FA tech support?

[jarmeat]

I'm wondering if any Furious Angels can help me with a tech issue that's keeping me from playing right now.

The customer service droids are frequently unhelpful or at least not specific, and calling customer service by phone only gets me directed to the swtor customer service website.

I'll try to keep the issue brief, for those of you who might want to help and are able:


My video card doesn't seem quiiite powerful enough to run swtor without getting laggy on me (though I know it's not a connection issue).

I lowered everything I can to the lowest setting except frame rate and resolution. Things improved, but high-traffic areas still had the hiccups I'm trying to eliminate.

I attempted to lower the resolution... Long story short is that after a couple different attempts where no change in the resolution was actually logged by the program in teh preferences menu, the screen went entirely black (though sound was still playing).

Now, any time I log into swtor, the screen is completely black.

Can anyone help me?


Thanks,


Jarmeat


PS- My OS is Vista, but other than that I don't know a lot about the system. It was a gift from a friend who frankensteined it together. Still, it meets specs for gameplay. As far as I can tell it's just screwing up right now because of my fiddling with the resolution.

[Tbone]

I'm not home at the moment, but there should be an ini file in the folder where you installed SWTOR where you can manually input the resolution. It should be settings.ini or something similar. Take a look at that and see what's listed. Other than that, make sure you have the most up-do-date video card driver installed for your card.

[ZephixLeer (Zephic)]

Tbone is correct. There is an ini file which you can manually edit with notepad.

Last I checked, it is actually in your appdata folder, which is hidden by default.

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\SWTOR
client_settings.ini  is the name, i believe. It may also be under a \settings folder inside the above directory.

Something else... there is a known bug which causes the game NOT to change the graphics settings completely when using the selector for low, high, or medium graphics settings.

To fix it, you want to set everything to high, apply, then set it to low and apply again. each time you start up SWTOR.

I haven't had the issue yet myself, but saw it somewhere on the SWTOR forums in the dev tracker.

[jarmeat]

Hey, thanks for the help guys.

I found the file, then went in and adjusted to "1600" width and "900" height.

I hit "save" from the file drop-down menu. Then I closed it and tried to open the game. I got the same problem. There's a floating text box on my black screen that says "Input Not Support". It's showed up every time I've tried to fix this and opened the game.

It now seems that the resolution itself isn't the real problem. It seems (from my layman's understanding) that there's a problem with the connection between the game and my monitor.

I've checked the drivers and initiated a search for updates, but everything is updated already.

If you've got any ideas, I'd love to hear them. If not, then thanks for your help thus far.


Jarmeat

[Avzeke (Khr0n1k)]

Hey, thanks for the help guys.

I found the file, then went in and adjusted to "1600" width and "900" height.

I hit "save" from the file drop-down menu. Then I closed it and tried to open the game. I got the same problem. There's a floating text box on my black screen that says "Input Not Support". It's showed up every time I've tried to fix this and opened the game.

It now seems that the resolution itself isn't the real problem. It seems (from my layman's understanding) that there's a problem with the connection between the game and my monitor.

I've checked the drivers and initiated a search for updates, but everything is updated already.

If you've got any ideas, I'd love to hear them. If not, then thanks for your help thus far.


Jarmeat

Set it to something low like, 800x600 and make sure the the refresh rate isn't too high, set it to 59 and see if that works.

[ZephixLeer (Zephic)]

Yeah, refresh rate sounds like a very possible culprit, as Khr0n1k mentioned.

If that doesn't work, I'd try just deleting that .ini file completely. It forces SWTOR to redetect settings and/or create a new .ini with default settings.

[jarmeat]

I have not yet tried setting the resolution that low, or lowering the frame rate. I just got back to checking in with this forum. Though I will say that I lowered the frame rate during my initial attempt to get the game running smoothly. There was no remarkable change in performance. I have not, however, tried it as a way to get rid of the hateful Black Screen.


Here are the things I've learned from forums where others are complaining about this issue (roughly in the order of my trial-and-error):

1- The problem (in theory) seems to be the result of the monitor or video card being incapable of handling the resolution requested of it. I find this odd, since I'm lowering resolution, not raising it.

2- There is a "fix launcher" in the installation client somewhere (I found it once by dumb luck) that patches your game so you can launch the program. This did not fix my problem.

3- Changing values of height and width in client_settings did not fix the issue.

4- Uninstalling and re-installing worked to get the game back online and visible, but when I attempted to fix the resolution again, things went awry.

5- Part of the problem with fixing the resolution is that the entire screen goes black, while the "revert to default settings" ticker ticks away.

6- Changing the Full Screen value in the client_settings file to "false" allowed me to stop the timer after adjusting resolution in-game. The game did not black out the full screen, so visual information was still available.

7- Having the game out of full screen mode made everything absurdly skinny after the resolution adjustment (I tried 1680x1050 at first)... leading me to attempt to change the resolution again as a fix... leading to another crash and the dreaded black screen.

8- Many people online are having many problems with poor tech support from Bioware/EA on SWTOR matters, including this one.

9- Sifting through inane forum hate-chatter to find nuggets of solution-potential is enough to drive a man mad.

10- If SWTOR staff fails me, and I cannot get the game to run in a weildy fashion, I may have to resort to the unthinkable: head outside and find a girlfriend.


Thanks for your help, guys. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to playing soon. Though I'm certain no one from SWTOR's staff is going to walk me through this over Christmas.


Jarmeat

[jarmeat]

Do you mean delete the client_settings file? Wouldn't that pretty much screw up the whole game?

Or am I misreading that suggestion? It is really late and I am rather fried, so there's a good chance I'm misunderstanding.


Jarmeat

[ZephixLeer (Zephic)]

No, that's accurate. Delete the client_settings.ini file. -Maybe make a copy of it to your desktop or something first, just in case... but the game should recreate that file once it is deleted, restoring default settings and -hopefully- fixing your issue.

So yes, delete it.

[jarmeat]

Thank you for the idea. Sadly, it does not seem to have worked.

I'm going to uninstall and re-install again. That's the only thing that seems to get me back into the game. Then... I dunno. I need to get the resolution fixed or I'll never be able to keep up with other players in PvP and instances. But at least this way I can play solo every now and again while I continue to research a fix and wait for the support staff to contact me.

[jarmeat]

Okay guys,

At the moment I seeeeem to have fixed the problem. An amalgam of solution-bits from online plus all the great help you guys have given me has resulted in a lower resolution and no Black Screen of Doom.

I'll keep my fingers crossed that it lasts.

Thanks so much for all your help.


Jarmeat

[ZephixLeer (Zephic)]

So are you issue free for the moment, or are you still having to go at it solo?