scottrick on 2/11/2022 at 13:01
Could be.
I don't have any 3p anti-virus installed, but I tried disabling windows virus and threat protection, and putting the DX:IW folders on the exclusions list, but I still saw the problem. It always works if I launch right after a reboot though, so it's just a minor headache. And now I just finished the game, so I will probably forget about this until I replay it again in another few years!
chk772 on 27/1/2023 at 12:29
I'm trying to get this to work on my Windows 11 machine... can't get it to work. Everytime I try to start a new game, after it plays the intro, before it shows the loading screen, I get a black screen and nothing goes. I can only reboot my machine.
Deus Ex IW with Visible Upgrade works fine on my Windows 10 machines though.
What I already tried to fix it: Stop Logitech Gaming Software. No change. Stop NTKDaemon.exe, a file which is supposed to make trouble with this game and the upgrade. No change. I also deactivated an autostart app which I suspected might have to do with the game not working (NIHardwareAccessibilityHelper.exe), but, that didn't do anything either.
What I could do now is run Deus Ex IW with Visible Upgrade on my Windows 10 machine, and stream it with Steam Link on my Windows 11 machine. But, I really wonder why it's not working at all.
Edit: Ok, so I just had 2 game crashes/freezes on my Windows 10 machine as well. Once when I quit DXIW, it simply froze with the menu screen, and I also got a game freeze when loading the Tarsus Apartments area. I don't know, either the game itself or the Visible Upgrade is extremely sensitive to anything running on the computer. It just doesn't work for me, on any of my computers.
Edit 2: Ok, so, I just analyzed via the Windows task manager on which processes the DX2Main.exe waits while it hangs. First, I had the NIHardwareAccessibilityHelper.exe as the culprit, which I closed. Then, when DXIW didn't close properly when I quit the game, it was some Logitech G Discord process, which is probably part of one of my Logitech utility softwares which I have installed.
I really wonder why DXIW/Visible Upgrade is so finicky that it hangs with literally any process running on your computer. Never had such issues with the Sneaky Upgrade for Thief 3...
snobel on 28/1/2023 at 10:08
Did you try the usual things: shut down completely (hold Shift while clicking shutdown in the start menu), then after rebooting disable all things anti-virus?
What's happening when you load a new level is that the game launches an intermediate exe (IonLauncher, which shows the black cover screen), then shuts down. The intermediate exe then launches the new game instance. Apparently virus checkers find this programs-launching-programs very suspicious.
Can't really say why DX2 would be more affected than T3, or why it would be worse on Win11 (which I don't have). Also, no idea why non-security related process would interfere.
Btw. you don't need to reboot to get away from the hanging black screen. Hit the Windows key, activate the virtual desktop overview, then drag the black fullscreen window to a new virtual desktop. (At least this works on Win10.) Then you can kill the IonLauncher process.
chk772 on 28/1/2023 at 23:43
Quote Posted by snobel
Btw. you don't need to reboot to get away from the hanging black screen. Hit the Windows key, activate the virtual desktop overview, then drag the black fullscreen window to a new virtual desktop. (At least this works on Win10.) Then you can kill the IonLauncher process.
Thanks, I didn't know that trick.
What I did now is plug my monitor and my keyboard and mouse into my Windows 10 laptop, and play on that one. DXIW with Visible Upgrade is so old/ressource friendly that it runs well on my laptop, and it works really well on that, for whatever reason when it doesn't work on my Win 11 and Win 10 desktop PC's.
I remember I already posted in this thread once (end of 2019) because I had similar issues trying to run DXIW Visible Upgrade on my Windows 10 desktop. Dunno why, but, Thief 3 with Sneaky Upgrade always worked much better on my machines.
