Resolved: Knytt Won't Launch (Steam) (No Error, No Crash)

Hello, I just purchased Knytt Underground via Steam and was looking forward to playing it, however it won't launch at all. Upon trying to launch the game (either directly from Steam or from the game's desktop icon), nothing happens. I get the standard "Preparing to launch Knytt Underground..." dialogue that appears for every game, but it disappears after a split second and the game never launches. Looking in my system tray in the bottom right corner of my screen, the Steam icon shows that it's syncing game data as if I've actually played, and the game's info page in Steam shows that I've played it today.

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game running both Steam & the game "as administrator," and restarting my PC.

I'm running Windows 8.1 Pro 32 bit on an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1 GHz processor with 3 GB of RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 video card (unsure how much video ram).

Have you checked if Knytt Underground appears on task manager?

Try verifying the integrity of your gamecache. This will basically reinstall the game and make sure its correctly installed.

To do this, go to your games list (library), right click Knytt Underground from the list, and select Properties. At the tab Local Files, there's a button called Verify integrity of gamecache. Click it to repair a damaged install.

Once done, try again.

It doesn't appear in the Task Manager, and I've also tried verifying the install.

EDIT: also tried this: http://nifflas.lpchip.nl/index.php?topic=5984.0 and got almost the same result - the game still won't launch, but now the screen flickers black a couple times, like the game is trying to load.

Could you paste the output of this program?
http://ononesoft.cachefly.net/support/DoctorGL.exe.zip

The engine requires the following OpenGL extensions to work:
- GL_EXT_framebuffer_object
- GL_ARB_vertex_shader
- GL_ARB_fragment_shader
- GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two

Some very old GPUs don't support these extensions, but they're practically available on all GPUs nowadays.

Thanks!

wellll, I tried running DoctorGL.exe but it crashes instantly all I get is the standard Windows message that says the program has encountered a problem and needs to close, and Windows proceeds to try and find a solution but can find none.

EDIT: Found another free program that allows me to view OpenGL extensions, 3 of those 4 extensions aren't supported, but it seems that this is because I am running a very old version of OpenGL (1.1). However, when I tried to download & install the latest drivers from my video card manufacturer's website, the driver fails to install Not sure what to do now.

It's a difficult one. Those four OpenGL extensions are required for the game, and they're quite widely supported except older drivers of some cards. Updating the graphics card drivers would usually fix this, so it's very unfortunate that the new drivers fail to install.

I've had some similar experiences with an ATI Mobility Radeon X1350 that came with a HP laptop. I was not able to install the latest version of the official drivers that HP supplied either so I was stuck with old drivers with poor support for OpenGL, but the ATI Mobility Modder solved everything. Note that it's a third party hack utility, and the installation process is very quirky, but it worked well for me. The page does list your card as supported, but that's for Vista and Windows 7, but maybe that works on Windows 8 too.

Thanks Nifflas! It took a bit of digging, but I got it to work. Apparently Windows 8 breaks the ability of several older video cards to use the newest drivers.

After finding this patch for Mobility Modder, and (more or less) following these instructions, I was able to update OpenGL and run Knytt Underground! I'm excited!!

Thanks everyone!!

I'm glad things worked out! Sorry you had to go through that amount of crazy GPU card driver hacking, but on the plus side, this should also let you play more games that uses OpenGL.