MrBehemoth

BTW, although I was nearly out of patience, I'm enjoying the game and glad I persevered. I'm a programmer too (indie game developer) and I have an Xbox as well as being a PC gamer. I agree that when you pay for something you expect it to work out of the box, but in a perverse sort of way I've always kind of enjoyed the challenge of getting PC games to work. It all started back in the DOS days of freeing up base memory and creating boot disks just to be able to run Doom. I dunno, maybe I'm a masochist or something!

Thanks astherial! The error message I was getting gave no further info, just "failed to load..." But... whilst I trying to run in compatibility mode I launched from the folder instead of the Steam client and I got a separate error message. It said that d3dx11_43.dll was corrupted. So I unzipped all the x86 cabs in the redist folder, found d3dx11_43.dll and, sure enough, the version in my System32 folder was older - guess the DX9 installer must have skipped it. Copied it over manually and voila! Glad it's working now, coz I'd just about lost patience. Hope the game is as good as I've been expecting, to make up for this nonsense. Cheers!

Thanks astherial, I gave that a shot and also edited the config.ini ... but no luck. It still says "failed to load DX9 DLLs" even when DX11 is set. WEIRD. Here are my ini's... engine.ini: ; Win32 engine defaults configuration file [Engine.Render] default_brightness = 0.138000 default_contrast = 0.946001 default_gamma = 2.2 default_contrast_range_low = 0.09 full_screen = 1 full_screen_width = 0 ; 0 -> desktop width full_screen_height = 0 ; 0 -> desktop height window_width = 1280 window_height = 720 adapter = -1 ; -1 -> primary shadow_quality = 2 ; 0:25%, 1:50%, 2:100%, 3:200%, 4:300%, 5:400%, 6:800% msaa = 1 support_aspect_ratio_4_3 = true support_aspect_ratio_16_10 = true support_aspect_ratio_custom = true default_display_conversion = box ; box|stretch|crop dist_fade_duration = 0.5 ; time it takes for something to fade once the range is reached dist_fade_in_range = 40.0 ; distance from camera that the object will begin to fade back in at. dist_fade_out_range = 45.0 ; distance from camera that the object will begin to fade out at. s3d_ar_multiplier = 1.3 ; aspect ratio multplier used to adjust the culling frustum for 3D. use_directx_11 = true ; false=DX9, true=DX11 [Engine.Audio] enabled = 1 enable_communication = 1 [Engine.Physics] ragdolls_enabled = 1 [Engine.Input] preferred_device = gamepad [Game.Default] project_name = Onyx npc_chatter_cooldown = 3.0 creature_chatter_cooldown = 4.0 config.ini: ; Application override configuration file [Engine.Render] default_gamma = 1.0 full_screen = 1 shadow_quality = 3 support_aspect_ratio_4_3 = false support_aspect_ratio_16_10 = false support_aspect_ratio_custom = false use_directx_11 = true separate_dimensions = 1 support_skinning = false ; render post-process settings enable_postprocess = true enable_depth_of_field = false enable_bloom = false enable_antialias = false enable_color_correction = false enable_color_controls = false enable_fog = false enable_heat_haze = true enable_transparent_depth = false motion_blur_enable = false motion_blur_scale = 0.5 motion_blur_max_length = 0.3 movie_sharpen_amount = 0.0 movie_sharpen_radius = 0.0 scaleform_edge_aa = 1.0 [Engine.Perf] ; perf_marker_categories_enabled is a bit field. The value defs ; are in oei_perf_marker.h. ; PERF_MARKER_CATEGORY_RENDER = 0x00000001; ; PERF_MARKER_CATEGORY_GAME = 0x00000002; perf_marker_categories_enabled = 0 log_disc_access = false [Game.Default] project_name = South Park - The Stick of Truth demo_mode = false disable_warnings = false [Game.Audio] listener_offset = 8.0 listener_separation = 16.0 [Game.Mouse] clip_to_screen = false use_hardware_mouse = true [Game.GUI] curve_tolerance = 3.0 collinearity_tolerance = 3.0 skip_single_node = false Anything else I could try? Thanks!

Today I also tried completely uninstalling DX9 and VC redists, as well as Visual Studio just in case, deleting local content, restarting my machine, re-downloading the game, re-installing DX9 and VC redists then retrying. Same problem....

I'm trying to run the game from Steam on Vista, but immediately after clicking it, I get an error message saying "Failed to load DX9 DLL" and nothing more. Here are some things that I've tried (multiple times in various orders and combinations): Validated the cache Checked Steam betas are deactivated Checked Steam client is up to date Deleted the Steam appcache folder Installed the DX9 and VC redists from the game folder (both with and without Steam running, and deleting appcache afterwards) Installed DX9 June 2010 SDK (which required VC runtime to be rolled back, then reinstalled afterwards) Uninstalled VC runtime bundled with Visual Studio 2010 Jumping up and down and swearing Please help. I've paid for this game and now I just want to be able to play it. Thanks!