Prepar3D v4 boots up into black screen, please help

[captain420 3,099]

Sigh, seems like I spoke too soon. I'm not sure what the deal is, but there's something strange going on with my PTA. I'm back with the same issue. I noticed that my sim wasn't as sharp as it used to be, the text in my cockpit seemed blurrier than before. so I went back into PTA, restored my original P3D shaders, and restarted and black screen again. Arghhh, I've been fiddling with PTA for the past hour or so to get it to work again. Trying many different things such as loading the default.ini preset and then loading the PTA Absolute 2.52 preset, and applying it, but when I launch the sim, I still get the same black screen. Arghhh it's so frustrating. I thought PTA was suppose to be safe. Had I known it would cause so much frustrations and headache, I wouldn't have wasted my money on this.

[Cruachan 705]

Hi,

I think you should seriously consider biting the bullet and spare yourself any further wasted time and misery. Hopefully you have a fairly recent good backup image of the drive on which a working P3D is installed. I would restore that backup image. I know it goes against the grain when a troubleshoot appears unsuccessful, no matter what you try, but sometimes you have to acknowledge the inevitable. Anyway it's better than feeling forced to do a complete reinstall.

Regards,

Mike

[vgbaron 3,478]

I agree - your setup is borked. Restore from a backup or bite the bullet and start over completely.

Neither PTA nor Envtex nor ActiveSky are causing the issue or we'd all be in the same boat.

AFTER you have either completely reinstalled or restored from a clean backup - FIRST - make a backup copy of the shadersHLSL folder in your p3d folder.

I have a feeling with all the backup/restore and deleting going on, your folders are messed up.

Vic

[captain420 3,099]

That is my last resort. I really don't want to reinstall all over again. I know there is a fix, because I was able to somehow manage to get it to load up fine yesterday, But since I tried so many different things and combinations, I'm not sure what I did to get it to work.

I also updated to the latest NVIDIA drivers, and I'm not sure if that had anything to do with it. I notice the problem happened after I did the update and I also noticed that somewhere after reverting back to my previous NVIDIA drivers that the sim started to load up normally again. It's a possibility that this caused my black screen. But like I said, I did and tried so many things yesterday that it could've been something else.

ALso I read somewhere that in P3D's options, theres a thing called Content Logging, and I need to activate this, to see what is causing the issue. However I can't even get to that screen because when P3D loads up, it's black. So is there a way to manually set this option on in p3d's config file or something?

Vic, you mentioned the shadersHLSL folder, is there a way I can restore this folder back to default by reinstalling the p3d client only?

[Jazzfan 57]

Sounds to me when you made a backup of your sims shader folder with PTA after they had already been modified, and were not the stock shaders. Now, every time you use PTA to reset the sims shaders to default, you get the black screen issue because the shaders are incompatible. My advice is to reinstall the P3d content, and try again. Leave PTA out of the equation until you get a stable simulator.

 

ps, you could also try deleting the shaders by going to the appdata folder, and then restarting the simulator to let it rebuild the stock shaders. A reinstall may not be necessary.

[swiesma 625]

Some people have the talent to mess up a good installation by installing everything they find. :-)

PTA is super simple to install. I guess you messed up when putting everything together wildly. Did you uninstall the client and reinstall? That takes you 5 minutes. 

 

Then clear the shader folder and restart P3D?!

[captain420 3,099]

Stefan, yes I did that yesterday, I will try to uninstall and reinstall the p3d client again, I heard that will restore the ShadersHLSL folder back to default as well. I know the reason why I'm getting a black screen on loadup has to do with the Shaders, and I know PTA or ENVTEX or the combination of the 2 is causing this issue. I recently bought these 2 add-ons yesterday. 

[swiesma 625]

Yep and somehow you messed up :-)

But don't give up. Keep your head up and you will get it working again. 

[captain420 3,099]

I'm wondering if updating to the latest nvidia drivers that came out yesterday has anything to do with this problem. Sigh... I just want to get my sim working again so I can fly and try out ENVTEX+PTA.

[swiesma 625]

No. I updated the NVIDIA drivers today and have no problems at all (1080ti)

[vgbaron 3,478]

Yes, reinstalling client will repair the HLSL shaders. Do not worry about content errors - that has nothing to do with your problem. I've been following your posts in this and other forums and you are just jumping all over the place trying this and that. I'm surprised you haven't screwed up your system before now. I don't really mean to sound harsh but you just can NOT just slap the latest and greatest "thing" to see if it works. 

You need to uninstall or disable ALL you add ons and reinstall P3D client and content. THEN see if it runs without doing ANYTHING else. You have to get there first period. Then you can slowly re-enable your addons omitting ENVTEX and PTA for now. Once THAT is done, then and ONLY then just do a basic install of Envtex and leave the options at default BUT make your own backup of the ShadersHLSL folder FIRST.

I then suggest reading the documentation on exactly how to use the PTA presets and be SURE they are compatible with the latest version.

Take it one step at a time and move slowly. Simply, YOU installed something wrong and your attempts to fix it have made it worse. Now go slow and we can help you fix it.

Vic