Win 7 no longer supported?

[silverkitty23]

I can start the game, select "new game", select a race, select advanced settings, but when I hit "start game" it tells "DBGHELP.DLL is too old" and then dies. It's on Steam autopatch and I did an integrity check and the game is all up to date. I found DBGHELP.DLL in c:\windows\system32 and it's from 2010, and probably thus the factory standard for Win 7. Steam says the game supports older versions of Windows like XP and Vista, but I find that unlikely anymore.

This change is recentish - I played a lot last year(*) (97 hours, all achievable achievements earned), and was just coming back to it to see how the patches changed the game and to get myself psyched for the DLC.

I can provide more info on request.

(*) or whenever the super ship/androids patch came out. I've played with those.

[sven]

I can start the game, select "new game", select a race, select advanced settings, but when I hit "start game" it tells "DBGHELP.DLL is too old" and then dies. It's on Steam autopatch and I did an integrity check and the game is all up to date. I found DBGHELP.DLL in c:\windows\system32 and it's from 2010, and probably thus the factory standard for Win 7. Steam says the game supports older versions of Windows like XP and Vista, but I find that unlikely anymore.

Are you using an AMD card? A serious AMD driver bug is outstanding in the latest builds, and I believe it can cause this error.

If it's the bug I think it is, going into the game's Options, and hitting "Simplified Graphics" (bottom right), should avoid the crash. But, I'm hopeful that we'll ship a patch tomorrow with a better workaround (one that doesn't require the "Simplified Graphics" switch).

[silverkitty23]

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M , but maybe tomorrow's patch will help, anyway.
I'm a web developer (not even really a sysadmin) on LAMP systems, and not really all that windows savvy.

EDIT: It does work with "simplified graphics" on, though the interface is just this side of unplayably slow.
Now that I can get into the game, I can see I last played in March 6th (at least, that was my last autosave), and it was all responsive and zippy then.

Also: a month ago I tried to update to the latest driver, but it broke all my other games, so I'm running a slightly older driver, but it's one that I can use to play FTL and Desktop Dungeons and Dishonored 2. So this is probably useless trivia to you, but my Nvidia gfx driver version is 378.92

---

Still, good to know it wasn't something where you were relying on a feature in that DLL only available after 2010. the name "dbghelp" didn't really say "graphics card" to me which explains why my post was titled as it is.

[sven]

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M , but maybe tomorrow's patch will help, anyway.

Hrm. It may, but, on this card, my guess would be that issue could be connected to an NVIDIA\Intel driver setup issue. Could you take a look at this post, and let me know if that sheds any light on things?

[silverkitty23]

Thanks for your quick responses. The "molasses UI" was, indeed, caused by my computer not bothering to let your game use the good graphics card (which isn't really a driver issue to my weak understanding of Windows, but whatever). It's all good now! I was able to turn off "simplified graphics," too.

And sorry it was a known issue with a known fix - I tried to search for the issue before posting, but, as I said, I really didn't realize "dbghelp.dll" had anything to do with graphics

[Zaskow]

Are you using an AMD card? A serious AMD driver bug is outstanding in the latest builds, and I believe it can cause this error.

I found that my old amd hd 5770 with very outdated drivers (15.20.1062.1004-150803a1-187669C) works with game fine. So, maybe newer AMD driver could cause such problems. I'm not using simplified graphics.

[sven]

I found that my old amd hd 5770 with very outdated drivers (15.20.1062.1004-150803a1-187669C) works with game fine. So, maybe newer AMD driver could cause such problems. I'm not using simplified graphics.

In my experience, the older 'Catalyst' AMD drivers were pretty stable. The most recent driver generation ('Crimson') tends to be a bit quirkier. Most AMD players are now on the Crimson drivers, however, so it's important that the game runs as well as possible on those machines.