Indiana Jones and The Great Circle no longer working on 3 different rigs

Peter_Brosdahl

Peter_Brosdahl

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So one by one each of my rigs has stopped being able to launch this game and it all mysteriously started happening at the start of the month.

I've put in over 4 hours across the last two weeks trying to figure it out and it's safe to say I've covered all the normal bases, if something can be updated, uninstalled/reinstalled, I've probably done it. I've deleted cache folders and various other folders, and nada. Old drivers and new drivers don't make a difference even with DDU in safe mode. Turned off overlays and disabled MS AB and reinstalled the game more times than I can remember, no mods after reinstall. I thought I made progress a few days ago when I finally got it to launch on one rig (5800X3D), tested it several more times that night and by the next day it was borked again.

What happens is after clicking on play I see it sync and then it stops and when I try to restart it again the launcher tells me it didn't close properly the last time and offers to run in safe mode which doesn't do anything.

Basically I need some kind of weird fix nobody would normally think of because I tried, to my knowledge, every kind of possible normal fix for this. I've got a thread going on Steam (under my old username Lost In 3d) but nobody has been able to provide helpful suggestions, although they have tried. The only info I've been able to find is in the qconsole log which indicates an NVIDIA related issue "SLinit failed error code 018". I now this relates to DLSS/FG but I cannot find any way to fix this. Even tried tweaking and resetting things via NV APP and Profile Inspector. I've also noticed the game fails to create a config file during this.

The rigs this is happening on are 5800X3D/RTX 5090, 9800X3D/RTX 5090, laptop Intel 275HX/mobile RTX 5090 (which is desktop RTX 5080). There's a chance I might do a full Windows reset on the 9800X3D rig since I don't really have any other apps beyond launchers and MS AB on it but I'm hesitant because I feel that even if it works this will still happen again. The laptop was working for most of last weekend and by Sunday it too had the same problem.

I truly appreciate any thoughts but as mentioned, I've already tried all the obvious things and a handful of less than obvious tricks. I swear it seems like there's something simple at play here but for the life of me I cannot find it and I've searched about a dozen threads to no avail.
 
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I will say one simple trick I haven't tried is using a Studio driver, I'll give that a shot when I get home later on and if that works I'll be truly amazed.
 
Sounds like windows pushed an update that has broken the Nvidia drivers for your systems. Weather that is specific to the 5090 series cards I can't say for sure. If you want to send me a 5090 I'll see if I can replicate the issue on my system for you. ;)

No but seriously I'd check and see what updates that might be called by the nvidia drivers/software were pushed. Roll back the last set of updates. See what that gets you.

Since it started happening on all of your systems around the same time frame that's my strongest suspicion. and it would explain the delay in each box presuming they are not all on and running 24/7.
 
I agree, and the part of this that is even more bizarre is that twice now, after trying around a dozen things and attempting to launch after each, I've managed to get it to work, but when I restart that rig the next morning, it's broken again. I've tried replicating those steps but they don't consistently work, so it feels like some kind of fluke.
 
I still don't know exactly what magic I did to get it working on my 5800X3D rig but was able to twice more, once Saturday night and then again on Sunday morning.

Witch each change in something I do, I try to launch the game and then progress to another step after any failed attempt. However I'm 100% confident that whatever last step is taken (as they haven't always been the same) that it's a combination of things and not a single step leading to the solution.

That being said here's a summary of what I'm mostly sure that is helping but still mad at whatever is causing this.
  1. Disable MSI AB from starting with Windows.
  2. DDU, safe mode uninstall current gameready driver, restart and reinstall from a downloaded file (not using NV app)
  3. Delete Machine games and install folders, do a clean reinstall from Steam, then restart
  4. Manually updated DLSS files in install folder. Essentially I copied each one's name from the folder and googled them (thanks TechPowerUp) and downloaded. There were about 4-6 which had newer versions. This step might not be needed but it's one of the ones I did Saturday night.
  5. Reset profile settings in NV App for game, then do the same for global in NV CP
  6. Add a profile in NV CP if one is not present but then do a reset (redundant I know but something is getting overlooked by the driver or OS and I'm tired of assuming it isn't)
  7. Use Profile Inspector to override various DLSS related items to use latest versions (I'll provide screenshot later). While NV App is capable of some of this, inspector has more options. I'm not 100% this is a contributing factor but on two different occasions it was a part of the process that got the game to launch.
  8. Disable and then re-enable overlays in NV App and Steam. Multiple folks have said to turn these off and I saw no effect but on at least one attempt I saw the game launch after re-enabling.
  9. Last step, which makes little to no sense, launch MSI AB. Now while there are numerous posts stating don't us OC settings the irony here is that I undervolt my 5090s. Both on Saturday night and Sunday morning I got the same error (failed to close properly would you like. . . ) and in each instance I then launched MSI AB and made sure to apply my settings and then the game would launch (I was even able to tell it to launch regularly, not safe mode).

Random step which may have or may not have helped, used the game repair app in the installation folder. This app seems to reset/reinstall the Xbox gaming app and since some folks mentioned it could be a contributing factor I've been giving it a shot.

