Black Screen

[Mental]

I have been getting a black screen lately, and ive tried a few things to help with this but cannot find a solution. So far I have tried reinstalling the game, and some other options on my comp such as adjusting my video card

what happens to my comp is when i load the game everthing seems fine until I get to the game itself. sometimes it goes black before I load into ns4. when it does this there are times when the screen appears again for a second oir 2 then goes black for a real long time. I am unable to play due to this. Oh and when my screen goes black I can hear something like a pop sound, not sure what thjis may mean. So i hope someone can help with this, any suggestions are greatly appreaciated.

[VagaStorm]

If you do have the latest drivers for your card, I would try to downgrade and see what happens. What screen card do you have? Tried running the autoconfig and setting it to minimum setings?

[Mental]

I alrdy tried rolling back my vid cards driver. My card is Nvidia 8500gt.

[Blystos Re]

Try changing your game resolution in nwn.ini; it may have gotten set too high by accident.

[frogofpeace]

Are you using Vista? I've had a similar problem, but only recently, and only on my Vista machine.

[Retzbu Tox]

Very interesting. I started having the same problem about the same time. No clue why.

I completely wiped and reinstalled the game, but that did not help. There have been no changes to my drivers or screen resolution settings. I was more of the opinion that something in a windows update or other recently installed program was causing my problem.

Hmm.

[Ragnareith]

An unusual but surprisingly effective solution (for me, anyway) is to do with hardware sound acceleration. Go to Run and type in dxdiag, and head to the Sound tab - you'll see a slider indicating how much you're letting your hardware enhance your sound. Now, I know many people don't think of sound as anything important regarding game performance etc. but it REALLY can be. If you're getting a black screen, try turning down the acceleration notch by notch. However, if you go too low (I think my lower limit was Basic acceleration), then NWN will refuse to even start. However, I think tinkering with this may help.

A second solution, which I found really helped me play the Fallout games (1 and 2) without the screen continuously and randomly going black, was to do a clean boot - go to Run and type in msconfig, you should be in the General tab. Under Startup Selection, select the 'Selective Startup' option - most boxes should be ticked. UNTICK the box labelled 'load startup items'. This stops all of those background utilities like msn, gameranger, norton auto-protect, etc. from loading up as your computer boots up, and again, it sounds like an unlikely solution, but it completely solved my blackscreen error with the early Fallout games - it might just help here.

[Retzbu Tox]

I investigated online and found that some drivers for nVidia Geforce cards can cause the black screen problem in several games (NWN and Mass Effect, among others) that share certain DLLs. Some recent update on my computer appears to have triggered that issue. I went to the nVidia site, downloaded a new Geforce card driver that does not have this flaw, and am back in business.

[frogofpeace]

THanks for the info. Can you give more details? ANy way to tell which drivers for you r card don't have the flaw?

[Retzbu Tox]

Apparently they had a string of drivers for many months that failed to resolve the problem, then more recently there have been several that were okay. I just downloaded the latest one and it worked. If you have an nVidia GeForce card, just try the most recent driver for your card. Hopefully you will have the same luck I did.

[frogofpeace]

I tired the most recent one about a week ago, and had no problem for about a week, then had the same problem last night. Oh, well, it's better than every night. I may drop back a version, as the latest one had a beta file name. It could also be that the driver for my model hasn't caught up yet. THanks for the tip!

[Mental]

Hi guys, I ahvent been on the forums lately, but how i got my black screen to stop was turnign all my settings to the lowest. It is funny tho cause i should be able to ruin nwn at full without even getting lag. but the black screen stopped and all, and i ahvent went back to the Nvidia site to update either. The reason I havent looked further into this is because I am geting a new card soon, so I will just wait til that happens.

[mgrjebbo]

They just released a new beta driver for the 8 series of geforce cards that seems to fix the issue the old drivers were having.

[Retzbu Tox]

But... but... that was useful information from mgrjebbo...

Thanks!

(Has he been replaced by an alien?)

[frogofpeace]

I downloaded that (179?) and it did seem to help. I do occasionally still get what appears to be the same crash (no vid, games sound keeps playing, stuff seems to keep going on), but it happens once every couple of weeks rather than every night.