   6.273 Created atlas bitmap 4096x1374 [smoke]
   6.273 Created atlas bitmap 4096x1868 [no-crop, trilinear-filtering, icon, light]
   6.273 Created atlas bitmap 4096x476 [alpha-mask]

So first I'd try to update my graphics drivers, then I'd try manualing setting max-texture-size=4096 and reduce graphics quality to normal. Then I'd try those settings both with and without force-opengl.

I'm not sure what the crop bitmaps step is doing, but since it only seems to run on first run, (and maybe when you make certain changes to graphics settings), it presumably caches its results somewhere. That leads to another possibility. Perhaps your antivirus program or windows file permissions are preventing crop bitmaps from saving its results. You could try temporarily disabling your antivirus program, and/or running Factorio with admin rights (not sure that is practical with the steam version. If the steam version of factorio is started outside of steam, it will restart itself under steam, that potentially drops admin rights).

Alternatively you can try downloading the .zip version from https://www.factorio.com/ . (Your factorio.com account is separate from your forum account, link your steam account to get access to the .zip download). When you unzip the .zip version you will get a completely self contained factorio install, with it's own config, log, mod and save files. Unzipping to c: or d: or even a usb key might work around protections on c:/program files and on you user directory.

[daniel34]

I'm not sure what the crop bitmaps step is doing, but since it only seems to run on first run, (and maybe when you make certain changes to graphics settings), it presumably caches its results somewhere. That leads to another possibility. Perhaps your antivirus program or windows file permissions are preventing crop bitmaps from saving its results. You could try temporarily disabling your antivirus program, and/or running Factorio with admin rights (not sure that is practical with the steam version. If the steam version of factorio is started outside of steam, it will restart itself under steam, that potentially drops admin rights).

Cropped bitmaps are stored in %appdata%\Factorio\crop-cache.dat (press Win+R and enter %appdata%\Factorio to get to that folder), deleting it might help. Also try deleting the config folder in the same location, this will reset all settings and keybindings.

You can also try and delete the complete Factorio folder from %appdata% (backup your saves/mods in that case), I think we had a permissions issue at some point where only that helped.