My Empires is broken. I've deleted the Sourcemods folder and reinstalled Empires. I've subsequently uninstalled and redownloaded the Orange Box SDK. Neither has helped. Prior to this, I transferred my cache from WinXP to Windows 7 without a problem. Empires worked first time and for a couple of weeks thereafter. Then I started running it in a window, again, no problems. After a few days of occasional play, it crashed mid-game - just froze the whole PC, no BSOD, nothing. Since then, Empires won't start. Double-clicking on the icon in Steam pull up the "preparing to launch..." window, then there's a pause, the briefest flicker of a window appearing and disappearing. CS:Source still works, and I can fire up the Orange Box SDK too. Any ideas?
If you can find out the Stop code from the BSOD that might be helpful for solving your problem the code has the form of 0x000000. Also try to verify the Source SDK Base - Orange Box. If that fails go into the Event Viewer and look if you find something about a hl2.exe a client.dll or something like that. Also try reinstalling steam, delete everything in the steam folder except the steamapps folder and steam.exe, then start the steam.exe it should reinstall everything. Make sure all your drivers are up to date, even stuff like network drivers. Thats about everything I can think of right now.
Brutos, Thankyou for the advice. I've worked through it from top to (nearly...) bottom: - No BSOD (sorry, I wasn't exceptionally clear in the original post), so no stop code. - I've now verified the SDK - apparently it's fine. - Nothing in the event viewer, at least not that I can see. A few peculiarities in there related to waking the system from sleep, but none of them relate to the right files, nor do any of them have a timestamp that matches with when I'm trying to fire up Empires. Attempting it just now did not trigger a response from the event viewer. - Deleted and reinstalled steam as advised, with no effect. Just leaves the drivers... I'll keep looking. <edit> and not the Nvidia drivers... maybe the onboard sound? Once again, thankyou for the advice. I wouldn't have known to look for half of the above had you not pointed me to it; I've a lot to learn about Win7 as I haven't used Vista previously.
Tried reinstalling the sound drivers and broke them. Not really my day... so I did a system restore. Empires was still broken, but I've found that by forcing fullscreen in the launch options, it fires up. Somehow, starting it in a window is causing it to crash out. As far as I'm concerned, that's fixed - I just won't run in a window. Brutos, blizzerd, thanks for the advice.
oh yes adding -autoconfig to the start params usually fix those problems, sorry that I didn't think of that and you had to find it out yourself.
