After I last update this post, I restarted my computer, and bafflingly enough, the game started working again. I didn’t know if it was a fluke or not, so I never gave an update.
Well, as of yesterday (April 13th 2024), the exact same thing started happening again, and I have very little clue as to why (the only thing I did the night before was remote desktop into my computer from my phone and launch a GPU powered AI Image generating program, but I doubt that other users are doing that too). I did everything I could think of to work around the issue:
- There was an NVIDIA driver update available, so I clean installed it with GeForce experience, no change
- I have the game installed via Steam, I verified files, no change
- I opened launcher.exe from the game’s install folder, this actually launched the game and I was able to play. I was also able to open the game again normally through Steam, but after a reboot, this stopped working entirely; even if I opened the game via the launcher, it would still close
- I did a sanity check, I disabled EAC via the launcher, sure enough, game launches and does not close. Turning it back on causes the game to close once, sometimes immedeately after the EAC screen (game doesn’t go full screen), sometimes right before/right as the game is connecting to the servers, sometimes right after the game connects to the servers, and on occasion, after a few seconds after loading into the hanger. Very variable results.
- I uninstalled and reinstalled EAC multiple times, using multiple methods and differing levels of thoroughness. This would either give me a crash after hangar load, or an immediate crash after EAC splash
- And yes, Windows does register this as a crash, I was using Procmon out of desperation (an official Microsoft SysInternals tool for non-invasive process monitoring), every time the game would close, the windows error reporting suite would kick in in the background (never in the foreground). This oddly enough is never mentioned in the Windows Event Viewer
NOW, as of right this second, I begrudgingly rebooted into safe mode on Windows 11, used the latest DDU, downloaded the latest NVIDIA driver (552.12 as of writing), rebooted into regular Windows 11, clean installed both the driver and NVIDIA Broadcast (1.4.0.29) , and after getting my settings back to the way I like them (shadow play preferences, hotkeys, Unlimited shader cache settings in NVIDIA Control Panel, 2nd monitor positioning and rotation, etc.), the game launched, logged in, and I am currently sitting in the hanger, no crash yet. Last time this happened, after I closed the game it no longer worked.
So if you’re desperate like me and you have premium time counting down and boosters about to expire, try this to get the game to open once.
UPDATE: Sure enough, after I closed the game, I was not able to open it again without it closing once reaching the hanger. I rebooted my pc, it began working again, closed the game again, and now it closes at the hanger again. I rebooted once more, and now the game just closes when it reaches the hanger. I already have a bug report in for a related issue (regarding the game crashing while flying planes), and I was lucky enough for it to be acknowledged, but it took a lot of back and forth with the moderators there for them to realize it wasn’t just a me issue.
I was about to submit a bug report, but it looks like this has been reported quite a few times in the past, and the general consensus is that, as @TT33a’s screenshot shows, that the moderators will say that this is an EAC issue, but EAC says to contact the game developers (and in fact, they have redesigned their website, and the support page only tells you how to collect logs “for whoever is helping you”. No way to put in a ticket [unless its a ban appeal], no support email address, no support phone number.) The only bug report that had a resolution was when the submitter reinstalled Windows, the issue stopped. I’m not about to try that for just War Thunder, but if someone is more desperate than I am, then I guess give it a shot. I have seen two instances of people saying reinstalling Windows fixed it for them, once on the forums, and once on the official issue tracker.
Overall extremely frustrating as someone with premium time and boosters in their inventory.
