black screen on startup

[Fonzehh]

when i start my game the logo pops up and then goes to black screen. the only fix ive found is to restart and open the game before doing anything else. when i finaly do get in and either try to join a server or make my own it comes up with a bunch of errors and just sits at initializing. all my drivers are up to date, files verified. all that.

output_log__2020-12-07__06-03-53.txt

[Liesel Weppen]

UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to the path "D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die\Data\Config\Localization.txt" is denied.

 

Make sure this file exists and is accessible with your user rights.

 

However i think not being able to load a localization shouldn't make the game unplayable.

[Fonzehh]

it does exist and is accessible

[Liesel Weppen]

Not from the game, according to your logfile.

[meganoth]

The most likely culprit after user rights is your virus scanner preventing access.

[Fonzehh]

I assure you it is there.
im not sure what else i can do besides whitelisting my entire steam folder from the AV program i run?

[meganoth]

I've heard whitelisting mentioned as a solution a few times. IF the virus scanner is the culprit its logfile should tell you that it prevented the access and why.

 

 

[Liesel Weppen]

20 minutes ago, Fonzehh said:

im not sure what else i can do besides whitelisting my entire steam folder from the AV program i run?

Turn off your AV-Software ENTIRELY. Try again. If it works then, your AV-Software is the problem.

 

Don't use bloatware like Norton Internet Security  and similar...

[Fonzehh]

turned off all my security things, still nothing.

[SylenThunder]

New log?

[Fonzehh]

output_log__2020-12-07__14-40-05.txt

[SylenThunder]

Still have the error with localization.

 

Either the user account running the game has insufficient permissions, file access is blocked by security software, or the storage device the file is on is corrupted or failing.

 

These are basically the only things that would cause this type of issue, and security software is the cause 95% of the time.

[Fonzehh]

uninstalled and reinstalled on a different hardrive. turned off all my security software. gave permission to my entire steam folder as well as the file. still nothing, black screen after startup logo. no idea what else i can do then if those are the only reasons for it. 

edit: on fresh restart, not doing anything else but starting up steam and the game it works. if i close out of the game and open it again, black screen.

[Fox]

Are you using microsoft's junk GPU drivers forced onto you by windows updates once in a while or are you making sure that you're using the proper drivers provided by the manufacturers?

 

Also, the game file integrity checker isn't perfect, it is possible that it may have missed something during it's check. It's a very small chance, but it might be worth re-installing the game to see if anything changes (deleting user profiles in the process to ensure clean install).

[Fonzehh]

yes i am using drivers straight from nvidia. i have tried reinstalling after deleting profiles and stuff. possibly didnt delete EVERYTHING?  ill try that again

[Liesel Weppen]

What are your complete system stats?

[Fox]

38 minutes ago, Fonzehh said:

yes i am using drivers straight from nvidia. i have tried reinstalling after deleting profiles and stuff. possibly didnt delete EVERYTHING?  ill try that again

Are you able to run other games that are resource demanding... more specifically ram demanding? Or you could run a free memtest86 to see if your ram is error free. Ram can do all kinds of unusual things when it comes to games, though usually they're a bit more random then this. But me being mainly a hardware troubleshooting guy, it's all I got. Maybe you bought new hardware recently that might not have been fully tested to be stable yet?

 

I'm also curious to know why your output log shows less errors than that screenshot you took. According to the screenshot, it's an access denied error. This could mean a lot of things. Since firewall / AV has pretty much been ruled out, ram could cause information not being delivered to the CPU, if you're using an old HDD, maybe that could cause that since no one uses HDDs for this game anymore as the performance / load times are insane now, so maybe the insanely slow loading time is causing read errors? This could be a user / admin rights kind of issue which I think you also ruled out already, besides, that's an unlikely issue anyway. I do assume you're not running a potato machine for this game as that would be rather rude to waste our time like that. Aside from all the mentioned, I don't know what else it could be. 

[Fonzehh]

i only run SSD's and machine is certainly nowhere near potato status. a few months ago the game ran fine with no issues, had not played it for a bit then when i tried to run it again this happend.
I really do appreciate all the help so far as well

[meganoth]

Here a few things you can try to get more information:

 

1) Check all the enclosing directories as well. Are they all readable by anyone?

