Between Steam, S397, and ISI, someone's eating lobster on me. I bought two lifetime rF2 licences from ISI. Today, if I want to use rF2 it has to be "approved" by Steam. Everytime I launch it. However when it won't launch, Steam wags a finger at ISI and says "tell them". Even when its a confirmed Steam error. I have two instances of rFactor & Steam loaded, one on an older Win 7 PC, one on a 3 week old Win 10 PC. The Win 10 PC fails to launch Steam, in turn means it won't launch rFactor2. Its a fresh install of Win 10, and the only apps installed are nVidia RTX2080 drivers, Fanatec Wheel, Windows Defender, Chrome, and Steam (+ rFactor 1 & 2). Worked fine until about 5:38 PM today. Removed and Re-installed Steam on the new Win 10 but it just won't open. On the old Win 7 (which worked fine yesterday) Steam opens, but won't launch rFactor. Steam wants me to open a ticket with S397 without even investigating the issue. Other than shut down Steam's internet connections to the USA , does anyone have any suggestions?
Definitely sounds like a steam issue, but strange that it's two different PCs. Searching quickly only uncovered a workaround of deleting GameOverlayRenderer64.dll to stop the steam overlay which was causing some games to not start (not sure about steam itself though), but that's going back a year. Is it possible windows defender is killing steam without telling you? Any logs you can check?
Thanks for the reply Lazza. I tried deleting GameOverlayRenderer64.dll but no change. Both PC's have Windows Defender. Win 7 was running on updates 2 weeks old. Win 10 was running on updates 1 week old. I can't find any log type files that give any indications of errors. The Steam app does open on the Win 7 machine API v018 built Nov 26 at 12:19:02. It won't open rFactor1 or 2. Win 10 won't open the Steam App successfully. Launch initiates and shuts down before any visual response. For the first 3 weeks on this new PC there weren't any issues with both systems running, but only one instance of Steam in a live mode. I never tried running rFactor on both machines simultaneously, although I certainly purchased the rights to that years ago with two lifetime rFactor2 licences. Steam support staff has not replied yet.
Are any other Steam games having problems ? If there are no others then uninstall Steam. Look for the Steam names mentioned in your Windows Defender Firewall list and delete them. You can delete the rFactor 2 ones as well if you are intending to reinstall rFactor 2 afterwards. Restart computer and reinstall Steam taking care to turn on Internet Access when the Windows Firewall windows popup. Sounds to me like a Firewall problem.
Ceecee, this happened on two different machines with two different OS's on the same day. Win 7 Machine Update Updated Windows Security Essentials. That enabled me to open rFactor2 (would not open prior) and runs, but not without errors. If you open an event track & car and Exit to the credits screen, exiting the credits screen leaves a state machine stuck in a loop. However if you Race (track session) than Escape, Exit, Exit it shuts down correctly. However disable WSE and it does allow Exit without a track session. Win 10 Machine Update After the 4th re-install I went into regedit (yeah, I've been around PC's since 1978....) and shut down WSE. No firewall, no anti-virus in the way. Uninstalled and re-installed 2 more times. No change. Its communicating with Steam, I can see that in the IO transactions. I have a spare SSD backup for my Win 7 machine thats about 2 months old. I'll try installing that in the Win 10 machine just to rule out hardware. It also has rF2 1111 on it. Steam Update Service provided a response, you know the typical stuff like is the PC plugged in? Clearly they never read the detail provided in the Trouble Ticket, but thats not surprising as a low tier troubleshooter gets the opening assignments.
Sounds like a strange question but could your Provider Modem have had a firmware update that day ? (happened to us last night in the middle of a Dedi session ) I shut down the modem by pulling out the power cable, pressed the on/off switch a few times to lose the power inside the modem and restarted it. We were back up and running once this was done !
Its always possible the Modem had an update, but I doubt the Win 7 machine would have resurrected rFactor. As the Win 10 machine is dedicated to rFactor2 only I went ahead and reloaded Windows 10, than Chrome, and now Steam. Steam did open and is now downloading rFactor2. I still have to install Fanatec & RTX 2080 drivers but figured I'll do one at a time to test for conflicts. That may be a while as all the rFactor Cars & Tracks still need to be installed.
Re-installed Win 10. Re-installed nVidia 417.35 drivers Re-installed Fanatec driver And of course, re-installed Chrome. rFactor2 is working again. For now. Hopefully Steam apps have no conflicts with Chrome; I'm a legacy owner of rF2 so the original EULA pre-empts the Steam EULA (in the USA). I learned that the hard way after a software acquisition we made several years ago; cost us 7 digits.
Installed a proprietary logger that detects Stack Overflows and RACE conditions. After an hour of testing, rFactor2 code is pretty clean Steam code is a disaster. Its like the SWENGs were trying to create "Hello World" but it came out "World O Hell" . Really need to figure out how to run rFactor2 without the Steamship blocking the harbor.....
Be interested to hear your findings. Maybe will solve the plague of "Lost Connection" messages which we have suffered through in the last year. Never had this prior to Steam on rF and rF2 and one of the connected PC's is 3m away from the server.
I recently could not launch RaceRoom, nor could I verify files, even after restarting Steam, PC. etc. How'd I fix it? I considered un-installing it but changed my mind at the last step. Next attempt, it worked fine again. I guess the game has "fear of abandonment issues".
