Post by Arkonis in Project Landsword comments

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Sadly this did not work. I've tried a few other things and here were my findings.

1. Tried that link and fiddled with compatibility mode trying windows 7, vista and 95.

2. Tried what the forum post says which is to give 'unrestricted access' but there is no option like that in properties, I am the admin and I already have all the access I can see.

No difference noted. I did some more digging and found that when I launch I can see the app open in task manager briefly and then closes. Sometimes it also has another program that opens briefly before it closes called WerFault.exe.

Looked into WerFault.exe and found indications to look into the reliability monitor on windows where I can see windows is logging errors when ever it's tried to open. Followed that down and the suggestions were to run sfc, disable windows defender (a common suggestion) and more.

I tried running SFC, disabled windows defender as much as windows will allow me to and tried all the above again (compability mode etc). No dice. I also looked at the printout of the reli monitor to see if the web had anything but no dice.

I think that I'm stuck and also scratching my head. I'm really not certain as to why it simply won't open as I have not seen this on other apps or itch.io games.

For now I'm out of ideas and have nothing else to try and it's probably not a priority given I've seen no one else having this issue. However if you decide you wish to investigate then let me know and I can provide any diagnostic material you want.

MezzSoft42 days ago

I'm really sorry to hear that. I'm not sure if there's any other people here using Windows 11 who could offer help, but I'm going to look into it a bit further and see if I can find a solution.

The only thing I can think of right now is to maybe try and redownload the game and then maybe unzip the folder with a program like 7zip assuming you did it using the regular Windows unzip function? I know the chances are slim, but there really shouldn't be anything wrong with the game itself. One other person did say redownloading it fixed some strange crashes.

Arkonis42 days ago

I had already tried a couple of re-installations and I was using 7zip. Interestingly, I just decided to get drastic and reinstall windows but no change. Same issue, nothing visual happens. :/ I will try again another time.

MezzSoft42 days ago

Sorry about that. The only thing I can think of now is to try a virtual machine running either Windows 10 or 8.1, install the DirectX patch on it, and then see if it runs. If it still doesn't run somehow, then there must be some sort of hardware issue because nothing should be preventing it from launching.

Arkonis39 days ago(+1)

TLDR: If you are using windows N edition and updates are up to date then certain weird media packages and DLL files won't allow you to install, run or fix any directX issues and all will result in internal errors or simply won't tell you the error. Reinstall non Windows N version. Windows N version is just windows without windows media player preinstalled.

I have it working and feel I should report my findings to you incase this comes up again with anyone else.
The solution is not all that clear cut so some of this is speculation but I believe I, at the very least, have all but confirmed a few things.

For anyone else having this same issue, you may have been in my boat and this will save you hours and hours of troubleshooting.

The long and short of it is that this game won't load if you are running Windows 11 N edition. The N edition is windows 11 but without Windows Media Player installed. I know it sounds funny but that makes all the difference after some insane Windows 11 Security patch sometime in the last few months.

There are a lot of IFs to this as well but IF you had windows 10 N and you updated you won't notice. If you install windows 11 N now you'll see it too. Basically it will prevent any direct X patches from installing correctly.

- Some games did not show me the same results because I'd installed and played them prior to the most recent windows 11 patches but when I reinstalled the games they all had similar issues being either they simply wouldn't launch at all (e.g. WH40K boltgun) which would get stuck at 'installing microsoft dependencies C++, DirectX, .NET etc) then just not open.

- Some games did open but without sound.

- Opening Directxdiag stated an error with finding sound.

- Installing directX redis failed due to internal error.

- Installing directX web patch failed due to internal error.

- .NET fix, SFC or anything else either showed no errors or failed to install.

- Installing optional update media packages failed to install.

Long story short is that MS released a patch which has made a few things shit the bed and for some reason windows N prevents directx from installing due to missing audio packages or codecs or something but also won't allow you to install any of them. From what I can tell the only solution is to reinstall with windows non N though I'm not sure what the workaround actually would be in countries where N is mandatory (such as S korea). I'm sure there will be a fix at some point but in the mean time, hopefully you won't waste days of your time like I did.

MezzSoft39 days ago

Great job finding out what was the problem, and thanks for reporting back! I'll link people to your post should anyone else have the same issue. I should've known it was something stupid regarding Windows update, there's almost always a nonsensical crash or bug caused by a batch of them.