A strange thing I noticed when using MSCONFIG to start Windows in safemode is that for some reason the boot tab showed starting with select drivers. I changed this to start with all drivers on Saturday night. I've, at randomly deleted shader caches, both in Steam and NVIDIA, but I'm not sure if this helps. I stopped doing this after seeing a successful launch on Saturday night. I've also at times deleted various folders in Steam (I forget its exact id but something to the effect of 2667. ...). I'm not sure if this helped or not and the above steps seem more in line with what is working. I've also tinkered with turning off cache preloading, including Vulkan, and not sure if that helped. The reason I'm saying this is that I have confirmed the app never even gets to creating a config file, let alone loading or creating shader caches so I don't believe they are the reason for failed launches.

I have to say that I find it highly suspicious that nearly every time I validate files via Steam that it downloads an unknown gamefile along with unkown redistributable. Obviously Valve is finding something but they're not telling what it is and regardless these never fix this issue. It was also very suspicious on how my first launch on Sunday morning it downloaded over 200MB of something after deciding on its own to validate files, and again a redistrutable, but still failed to launch. However after I repeated step #9, it did (I can't explain how happy I was to not have to put another 3-4 hours for all the other steps).

For f's sake I really wish Bethesda, NVIDIA, and the powers that be would get together and fix this since I'm not the only one experiencing it. I do agree with reports that its related to MFG (ironic since I'm not using it), DLSS, and ray reconstruction. Btw another interesting thing is how NV app shows the game as not supporting RR when reinstalled, when it does. I do believe that perhaps its possible that the game is allowing an incompatible combinations of settings when its comes to DLSS/RR/MFG. My current settings are DLSS (auto) and RR enabled.

Odds are I forgot something here given the now 8+ hours of testing and it doesn't help that no single step leads to a successful launch so I've usually ended up doing the above and maybe some others before it finally wokrs and yet somehow Steam is making changes after the next restart. I did as an experiment get the game on GOG and it had the exact same issues. Some other odd behavior I've noticed is the not everything in the Machine games folder is recreated during a failed launch despite the qconsole nearly always showing the same log errors and sometimes it too doesn't show a new timestamp with recent launches.

Meanwhile, mostly happy that at least on one rig this has all been narrowed down to one extra step at launch but I've yet to have the time to do all of the above and getting it working on my other two rigs.
 
MS and Nvidia brag about AI writing code, and here we are.

Quick search brought up the same posts and fixes you probably perused. https://steamcommunity.com/app/2677660/discussions/0/604148672905707343

If you are not running the latest bios on the systems, update.

Some say deleting the config file fixes it. Though you have already nuked it from orbit and started over fresh, so probably not going to be the magic bullet here. In case you want to do it anyway.

Code: 
%USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\MachineGames\TheGreatCircle\base\TheGreatCircleConfig.local

Disable all overlays -

Disable:
  • Discord overlay
  • Steam overlay
  • Xbox Game Bar
  • Nvidia overlay
  • AMD overlay
  • MSI Afterburner / RTSS
  • Razer Synapse overlays
  • RGB monitoring tools
Apps like iCUE are the devil. I never used any of them on windows.

Delete the shader cache.
Code: 
%localappdata%\NVIDIA\DXCache

You can repair XBOX game services in PowerShell

Code: 
get-appxpackage Microsoft.GamingServices | remove-AppxPackage -allusers
Then reinstall from the MS store.

Some had success using the launch option
Code: 
-windowed

The whole thing is BULL :poop: I don't miss windows at all.
 
Grimlakin said:
It's weird I've been tunning iCUE without issue for YEARS... maybe it's some interactions if you have multiple? that's probably my saving grace.
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This game has become a friggin nightmare in regard to what pisses it of and the worst part is it can be some little thing that shouldn't affect it at all.

@DAPUNISHER , thanks, yep, pretty did all that stuff one way or another as well. It's insane. I somehow missed or skipped over that Steam thread as there's around a half dozen or more regarding issues for this game but found each one of those steps brought up somewhere. Sheesh, it got to the point I was making desktop shortcuts to the various 3-6 folders just to cut down on time in trying things, sad part I'd put in around 6 hours over 3 weeks before I decided to do that because I kept thinking I'd finally found a solution.

Another thing that's unfortunate is that this largely affects owners of 40 and 50 series NV cards. Lost track of how many threads where someone with a 30 series said it was working fine for them and all the more points to an MFG issue with newer versions of DLSS (thinking 4.0 on). It also sucks that the game is essentially doing preset internal rendering calls prior to creating a config file so you cannot control how it initializes. Seriously one of the stupidest things I've ever witnessed and I truly believe if it was the other way around, like most games, we could make a change there as a workaround when this happens.

Basically that config.local file you saw mentioned is nothing more than an after-init log and does nothing when this issue comes up. You can change it with zero effect since the game doesn't use it until after trying to initialize its first render calls and that's when these crashes are happening. I've never seen a modern game behave this way. Another telltale that this is happening is that when the Machine Games folder where it's located is deleted, or created after a fresh install or new game launch, that config file won't even get created until after a successful launch. The most useless config file I've ever seen in the last decade.
 
DAPUNISHER said:
I don't miss windows at all.
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Still not enough for me to make the switch but was definitely considering it this weekend, especially since I'm aware that major gains are happening all the time.

Edit: And the fact that I didn't come across a single post from a Linux user having the same issue, again points to NV and MS not getting along.
 
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