 

2) Edit Localization.txt. Can you add a space somewhere?

 

3) Delete Localization.txt and start the game. What is the error message in the logfile now? (Afterwards make a steam validate so it replaces the file).

 

4) With the normal explorer or with the command shell copy the whole game directory into a newly created dir (preferably) on your c drive and execute 7d_launcher.exe in that new dir (after having started steam but without using steam to do anything)

 

EDIT: Jugginators post was the spark for experiment 4a:

 

4a) Move the game directory you already copied to c  into c:\Program Files (sp)  and check if it changes anything. If some virus scanner is still stealthyly preventing access it may be more forgiving if the stuff resides in the usual place for programs. But I'm not an expert on windows and virus scanners, not sure if this really makes a difference.

 

[Jugginator]

Something seems to be off with permissions to be honest if you've eliminated hardware as an issue. Ensure you have read/write/execute access, which is what Meganoth is getting at. Can also disable Windows firewall/defender, and don't forget that most 3rd party AVs will still run even though you told them to not run, so realllly make sure they aren't running.

[doughphunghus]

You mentioned above that "....the only fix ive found is to restart and open the game before doing anything else. when i finaly do get in and either try to join a server or make my own it comes up with a bunch of errors and just sits at initializing.", which makes me think that the game can ( for some reason) get past the loading of Localization.txt, but then other errors happen. There was a comments above about possible memory or "Disk" corruption (an SSD can go bad, but I would think it would self heal...but maybe it doesn't, and I believe I've heard they normally "go bad" all at once, not gradually.).  I would definitely also recommend looking into running a memtest for memory errors, and a disk scan for disk issues. For a "me too" comparison: I've (super rarely) had odd issues like this occur to me and it turned out to be a bad memory stick/area of memory.  The bad memory was corrupting files in a game I was playing (apparently, I guess it saved them to disk as I played?) and every time the game failed to start, I had steam validate files it would always find a few that failed to validate...then the game would start and run awhile...then it would crash.  My PC worked fine (mostly) until I started playing games with it, and then (I guess) the large memory usage of the game would trigger/access/hit some bad memory address(es), and crash it.  I ran a memtest and errors started appearing as it scanned.  I just replaced the memory sticks, and no more issues.

 

What's weird (to me) is its complaining about the same file every time (It's consistent).  What I don't know is if the error is actually "correct" in that we don't know if the game is actually trying to to open that specific file and getting the error ( e.g. it could open other files in that directory, then fails on just that one file) OR if it's hitting permission errors "higher up" and that's the file its trying to open at that time, so it reports the entire file path instead of the actual folder its having issues with.  Alternatively: Maybe Localization.txt is physically corrupted and it literally cannot open it properly, so it fails with an error that makes it look like its a permissions issue.  A lot of the ideas that @meganoth mentions above should alleviate that possibility though.

 

Other ideas that are a little "out there" but the answers might help diagnose:

- Is this your personal PC, or are you using someone else's? Purpose: Making sure you have full control over the PC, someone's not blocking you as admin (owning the antivirus, etc) or literally messing with you.

- Does your windows account you log in with have Administrator rights?

- Has this PC been patched recently (e.g. windows updates were applied). Like the game ran, then it was patched, then the issue appeared?  Windows may have reset some setting...somewhere.

- The error is with the Localization.txt file.  In my game (that loads ok) the "next line" in my logfile after "INF [Steamworks.NET] SteamAPI_Init() ok"

is: "<timestamp> INF Localization language: english".  I'm really reaching here, but are you launching the game using "Engligh" or another language? To check the language chosen: (from stream choose the game (right click) -> properties -> Language))

- How old are your disks/SSD's/memory?  Are you using any "reused" parts? You mention "uninstalled and reinstalled on a different hardrive" but I'm not sure if you physically attached/changed a physical hard drive out or just pointed to a different existing internal hard drive letter on the PC (which could actually be the same hard drive behind the scenes?)