New player, ED doesn't start correctly when launched from Steam

SpacemanSpiff3629

SpacemanSpiff3629
Hi folks,

Lured in by the promotion on Steam recently, I "purchased" the game and have just tried to run it for the first time. I get the "ED Horizons" menu window up okay with the "My account" / "Options" etc tabs at the top, and the "Play" selection at the bottom. I opted to "Play Elite Dangerous" and it popped up a new window labelled "Elite - Dangerous (CLIENT)". This is entirely black, apart from a little panel at bottom right for "Access the STEAM community" and there's no sound.

Pulling up the Task Manager on my Windows 7 laptop, I saw "EliteDangerous64.exe" ramping up, fairly quickly getting to around 712k memory. It then seems to sit there, still with the all-black window, grabbing memory in 4k chunks but never actually giving me any chance to interact with it. It's been doing that for well over 15 minutes now and is up to about 716.5k. The PC still has free memory and only 4 of the 8 cores are doing anything (and that not very much, around 15% CPU).

I've heard great things about this game which is why I wanted to try it. Does anyone have any suggestions, please? I'm not seeing any messages anywhere, are there any log files which might tell me what the heck this program is doing as it chugs along?

Cheers,
Spiff
 
Last edited:

SpacemanSpiff3629

SpacemanSpiff3629
Para Handy said:
Have a look at some of these:

Account Support – Frontier Support

Get help with issues regarding your Elite Dangerous account setup
customersupport.frontier.co.uk customersupport.frontier.co.uk
Click to expand...
Thanks for the pointer, but none of those seem to fit my situation. I see the ED menu window and it gives me the "Play" options for ED, Horizons and Arena (1st image) - but clicking on ED to actually launch the game pops up the "(CLIENT)" window I mentioned which is just black - no sound, nothing, it just sits there (2nd image).
 

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SpacemanSpiff3629

SpacemanSpiff3629
Para Handy said:
Have a look at some of these:

Account Support – Frontier Support

Get help with issues regarding your Elite Dangerous account setup
customersupport.frontier.co.uk customersupport.frontier.co.uk
Click to expand...
But, you may have pointed me in the right direction. I checked out the "Technical Support > Other Technical Issues" section and found the "Minimum specs" which says:

MINIMUM:
  • OS: Windows 7/8/10 64-bit
  • Processor: Quad Core CPU (4 x 2GHz)
  • Memory: 6 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Nvidia GTX 470 or AMD R7 240 (Direct X 11 functionality required)
While I've got DirectX 11, the laptop is a Samsung R710 which has a GTX330M card and I know (from attempting to run Elder Scrolls Online, which took one look at it, sneered, and rather haughtily pointed out its inadequacy) that it's only a DirectX 10.1 card. Would that explain the behaviour I'm seeing - in which case, my tentative steps into ED will have to await a PC upgrade...
 

Para Handy

Para Handy
SpacemanSpiff3629 said:
Thanks for the pointer, but none of those seem to fit my situation. I see the ED menu window and it gives me the "Play" options for ED, Horizons and Arena (1st image) - but clicking on ED to actually launch the game pops up the "(CLIENT)" window I mentioned which is just black - no sound, nothing, it just sits there (2nd image).
Click to expand...

What is your console doing? That might be doing something that is interfering with the GPU handover to the Elite Client.
 

SpacemanSpiff3629

SpacemanSpiff3629
Para Handy said:
What is your console doing? That might be doing something that is interfering with the GPU handover to the Elite Client.
Click to expand...
Console is sat there doing a longstanding ping (Wifi responsiveness problems with the Virgin Superhub, spit, don't ask!). It doesn't usually cause a problem and I can certainly launch Skyrim just fine with it there...
 

SpacemanSpiff3629

SpacemanSpiff3629
Para Handy said:
customersupport.frontier.co.uk

Does my computer meet the minimum requirements to run Elite Dangerous?

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Below you can find the minimum and recommended system requirements for Elite Dangerous as well as Elite Dangerous: Horizons on Windows.The system requirements for Elite Dangerou...
customersupport.frontier.co.uk customersupport.frontier.co.uk
Click to expand...
Yep, as I said I did find that and I'm suspecting the GPU isn't recent enough - would that give the behaviour I'm seeing? I did do the "Display Hardware Survey" option in the main ED window, thinking that would flag up any deficiencies, but it just gives a glorified DxDiag. I did think that if the GPU wasn't up to it, the game would try to do something with DirectX then post a vaguely meaningful error message and abort, rather than disappearing into the wild black yonder with nary a word spoken...
 

Para Handy

Para Handy
SpacemanSpiff3629 said:
But, you may have pointed me in the right direction. I checked out the "Technical Support > Other Technical Issues" section and found the "Minimum specs" which says:
......
........ - in which case, my tentative steps into ED will have to await a PC upgrade...
Click to expand...

Well in the meantime you can have fun in the "Single Player Combat Training" option (the bottom option in the launcher) - which as far as I remember is still a 32-bit low-gpu bit of code.

P.S. Your posts were not appearing right away, hence the cross-talk on specs - new people need their posts to go through moderation - but you have probably passed that now.
 

SpacemanSpiff3629

SpacemanSpiff3629
Para Handy said:
Well in the meantime you can have fun in the "Single Player Combat Training" option (the bottom option in the launcher) - which as far as I remember is still a 32-bit low-gpu bit of code.

P.S. Your posts were not appearing right away, hence the cross-talk on specs - new people need their posts to go through moderation - but you have probably passed that now.
Click to expand...
Just tried, it, that fires up okay so at least I can do some flying around! Thanks a lot for the pointers, much appreciated. Was already looking at getting an RX6800 or RTX3080 based PC in the New Year, this is just another reason to want it! Cheers :)
 
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