[Solved]Demo crashes to black box

[manveruppd]

Hi, I installed the demo (and the fixed .exe from the other thread), and, on the first run, the game launched just fine. However, the first thing I did before I started playing was go into the options menu and crank all sound and video settings to max. This was evidently not a good idea, as, when I closed and relaunched the game, it would crash and bring up the bug reporting tool immediately, before even getting to the startup logos.

I figured that I must've set something in the game's settings which isn't supported by my system, so the crashing must be my fault. Since I couldn't find a "safe mode" launcher or a /safemode or similar command line modifier to launch the game without my settings taking effect, I decided to just uninstall and reinstall. I did so, but it still didn't work: the game would still immediately crash me to the bug reporter immediately after launching.

I therefore uninstalled again, but, this time, before reinstalling, I launched regedit and deleted every reference to "penumbra" in the registry, in case my modified settings were taking effect because of one of those leftover registry keys. I then reinstalled, but, again, the game crashed immediately in exactly the same way.

I then started looking around in the demo's directories, and found the default_settings.cfg file. When I viewed it, I saw that it contained the original startup settings before my modifications: resolution at 800x600 rather than 1280x1024 as I had put it, and gamma at 1.0 rather than 1.8. I initially thought that this was a backup file that the game keeps if the player chooses to restore default settings, rather than the file which thegame actually takes its settings from when it loads. When I looked at all the other .cfg files, however, I saw that default_settings.cfg is the only file containing those kind of settings, so it must be the only one.

I've therefore thrown my hands up in the air and come to the devs for help: why is the demo not launching, seeing as it had no problems doing so on the first time I ran it? This game seemed really interesting and I really wanted to try it out, but I'm really disappointed by the trouble I've been having! Please help!

[gamgam2]

Un-install the demo
Look in your penumbra file on the c-drive(or whatever drive it installs to) and if the foulder and make sure it does not exist.
Re-install the game

Please post your computer specs also, your computer might be too old to run the game. (Btw, I belive you can right-click on the game-icon and go to properties, there should be some settings in there that MIGHT help you)

[manveruppd]

Solved: I didn't realise that settings.cfg was stored in My Documents rather than in the demo's program folder. Once I overwrote settings.cfg with default_settings.cfg it worked fine. Wonder what setting it was that screwed it...

[Thomas]

If some setting you made screw up the game go to:
"My Documents/Penumbra Overture/Episode 1/"
and delete settings.cfg

The default setting file will be loaded instead and all should be fine.