Official forums for BZFlag.org

Hi

I ran bzflag on a Windows 7 machine fine and it continued to work ok even after upgrading to Win10.
However, since the large Win10 update on 6th December 2015 this year, it's all gone a bit Pete Tong.

When I double click BZF 2.4.2 32 bit, nothing appears. No sound, no screen. Using Task manager I can see it running in the background. I have to use Task Manager to kill it off.

I installed BZFlag 2.4.4.20151115-RC2. This time I get the black screen, with the only the text [All Chat Server Misc].
Again, it does nothing else and I have to use Task Manager to kill it off.

Anyone else experienced this or similar?

I'm getting withdrawl symptons...

Sorry, I should have mentioned:
- running Win10 64 bit on i5 750 @ stock 2.67ghz, 4.00gb ram
- that I've tried uninstalling & re-installing.
- the graphics drivers ATI Radeon HD 4600 have not changed; dated 13/01/2015.

NTH also had an issue with the Windows 10 update on a system with an AMD Radeon HD 7800 series card. I've got a few systems with an Radeon HD (or similar) GPU, so hopefully I can replicate it somewhere and find the cause.

Cheers,
Just let me know if there is anything you would like me to try.

I used the windows tools to go back to the previous version of Windows (when bzflag did work).
After much grinding and restarting it eventually put itself back to an earlier release.

BZF still doesn't work, so it must me something else.

I've tried disabling Defender, MalwareBytes.
I've tried running it as Windows 7, 8, etc compatibility mode, runas Administrator .... nothing works for me.

The symptoms for the standard 2.4.2 build is it doesn't appear to run, but sits running in the background consuming 33% of a 4 core cpu.
The symptoms for the standard 2.4.4 build is it opens the black screen and eventually crashes.

Please, any ideas?

For NTH, I believe changing the display scaling mode in the catalyst control center made the game work until a reboot, after which it would fail again. So it seems to be something with AMD's drivers. I have a Windows 10 install with an older AMD, but have not tried running the game yet. Hopefully tonight I will try it out.

Try running bzflag in a virtual machine, it might work.

Running it in a virtual machine is definitely not ideal and performance will suffer greatly. It's more useful if we can actually fix the issue (or at worst, find a reasonable workaround). I've got a handful of systems at home with various generations of AMD graphics hardware, so I should hopefully be able to reproduce it on at least one of them.

EDIT: Also, if you reverted back from Windows 10, you may have a bunch of corrupted Task Scheduler items. There's a repair tool that will fix that: https://repairtasks.codeplex.com/

Oops.
Seems that running bzflag in virtual machine might not be such a good idea.

-Zehra