Black Screen Problem

[Schipperke]

This happened in my first game and now here it is again.  I just re-started my game, and the whole screen is dark.  In the Eye of the Watcher mode, the only thing I can see is my sim's plumbbob and the markers for the sims he's supposed to talk to in the quest.  In Follow my Sim mode I was able to see into my sim's house.  In Kingdom mode everything is dark sepia - I can see the building markers but not the buildings themselves. 

When this happened the first time, I was doing the Free Time quest with my knight.  I cancelled that quest, reassigned it to another sim, and when I went back into the game everything was fine.  This time I'm doing a different quest, but it's the knight again.  When I started this game I used the knight I'd saved because I liked his looks, but I changed his traits for this game.  Does anybody have any idea why this is happening and what to do about it?  I don't really want to lose the 3 QP it will cost me to cancel out of this quest, but I sure can't play a game I can't see.  Could this character be bugged in some way?  How could that be?

[Ricalynn]

Have you tried the standard reboot and restart game?

[Schipperke]

Have you tried the standard reboot and restart game?

Yeah, that was the first thing I tried in the other game, but it didn't have any effect.  I'm going to try it now in this game.  I hope it will work, but am not too hopeful.

Edit:  I just finished restarting the computer and the game.  No luck.  Unless anyone has any other ideas about this problem, I guess I'm just going to have to sacrifice the QP and hope the problem resolves itself like it did in the other game.  But I'd sure like to know why this is happening.  It's not much use having a knight if I can't do quests with him (assuming that the knight actually is part of the problem and it isn't just coincidence that he was involved both times the screen went dark).

[Schipperke]

I found a thread about this on the EA site, here:  http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/0/5521746.page#13061608

It's nice to know I'm not the only one having this problem, but I'd sure like to know why and what can be done about it.  I have a good computer and it's not having any trouble running the game other than this bizarre and annoying problem.

[Gheez]

If you haven't yet sacrificed that quest, Schipperke, why not try loading up the game and using options to change to 'windowed mode' before opening up the problem Knight save file? 

I had a similar darkness problem just now.  My screen went black and the game minimised.  It did this because another program had interrupted my game.  When I maximised the game, everything in live mode was a dark sepia, as if someone had turned out the lights. Very difficult to see what was going on.  I saved, quit and reloaded and, fortunately for me, everything was back to normal when I re-started.

However, I've come across this problem before. It happens to me with The Sims 3 too. If I should ever minimise the game then, when I go back to it, it is too dark to see what is going on.  (It's impossible to press C to get a picture to show this, as the pictures come out at the normal brightness.) If I want to browse the internet whilst playing TS3 then I have to play in windowed mode. I don't like windowed-mode though, so I don't.  I also try to turn off any background programs before playing.

Hopefully, changing to windowed mode, just to complete this quest with the knight, will be a short-term answer to your problem, Schipperke.

[Schipperke]

Thanks for the suggestions, Gheez.  I'll definitely try it if the problem happens again.  I don't understand it, but the problem disappeared as mysteriously as it came.  I had decided the only thing was to give up on that quest so I went to Kingdom mode and clicked to end the quest.  I needed some time away from the game at that point so I exited and I'm pretty sure I didn't save the game.  When I restarted the game, the quest was active and everything was fine.  Does this make any sense?  Both times this problem has happened to me, ending the quest has fixed it - even if the quest didn't really end because I hadn't saved.  Both times the problem occurred it was when I was playing my knight also.  I have no idea if that's just a coincidence, but in case it isn't I'm avoiding quests with the knight and I'll create a brand new knight for the next game instead of the one I have saved in the bin.

I don't understand any of this but at least the game is working again, touch wood!   

[chrissie]

You are not alone Schip I'm having the same problem myself but with me it's an intermittent fault. I can usually clear it by save and quit then restart. It's actually happened to me between quests when I had nothing going on in-game!

[Schipperke]

That's interesting, chrissie.  In my case, saving and restarting didn't fix the problem - the only thing that worked was to quit the quest.  But it's quite a while since it happened.  I don't know if the particular knight was the problem, but I haven't used him again and the problem hasn't come back, fingers crossed!  I'm glad you've found a solution to it in your game. 

[AriaGirl77]

I've had some similar problems, but for me I think it's because my graffics card is going bad.  When my screen goes black sometimes I get a crash to desktop and sometimes it reboots my system.  When it comes back up it'll say that my graffics card failed and that after reboot it was able to recover itself.  *sigh*

I'm having major Sim withdrawls over here!!!

[Carl]

With my old graphics card, I had to install a specific driver version to get TS3 to work. The newest wouldn't, so I had to go into the archives and select a driver a couple versions back. That in itself is a rare problem, but most of the time if you have an issue like this it's because of outdated drivers. For the record I haven't had a single graphics glitch with TSM just yet (Radeon 6850). Actually, it's never crashed. It's more stable than TS3. Strange

[Schipperke]

You're right, Carl - it is strange.  I have a new graphics card so I wouldn't think that's the problem.  And it hasn't happened recently.  I haven't used the knight I was playing both times the problem occurred, and it hasn't happened again.  Coincidence?  No idea, but whatever the problem was, I hope it doesn't come back.

Between this black screen thing and the problem I've had with several quests getting stuck and not moving on even though a step has been completed, I've started taking the precaution of having two save files for each Ambition.  One is (Kingdom name) and the other is (Kingdom name)QIP, for quest in progress.  I save to the QIP file while I'm playing a quest and only after the quest is successfully completed do I save to the "real" game file.  That way if a quest goes bad for some reason, all I've lost is some time, not those precious quest points.

[chrissie]

I spoke too soon, my game keeps loading black screen, and by coincidence I'm playing a knight too! It's making me wonder if this glitch is connected.